This is an excerpt from The Foundry’s Lord of the Tragic, by Al Truesdale now available.

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A sense of being abandoned by God often plagues those who suffer. The psalmist asked, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Ps. 13:1, NIV).

For two years, pastor and missionary Andrew Brunson was imprisoned in Turkey. During his imprisonment there were times when he “felt abandoned by God.” In those circumstances it was easy to let his heart grow cold. He says, “I had questions about God’s love, loyalty, and faithfulness.”

Does God’s identity with us extend to a sense of being abandoned by him?

In all the New Testament, perhaps in the entire Bible, no question seems more “foolish” than Jesus’s cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). Though shocking and puzzling, the cry is highly revealing and comforting. How can the one Matthew identifies as Immanuel, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23), in the hour of his impenetrable testing imply that he has been forsaken? What did Jesus’s question mean for him? What does it mean for us? Maybe we have arrived at the heart of “Immanuel.”

Jesus’s words repeat the first verse of Psalm 22 and must be understood in the context of the whole psalm. Mark wants us to see that Jesus was not merely quoting the psalm, in the most intense sense possible, but also making the psalm his own. Mark and other early Christians read Psalm 22 as a messianic psalm that prophesied Jesus’s suffering and subsequent resurrection. They read the second part of the psalm as referring to Jesus’s resurrection and exaltation (vv. 22-31). Mark connects Jesus’s use of the psalm to all those who cry out to God from the desperate situations Psalm 22 and the other lament psalms describe. Jesus gathers to himself, identifies with, the experiences of all those whose sufferings find expression in the lament psalms.40 Richard Bauckham explains that Jesus’s words “echo the most extreme of the situations in the psalms of lament: those in which the psalmist not merely fears abandonment by God, but experiences it as realized fact.”

Jesus asks, “Why?” His words echo numerous times in the psalms when God’s people voiced an anguished inability to see God at work in their circumstances (Pss. 10:1; 42:9; 43:2; 44:24; 74:1; 88:14). God’s “absence” was incomprehensible.

Mark tells us that Jesus’s cry of desolation happens at the end of three hours of darkness that covered the earth (Mark 15:33). The darkness symbolizes the absence of God. “My God, my God” culminates Jesus’s experience of darkness.

As noted above, Richard Bauckham reminds us that in Jesus’s radical self-identification with those who suffer, including those who feel godforsaken, Jesus’s deity is revealed (cf. Heb. 2:14-18). The cross “is the furthest point to which God’s self-giving love in incarnation goes.”

Psalm 22 alternates between complaint and true praise.44 On the one hand, the psalm complains about being forsaken by God. On the other hand, it addresses God as “my God.” Each complaint (vv. 1-2, 6-8) is followed by trust (vv. 3-5, 9-11). The back-and-forth intensifies the psalmist’s distress. Why has God “forsaken” his own? Once, God was close. Now he is far away.

In verse 22 the psalmist discovers he has not been abandoned. In spite of appearances, God has always been there. God has not “despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him” (v. 24).

Upon being answered by God (v. 21b, NRSVue), the psalmist praises God and invites the community, consisting of “the afflicted” (v. 24) and the “poor” (v. 26, NIV), to the community table, where they will be satisfied. They are invited to join the chorus of praise. The community of the “afflicted” knows no boundaries. It is composed of “people from all nations—living, dead, and yet unborn! God’s reign [is being] universally acclaimed.”45 The afflicted are assured possession of life in its fullness. They “shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek [God] shall praise the Lord!” (v. 26).

Has the psalmist’s celebration gotten out of hand, escaped the bounds of reality? No!

The psalm “portrays what God intends for the world. It affirms God’s reign over all people and nations in all times and places, despite appearances to the contrary.” The psalmist is inviting everyone to “enter the reign of God.”

No wonder Mark and the early Christians valued Psalm 22, not only for describing Jesus’s passion but also for depicting his Easter vindication. In crying out to his Father amid his abandonment, Jesus trusted his Father. The Father’s faithfulness to his Son (and to us) was confirmed in his raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus and the Father remained faithful to each other. In this glorious mutual faithfulness the early Christians understood the radical character of God’s self-giving love. Because Jesus and his Father remained faithful to each other, God’s full self-disclosure, including his identification with the “godforsaken” could occur.

Jesus was not abandoned. On Easter morning, the Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:11), raised his “faithful witness” (Rev. 1:5; Gk., ho martys ho pistos) from the grave. Psalm 22 was fulfilled “in a new and expanded vision of God, of human life and vocation, and of death.”

Entrusting one’s life to the God revealed in Jesus changes everything. Suffering can be understood, not as the ultimate insult to or contradiction of human life, but as something to be entrusted to God with the assurance that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:31-39).49 The book of Hebrews teaches the same thing, but differently. The author says that because of Jesus being tested in his suffering, humiliation, and death—his radical identification with human weakness and suffering as our High Priest—now in his exalted sovereignty he retains what it means to be mortal humanity. Christ’s sovereignty is exercised in solidarity with humans.

In Jesus’s life, as on the cross, he lived like the psalmist, as one of the afflicted, “in the knowledge that God does not despise the afflicted” (Ps. 22:24; cf. Isa. 53:1-12).51 He demonstrated humble dependence on his Father and embraced suffering on behalf of others. “He faced death with the conviction that God’s power is greater than death’s power” (cf. Mark 14:36). On the authority of Jesus’s resurrection, we can surely add that God’s power is greater than the power of tragedy.

Jesus bids us, “Learn of me” (Matt. 11:29, KJV).

O myster’ous condescending!

O abandonment sublime!

Very God Himself is bearing

All the sufferings of time!

Lord of the Tragic is available to order on TheFoundryPublishing.com