The Cry From the Cross

Transcript

Hello, my friend… so glad you're with me today. This is By God's Call — day 303, The Cry From the Cross.

"And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'" Mark 15:34.

This is, perhaps, the hardest verse in the whole Gospel. And I don't want to rush past it today.

Notice the hour: three in the afternoon. At the temple in Jerusalem, that was exactly the hour of the evening sacrifice — the moment when lambs were offered on the altar for the forgiveness of the people's sins. And while that was happening inside the walls, outside them the true Lamb of God was being offered once for all. That is not coincidence. That is fulfillment.

And these words Jesus cries out — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — are not a spontaneous outburst of random despair. They open Psalm 22, a psalm Jesus surely knew by heart. Even hanging on the cross, wounded, exhausted, suffocating, he prays Scripture. That already teaches us something: even in the deepest suffering a human being can imagine, the Word of God was still on his lips.

But I don't want to soften the weight of these words. Because something real was happening there. In that moment, the perfect Son, who had never sinned, was carrying the weight of the sin of the entire world — your sin, mine, all of humanity's — and truly experiencing the separation that sin always causes between us and God. It was not performance. It was not rhetoric. It was genuine anguish, feeling for the first and only time in eternity what it is to be cut off from the Father.

And why did he go through this? So that you and I would never have to feel that abandonment forever. Jesus's cry on the cross is the reason you can approach God with confidence, even on your worst days. He already paid the price of separation — so that communion could be restored.

Now, here is something that changes everything: Psalm 22, which Jesus is quoting, does not end in despair. It begins there, but it ends in praise, in victory, in the declaration that all the nations will turn to the Lord. When Jesus quotes the opening line of that psalm on the cross, he is also silently pointing toward its ending — toward the certainty that resurrection was coming, that Sunday morning was on its way.

So, if you are today in an hour of God's silence — if it feels like your prayers are hitting the ceiling, if you feel like God has turned his back — I want to invite you to do something specific. Take the whole of Psalm 22 and pray it out loud, start to finish. Let it carry your real pain all the way to real hope. Jesus walked this road before you, and he came out the other side.

The cry of abandonment was not the final word. The resurrection was.

Stay close to God. Pray — then act. I'll see you tomorrow, my friend.