Pastor Marco Ambriz

April 13, 2025

What songs speak to/for you when you feel alone or when you're hurting?

Matthew 27:45–46

45 From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 46 And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Psalm 22:1

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

How should we understand Jesus’s cry in verse 46? See Psalm 22. What was significant about the “darkness” that covered the land in that moment? What can we infer from these verses about the crowd watching Jesus’s crucifixion? (Coleman, 1590)

Citing Psalm 22:1, Jesus cries out a prayer that declares his trust in God even as he feels abandoned by God. It is a prayer that does not gloss over the chasm between suffering and shalom that humans experience as God’s absence. In spite of that, however, Jesus prays, hoping that God will yet come to his aid (read Ps. 22:19–24) (Gardner, 392). What helps you maintain hope during times when you feel God's silence or absence? 

All kinds of theological questions are raised here that the text simply does not answer, particularly regarding the relation of Christ’s divine and human natures. But the docetic or Gnostic view that Jesus’ divine nature actually departed at this time because God could in no way suffer (found as early as mid-second century in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter), has usually been rejected by Christians as heretical. Jesus remains a psychosomatically unified entity all the way to the moment of his death. Yet shortly before he dies, he apparently senses an abrupt loss of the communion with the Father which had proved so intimate and significant throughout his life. Not surprisingly, then, Christian theology developed the belief that at this moment Christ bore the sins of all humanity, spiritually separating him from his Heavenly Father (Blomberg, 419). How is this interpretation of the Son's separation from the Father helpful for understanding God's work of salvation? How is it problematic?

Part of the whole point of the cross is that there the weight of the world’s evil really did converge upon Jesus, blotting out the sunlight of God’s love as surely as the light of day was blotted out for three hours. (Matthew probably intends us to see here the start of the fulfilment of Jesus’ words in 24:29; these events are ushering in God’s ‘last days’, which will reach their climax when the son of man is exalted and vindicated, and the Temple is destroyed.) Jesus is ‘giving his life as a ransom for many’ (20:28), and the sin of the ‘many’, which he is bearing, has for the first and only time in his experience caused a cloud to come between him and the father he loved and obeyed, the one who had been delighted in him (Wright, 190). Can you explain in your own words how Jesus' crucifixion bears the weight of the world's sin and evil?

Psalm 22 has been influential in the very wording of some of the scenes at the crucifixion. The psalm in its original context was a lament of a righteous sufferer. Though these opening words of dereliction described the agony Jesus experienced on the cross, they also introduce a psalm that concluded in hope and praise for God’s salvation, a fact of which Jesus was not ignorant (Hahn, 334). This is the prayer of one who still trusts in God to vindicate him (Newman, 863). Read the entirety of Psalm 22, especially the ending. How might the ending of Psalm 22 help us understand Christ's Cross?

Sermon Points

1. Jesus experienced loneliness and abandonment.

2. Jesus reached for the Psalms in his darkest hour.

3. Jesus used the Psalms as a statement of hope in God's redemption.

4. Jesus used the Psalms as a statement of victory over evil.

Reflection

1. Do you see Jesus identifying with you in lonely times? Why or why not?

2. What concepts of God might need to be reconsidered when you feel alone?

3. What would it look like to grow in your hope of God's presence with you?

Works Cited

Craig Blomberg. Matthew. Vol. 22. The New American Commentary. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992).

Lyman Coleman. Life Connections Study Bible. Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019.

Richard B. Gardner. Matthew. Believers Church Bible Commentary. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1991.

Roger L. Hahn. Matthew: A Commentary for Bible Students. Indianapolis, IN: Wesleyan Publishing House, 2007.

Barclay Moon Newman and Philip C. Stine. A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. UBS Handbook Series. New York: United Bible Societies, 1992).

Tom Wright. Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004).