Good Friday Mini-Meditation

(Shared in Luther House Chapel, Petaling Jaya, on Good Friday 2025)

I cannot grasp how profound it is that the Word made flesh cried out, and even ‘accused’, God the Father. I cannot understand how Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, felt so much anguish and pain he sorrowfully ‘demanded’ his Father, the first Person of the Trinity, for an answer.

My God, My God, why have thoust forsaken me?

And there was no answer on that day. On this day.

There was no comfort for Jesus, hanging there. There was no resolution for the Son of God and the immense sorrow he experienced, the absolute abandonment by Someone he had loved and who had loved him.

Everyone knows that the greatest pain we face isn’t physical — it’s emotional. It’s spiritual.

And there is no running away from the idea that on the cross, God abandoned God, God forsook God. God was broken, God took on the sin, the injustice and the trauma of the world. On the cross, ‘the alienation and brokenness of the world enters right into the relationships that form the being of God’

When Jesus appeared to Thomas a few days later, he showed the doubting disciple his side that was pierced by a spear. Jesus showed Thomas a physical wound which, somehow, remained.

What about the emotional scars of the cross? Do those remain, I wonder?

My God, My God, why have thoust forsaken me?

If the God we worship is eternal, then somehow the psychological pain of the Cross ‘lives’ within God through eternity. There is no God other than the one who has suffered the loss of his son.

Does all this confuse and confound us? Certainly. Perhaps we must resist the temptation to ‘solve’ the problem of Jesus’ cry on the cross. This is a Son crying out to His Father, a cry that echoes throughout time and forever.