Cry of Dereliction or Shout of Victory?

Photo by Samuel McGarrigle from Unsplash

One of the many beautiful aspects of Scripture is the complex description of visceral human emotions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cry of dereliction raised by Jesus as he neared the end of his life. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he uttered as he hung naked, bleeding, and dying on the cross (Matt. 27:46; Mk. 15:34). 

After a merciless flogging that left him too weak to carry his own cross, Jesus had been nailed to that cross, complete with a deriding sign, “King of the Jews.” In other words, let this be a lesson to anyone who opposes Caesar: this will be your fate, too. Mockers encircled him, demanding that the God who supposedly loved him rescue his favored one. Soldiers had stolen his last possessions, gambling for a piece of blood-soaked clothing.

Jesus said but a few words from the cross, some not surprising—“I am thirsty” (Jn. 19:28)—and others unheard of in the midst of such terrible injustice: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” (Lk. 23:34). Among the seven last “words” of Christ, the cry of dereliction remains the most misunderstood.

On one level, we easily resonate with the pain and horror reflected in that cry. Where are you, God? Why are you so far from me in my darkest hour? The cry of Jesus is an honest expression of the feeling of abandonment that so often accompanies our darkest moments. His honesty gives us permission to express our deepest, rawest emotions to God.

But the Jews among the onlookers at the foot of the cross would have heard something more. It would have been startling, difficult to understand, perhaps even disturbing: hope. They would have heard hope. For even with Jesus’ dying breaths, he pointed toward the God who saves. 

Jews standing at the foot of the cross would have recognized in Jesus’ words the first line of Psalm 22. And although Jesus did not have the strength to recite the entire psalm, he didn’t need to do so. The first line was enough. In the days before chapters and verses had been edited into the Scriptures, the Jews identified entire passages by their first lines. When Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he was pointing to the whole psalm. It is a lament psalm, to be sure, but lament psalms not only cry out to God in dark circumstances, they also cling to God in hope and trust. Verses 3-5 of the psalm demonstrate this well:

Yet you are holy
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.

The psalm then returns to the excruciating reality of the present moment, contrasting the ancestors who had been saved with the “worm” who speaks the psalm. Several of the descriptions that follow have striking parallels with Jesus’s own experience: the mocking by one’s enemies (vv. 7-8), extreme physical distress (vv. 14-15), the casting of lots for his clothing (v. 18). It is worth noting that although some English versions translate v. 16 as “they have pierced my hands and my feet,” the Hebrew text is uncertain; the fact that our New Testament authors did not cite this verse as a prophecy about Jesus argues against using the “pierced” translation. Nonetheless, the agonizing descriptions in this psalm point to one who is suffering severe physical and emotional trauma. It is a fitting psalm for Jesus to recite. The God-man was not spared the agonies of the cross.

It is all the more fitting because through this psalm Jesus is able to communicate to the Jews who are listening that he has not been abandoned by God, despite all appearances to the contrary. Verse 24 of the psalm maintains,

For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.

As the psalm continues, the speaker proclaims that “the poor will eat and be satisfied” (v. 26) and “all the families of the nations shall worship before him” (v. 27). This is an apt psalm indeed on the lips of the one who brings salvation to all nations through his atoning death on the cross. Perhaps the most telling line of Psalm 22 is the last:

…future generations will be told about the Lord, 
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn
saying that he has done it.

Although not linguistically identical to Jesus’ final cry in Jn. 19:30 (“It is finished”), the last line of the psalm makes the same point: God has accomplished his purposes. For a Jew standing at the foot of the cross hearing the initial line, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and remembering the fullness of the psalm, many complex emotions would arise: sadness, grief, confusion, and the glimmer of hope. 

Even one of the criminals hanging next to Jesus recognized this hope. The man rebuked the other crucified criminal, who had been mocking Jesus: “‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’” (Lk. 23:40-42). How remarkable that the first criminal could look at Jesus—bleeding and dying, gasping for his last breaths just as the criminals were—and yet see someone who still had a kingdom over which to reign! He saw something in Jesus that gave him hope. Death would not have the last word. Jesus himself assures the criminal of this truth: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).

For those standing at the foot of the cross, the words of Jesus and the words of the psalm would coalesce into a nagging sense of curiosity and hope. How could one who was cursed with a shameful death on a Roman cross proclaim that God would bring victory from this horrendous evil? The psalmist declared—and Jesus implies—“You have rescued me” (v. 21). Had the pain of the torture driven him mad? Was he hallucinating in his final moments?

But Jesus had prepared his disciples for this. On multiple occasions he had predicted his suffering and death, followed by the promise of his resurrection (e.g., Mk. 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34 and parallels). In their fear and grief, however, the disciples had not understood Jesus’ words. Who could blame them? Anyone witnessing the terrors of flogging and crucifixion would be certain that Jesus had been speaking in parables—how could he speak literally of a resurrection? Who could live after death? After a death like that? Although Jesus had raised the dead during his ministry, if the author of life was killed, then who was left to raise him?

Even modern disciples sometimes misunderstand the words of Jesus from the cross. It has become all too common for pastors to describe God turning his face away from the Son, repelled by the sins of the world which Jesus bore. “Jesus’ cry of dereliction,” they say, “was not just a feeling of abandonment. He really was abandoned. Sin separates from God, and so God turned away from Jesus.”

This interpretation, however, is fraught with theological difficulties: how can the Triune God abandon himself? If God completely separates himself from Jesus, does this mean that sin has—even if only temporarily—destroyed the very fabric of the Godhead? If God turns away from the Son he loves because he bears the sins of the world, then how can God possibly look at me in all of my sin? And how do we square this with the many Scriptures that describe the God-man approaching the sinful, eating with them, and welcoming them when no one else would? Can God only take so much sin before he turns away?

It is only when we hear the whole of Psalm 22 that we recognize the deeper theology of Jesus. Although it feels as though God is absent (“why are you so far from helping me?” in v. 1), Jesus nonetheless proclaims the deliverance of God (“you have rescued me,” v. 21). God did not hide his face from Jesus, nor did Jesus die in despair. Instead, we can recognize that with Jesus’ dying breaths he was proclaiming that God would be vindicated. Rome would not triumph. The Jewish religious leaders would not remain smug for long. Sin would no longer reign. Death could no longer have the last word.

Yet in their confusion, the disciples saw only the darkness of death. The pain of the moment had shrouded their memories of an almighty Lord who had subdued the chaos of the Sea of Galilee by walking on water, the Manna from heaven who had fed more than 5,000 hungry followers, the Son of the Most High God who had defeated the strongest demonic powers with merely a word, the promised Restorer who had made the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to leap for joy. They feared that their memories of the Redeemer of Israel were nothing but a mirage, and they failed to see that death itself would soon become a fleeting phantasm.

But then the women went to the tomb. They wanted to pay their respects, to weep over their loss, to honor their fallen messiah. Instead they discovered a rolled back stone, the exclamation point emphasizing that death had lost its grip. To ensure that the message was not lost on these mourners, God sent an angel to explain what all the disciples had missed: Jesus has been raised, just as he said (Matt. 28:6). In other words, don’t be surprised—he told you this would happen. Not only had Jesus predicted his resurrection prior to his passion, he spoke this truth from the cross when he pointed to Psalm 22. 

As the women ran to tell the disciples, the embodied Jesus appeared to these overjoyed women and commissioned them to preach the resurrection to the rest of his disciples (Matt. 28:9-10). In the days and weeks ahead, Jesus appeared to his followers on multiple occasions and “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Lk. 24:45; see also 24:27). Surely a renewed understanding of Psalm 22 was part of these conversations. 

As we approach the Easter event, let us remember the kind of truth-telling that Jesus modeled. He was not afraid to offer deep lament in extremely difficult—and public—circumstances. But his sense of suffering was also couched within the larger narrative of God’s faithfulness. The God who saved our ancestors is the same God who dealt a death blow to death itself. And we who wait in the space between the Lord’s first and second coming can proclaim the impending fullness of the victory of God, despite appearances to the contrary. Or, as the apostle Paul has framed it in 2 Cor. 4:16-18, “We do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

Dr. Suzanne Nicholson is Professor of New Testament at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. She is a Deacon in the United Methodist Church and serves as Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.