Good Friday
Matthew 27:46
April 3, 2026
“Elio, Elio, Lama Sabachthani?” We heard these words of our Lord during Lent as we looked at the various stations of the cross. “Elio, Elio, Lama Sabachthani?” This is Aramaic, an old cousin of Hebrew and it was the common language of the Jews, and the language Jesus spoke most of the time. The Gospel Evangelists who record Jesus’ speaking in Aramaic a few times were kind enough to provide a Greek translation, and today we have the English. This phrase means, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
On Good Friday we are brought to the most terrible words ever spoken. Not because they are uncertain or confused, but because they reveal the depth of what our salvation truly cost. From the cross Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” The eternal Son, who has lived in perfect communion with the Father from before the foundation of the world, now experiences abandonment.
This cry is not a failure of faith. Jesus addresses God as My God. This is not unbelief speaking; it is faith speaking in the darkness. These words come from Psalm 22, a psalm that begins in despair but ends in trust and victory when King David was faced with the darkness of evil and violent men seeking to take his life but where God prevailed over them. Jesus knows exactly what He is saying. He is taking that psalm upon His lips because He is carrying out its fulfillment in His body.
This cry reveals the seriousness of sin. Too often we imagine sin as a trifle problem, something easily overlooked or excused. But here we see what sin truly does. Sin separates from God. Sin brings death. Sin brings judgment. And the wages of sin is not merely physical pain or emotional suffering or a temporary inconvenience, but abandonment—being cut off from God Himself. The wages of sin is death.
This forsakenness is not illusion or metaphor. God does not pretend. On the cross, the Father truly hands the Son over to judgment. Jesus bears the full curse of the Law—not His own, for He is sinless—but yours. As St. Paul says, “He who knew no sin became sin for us.” Every accusation of the Law that should fall on you falls on Him instead. Every moment when you have doubted, feared, rebelled, or loved yourself more than God, sought after the plans and pleasures of the world and rejected God’s commandments—those sins are carried into this cry.
And this should terrify us. Because what Christ experiences here is what sinners eternally deserve. Separation from God. Judgment. Death.
But Jesus is forsaken so that you will never be. The abandonment He suffers is not the Father turning away from the Son in anger at Him personally—it is the Father judging sin fully and finally in the body of Christ. The wrath is real, the suffering is real, and the payment is complete.
This means that when you cry out to God in your own suffering—when God feels distant, silent, or hidden—you are not abandoned. Because Christ has already been abandoned for you. God may discipline, He may test, He may permit suffering, but He does not forsake His baptized children.
The cross is the proof. If God did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, then nothing— sin, death, guilt, or despair—can separate you from His love in Christ Jesus.
Good Friday is not about lost hope or despair; it is not about feeling so horrible that Christ died. Good Friday – and the reason we call it “Good Friday” – is about that flicker of hope and salvation which culminates, which explodes into the light of lights at Easter. For God cannot die and He does not stay in the grave forever.
Therefore, we cling to Christ. Forsaken for us. Crucified for us. Dead for us. And because He was forsaken, we are forgiven. Because He died, we live.
Amen.
