“And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, E’loi, Eloi, la’ma sabach’thani? (Aramaic) which is, being interpreted, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Mark 15:33–34
WOUNDED SPIRIT
We are living again in the day of the cross—the day of Golgotha—an enveloping worldly darkness; eerie and oppressive!
It was the day darkness covered the land at noon. It was then, at noon, that a miraculous darkness came over the land, and all creation sympathized with the Creator as He suffered. There was not only darkness over the land, but there was darkness in the minds and hearts of the people (2 Corinthians 4:3–6; John 3:16–21; 12:35–41).This was, indeed, a miracle and not some natural phenomenon, such as a sand storm or an eclipse. It would not be possible to have an eclipse during full moon at Passover.
There was a thick darkness over the whole land for three hours, from noon until three o’clock. Now the Scripture was fulfilled (Amos 8:9), “I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day;” and (Jeremiah 15:9), “Her sun is gone down while it was yet day.”
SIN OFFERING
Toward the close of this darkness, our Lord Jesus, in the agony of His soul, cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (v. 34). The darkness signified the present cloud which the human soul of Christ was under, when He was making it an offering for sin. Jesus was denied the light of the sun when He was in His sufferings, signifying the withdrawing of the light of God’s countenance. And this He complained of more than anything. He did not complain of His disciples’ forsaking Him, but of His Father’s presence being withdrawn! This wounded His spirit, and that is a thing hard to bear (Proverbs 18:14); and brought the waters into His soul (Psalm 69:1–3).
Because in this, especially, He was made sin for us; our iniquities had deserved indignation and wrath upon the soul (Romans 2:8), and therefore, Christ, being made a sacrifice, underwent as much of it as He was capable of; and it could not but bear hard indeed upon Him who had lain “in the bosom” of the Father from eternity, and was “always His light.” When Paul was to be offered as a sacrifice for the service of saints, he could joy and rejoice, (Philippians 2:17), but it is another thing to be offered as a sacrifice for the sin of sinners. “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful unto death.” Mark 14:34. These dreadful words first opened the door to our Lord’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.
ROARING WORDS
In this great cry from Jesus of absence, this prayer from the opening lines of Psalm 22 (sometime called “Passion Psalms)—“My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”—that arose out of the depths of His experience of forsakenness on the cross, the gospel writers identify the suffering of Jesus with the suffering righteous in psalms of lament.
Jesus does not lose faith even while describing His intense suffering and persecution. He feels forsaken by God but knows that God is near. After recalling the trust of His forefathers and their deliverance, He describes the contemptuous action by His enemies.
But if we can only be brought close enough, say realistically for a moment, to the tortured Jesus in faith and spirit, we could almost hear the tremor in His breathless cry of abandonment. Close enough so that we can taste His sweat, smell His blood, and shiver in the cold wave of death that sweeps over Golgotha that moment. Here is the pathos (GR: power of exciting, tender emotions) of the cross! Jesus, in His moment of isolation and agony, cries out for all of us, lamenting the dreadful condition sin has brought upon us.
OUR OWN!
In His prayerful cry, He calls upon God to occupy the space of suffering and death through which we all must pass on our way to redemption. But that identification runs in more than one direction. Indeed, we may find ourselves identifying with the same lament of Jesus in the prayers that at times arise out of the darkness of our own lives!
We recognize in His prayer on the cross something of our own experience: that the prayer of Jesus in the darkness that covered the land at noon is at times very painfully like our own; that His experience of God’s absence is something of our experience; that His loneliness is also our loneliness; that in Him we indeed find One who “hath borne our grief and carried our sorrows,” One who can sympathize with us in our fears, in our distress, in our pain, in our emptiness, in our loneliness, and in our sorrows—One who knows what it is to cry out, “Why have I been forsaken?”
PRAYER TOOL
These days, however, in countless books on spirituality, prayer is portrayed either as a means of self-fulfillment or as a spiritual resource for managing our stressed-out, time-pressed modern lives, full of ceaseless technology, a punishing work week, and that to-do list that keeps multiplying. In a therapeutic culture like ours, prayer becomes one more therapeutic tool, a meditation tool, a spiritual technology prescribed by certain professionals for enhancing our quality of life or calming our frazzled nerves.
“Meditation is a specific and often effective form of relaxation in Anxiety Neurosis: (Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Anxiety Reaction is characterized by chronic, unrealistic anxiety often punctuated by acute attacks of anxiety or panic. It afflicts 5% of the population, is characteristically a disorder of young adults, and affects women twice as often as men).” –The MERCK MANUAL of Diagnosis and Therapy, 16th Edition, p. 1582–1583, Robert Berkow, M.D. Editor-In-Chief, Pub. Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, N.J., 1992
PROFESSED CHRISTIANS, WORLDLY CHRISTIANS
“Professed Christians, worldly Christians, are unacquainted with heavenly things. They will never be brought to the gates of the New Jerusalem to engage in exercises which have not hitherto specially interested them. They have not trained their minds to delight in devotion and in meditation upon things of God and heaven. How, then, can they engage in the services of heaven? how delight in the spiritual, the pure, the holy in heaven, when it was not a special delight to them upon earth? . . . Spiritual things are not discerned, because they are viewed with world-loving eyes, which cannot estimate the value and glory of the divine above the temporal.” –Testimonies for the Church, vol. 2, p. 265
“Flatter not yourself that a time will come when you can make an earnest effort easier than now. Every day increases your distance from God. Prepare for eternity with such zeal as you have not yet manifested. Educate your mind to love the Bible, to love the prayer meeting, to love the hour of meditation, and, above all, the hour when the soul communes with God.” –Testimonies for the Church, vol. 2, p. 267
Paul exhorted Timothy: “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity. Till I come, give attendance to reading, exhortation to doctrine. Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.” 1 Timothy 4:12–13, 15–16
GOD AS GOD
Ah! But in Holy Scripture, and in classical Christian tradition, prayer has little to do with self-improvement or making life comfortable. Rather, authentic, Christ-centered prayer is always about encountering God as God is and ourselves as we actually are! When we enter those empty, lonely, and sometimes painful places of our lives in prayer and faith—instead of trying to avoid them or circumvent them—we may discover that those places of human agony or brokenness also can offer deep well springs within us from which to draw the living waters of prayer.
The American-born English poet T. S. Elliot knew this, I think, when he wrote,
“I said to my soul, be still and let the dark come upon you,
Which shall be the darkness of God.”
In Scripture, furthermore, there are many examples of people who pray, but their experience of prayer is clearly not always an easy one. We often find them praying in great personal turmoil or in deep despair, “Why are you cast down, O my soul,” Psalm 42 asks repeatedly, “why are you disquieted within me?” the Psalmist then asks that question we have all asked, “Why God, have You forgotten me?”
PAIN AND TURMOIL
So, what does all this say to us about our experience of God in prayer? The picture we have from the gospels of Jesus praying on the cross in the darkness at noon reminds us that the way to God through prayer is not to be found by avoiding the shadows that descend upon our lives. Nor is it to be found by keeping our distance from the pain and turmoil of the raging world around us. Rather, authentic Christian prayer invites us to live in the often painful realities of life with Christ in faith. It invites us to be willing to walk into the dark places, vulnerable as we may be there, knowing that somehow, by the mystery of God’s grace to us in Christ, the road to Golgotha which passes through the darkness that covered the land at noon is also the same road of hope that leads to the inevitably surprising dawn of another new day.
SERIOUS BUSINESS
The day of the cross—the day when bewildering darkness covered the land at noon—reminds us that life, indeed, is serious business! It is not some Carnival Cruise Caribbean Holiday we are on as people of faith, where life sails tranquilly over calm, clear, turquoise waters, or into those perpetually golden, tropical sunsets. Neither is our experience of God in prayer a journey into some religious fantasy land. No! No! Prayer is the battle! Prayer is an effort of the will! Prayer is an interruption to personal ambition! Prayer is labor; not agony! Remember—every time you pray your horizon is altered!
“God should be the highest object of our thoughts. Meditating upon Him and pleading with Him, elevate the soul and quicken the affections. A neglect of meditation and prayer will surely result in a declension in religious interests. Then will be seen carelessness and slothfulness.” –Testimonies for the Church, vol. 2, p. 505
As the prayer of Jesus on the cross again reminds us, the life of true prayer can at times be full of painful realities. Christ calls us to face with Him all the darkness of our lives—together in the fears we have, the pain of living, the brokenness of our world, a sickness, a separation, a set-back—to face with Him in faith and in trust, assuring us by His own death on the cross that the way to true life, and so the path of true prayer, leads to the cross—where He has been and where He can work on us! But, “meditation and prayer are neglected for bustle and show. Religion must begin with emptying and purifying the heart, and must be nurtured by daily prayer.” –Testimonies for the Church, vol. 4, p. 535
If we, therefore, heed His call, we will find that we can pray in “the darkness at noon” of our own lives, as Christ did on that day at Golgotha, knowing that God, through this very same crucified One, is an ever-present help in times of trouble; our refuge and our strength in the day of our distress (Psalm 46:1; 9:9).
The impossible is exactly what God does! (Luke 18:27).
Amen. <><
John Theodorou
U.S.A.