Matthew 27:45–48

Midweek 6

The Wound

of Abandonment

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, "This man is calling Elijah." And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to Him to drink. (Matthew 27:45–48)

How many are the wounds we inflicted upon our Savior in His Passion, suffering, and death! We have pondered together the wounds of betrayal, apathy, denial, and mockery. We have seen ourselves, our own lives, reflected in Judas, the sleepy three, Peter, and the soldiers. Yet of all the wounds that our Lord received, none so struck, so terrorized, and so weighed on Him as the one we ponder tonight. We did not inflict this wound. It came from His Father—the wound of abandonment. From out of the unspeakable depth of His agony on the cross, our Lord cries the words of Psalm 22: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" The great Lutheran preacher O. P. Kretzmann ponders this cry of agony and says: "Suddenly on a Friday afternoon a man was forsaken of God, cut off from the living and the dead, utterly and ultimately alone. The sudden emptiness in those eyes. . . . It was then that he died, much more than afterward. You see, this is sin. It is not merely a matter of murder and adultery and gossip. Something to do or not to do! It is always loneliness. It is cutting yourself off from God. It is a deliberate turning away from truth, from goodness, from heaven. You see, this is redemption. All this He took into Himself, alone there in the dark. He became sin for us." (The Pilgrim [St. Louis: Concordia, 1944], 47)

Dear people loved by God, as all the sin of the world is laid upon the Lamb of God, as He owns it as His very own, He experiences in Himself what every one of those sins demands: "Leave Me alone, God! Go away! Leave Me be!" This is the bitterest dregs of the cup that Jesus will drain down for us in its entirety. He will taste hell. He will taste it for us all. He will know the loneliness so profound that its pain is unimaginable for us. How can we begin to understand what it was like for Him in that Moment. He was the Eternal Word, who had delighted in the Father's presence before the ages came to be; the Eternal Word, who took on flesh from the Virgin without ever leaving the presence of His Father; the Word made flesh, who lived among us constantly, as all men were meant to live: conscious of His Father's never-failing love and the presence of His guiding hand. And all this is now withdrawn, and Jesus is alone. All alone.

People joke about hell, saying, "Well, at least I will have a lot of company there." Wrong. Utterly wrong. Think of the story of Lazarus and the rich man. In that story, the rich man is all alone. Lazarus has angels for company and Abraham, to whom he is so close that he lays his head in his bosom. The rich man hungers and thirsts for a human touch. "Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame" (Luke 16:24). But no visit relieves the terror of the rich man's solitude. He is alone. All alone. And will be alone forever. Ponder that, and you will begin to understand the reality of hell. Ponder that, and you will see its true terror. Ponder that, and you will bow in love before the Savior whose love for you was so great that He chose to enter that loneliness Himself and to endure it in your place that you might be set free from it forever. Never alone. Never again. Because Jesus endured the wound of abandonment that our every sin demands of God, because Jesus drained the cup down to this, its last and bitterest dregs, you can look to your Savior and pray with the confidence of being heard as we do in the hymn:

My Savior, be Thou near me

When death is at my door;

Then let Thy presence cheer me,

Forsake me nevermore!

When soul and body languish,

O leave me not alone,

But take away mine anguish

By virtue of Thine own! (LSB 450:6)

Do you see it now? You will never have to know what Jesus went through in those darkest hours. You will never have to face life or suffering or death alone. He has made sure of it. He will be with you. He will walk with you every step of the way, and so hell itself is undone, death destroyed, sin forgiven. Your Savior, your Shepherd, He attends you through the valley of the shadow of death so that you fear no evil, for you are not alone, but He is with you. His rod and His staff they comfort you. He brings you out from that darkest of valleys into the sunshine and the bright light of the day that never ends in the kingdom of your Father.

O. P. Kretzmann will have the final words on this meditation on the wound of abandonment: Above His "Eli, Eli" was the sound of tearing veils, of falling walls, of the glad crying of those who now had a home again after the long loneliness of sin. They would continue to wander, groping, stumbling, falling, in all the black ways which man will walk when they turn away from God. . . . But there was a way back now, beyond Jerusalem and beyond thought and hope to the place where the open arms of the cross had become the gates of heaven." (The Pilgrim, 47)

Amen.