Calendar of sayings

April 2025

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Mark 15.34 (JB)

This cry of Christ’s from the cross is the cry we pray we will never utter. It is from Psalm 22, a song of suffering, from which arises the certainty of God’s fidelity to us, forever. Whilst no one can side-step the pain behind Christ’s cry of apparent abandonment, he has actually just triumphed. He grappled with the power not to choose the cross at Gethsemane (Mark 14.36). He struggled with free will, and won: ‘Take this cup away from me. But let it be as you, not I, would have it’, he prays. For our sakes, he finds the courage to drink.

Others have also found themselves feeling far from God the Father. St Teresa of Calcutta experienced a fifty year night, writing: ‘I just long for God. The torture and pain I can't explain’. Yet thirst for God felt better to her than fulfilment elsewhere. In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor finds that ‘In the absence of any sense of God … [it is] still possible to trust God’.

God isn’t ever absent; He never leaves us. The feeling of distance is in us, not Him. Not a failing on our part, it is part of the plan and pathway to God for some. Brown Taylor concludes: ‘There is no filling a hole that was never designed to be filled, but only to be entered into’. Drinking from our own cup of suffering, entering the darkness in Christ’s footsteps, sharing others’ suffering, really carrying their crosses, and letting go enough to let them carry ours, these too are Easter miracles. It is no accident that the crucified Christ chooses Psalm 22; it ends in certainty, not doubt. Eugene H. Peterson’s The Message captures this perfectly in its translation and reimagination of Psalm 22.22 onwards:

Here’s the story I’ll tell my friends when they come to worship,

and punctuate it with Hallelujahs:

… He has never let you down,

never looked the other way

… He has been right there, listening.

… hear the good news—

that God does what He says.

Thanks be to God this Easter and always, that His faithfulness to us never ends.