The Crucifixion: Faithful Even When It Looks Like Abandonment

“About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ (which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).” – Matthew 27:46 (NIV)

There is one moment in all of scripture where faithfulness looked, from every conceivable angle, like abandonment.

Jesus, on the cross, cried out with the words of Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This was not a theological statement delivered calmly from a position of understanding. This was a cry from a person experiencing something no human being before or since has experienced: the actual withdrawal of the Father’s presence from the Son, the moment when the weight of human sin was placed on Jesus and the holy God who cannot look on sin turned His face away. The darkness that fell over the land at noon was not meteorological. It was the darkness of the absence of God.

This is the most important moment in all of the stories of divine faithfulness we have been walking through this month, precisely because it is the moment where faithfulness appears most completely absent. Jesus died. His disciples scattered. The women who watched from a distance watched a man they had followed for three years die in agony in public, with nothing to suggest that God was doing anything except allowing it to happen. By every visible measurement, Friday afternoon was the end of everything.

And it was the most faithful act in all of human history. The Father allowing the Son to absorb the full weight of the separation that human sin deserved, so that no human being who trusts in Christ would ever have to experience that separation themselves. The cry of abandonment from the cross is God’s faithfulness to every person who has ever felt abandoned. He has been in the darkness you are describing. Not metaphorically. Actually. And it did not end there.

This matters enormously for how we interpret the dark Fridays of our own lives, the moments where faithfulness appears completely absent, where the prayer seems unanswered and the situation seems irreversible and the silence seems permanent. The testimony of Calvary is that God’s faithfulness can look, from the outside and from the inside, exactly like abandonment, and still be the most faithful act imaginable. The cross was not God failing to show up. It was God showing up in the most costly way conceivable.

Today, if you are in a season that feels like the cross, remember that the story did not end on Friday afternoon. The same faithfulness that sent the Son to the cross sent the angel to the tomb on Sunday morning. Dark Friday is always followed by resurrection morning. Always.

Prayer

Father, I bring you my dark Friday. The moment that looks like abandonment, the silence that feels final, the situation that appears irreversible. I hold it alongside the cross, where faithfulness looked exactly like failure until Sunday morning changed everything. I trust you with what I do not yet understand. The resurrection is coming. In Jesus’ name, amen.