The Darkness Over the Son

Mark 15:33-47 shows us the cross of Christ. The darkness of sin overcame Jesus on the cross, and he felt it. Verse 34 says Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark includes both the Aramaic version Jesus actually spoke and the Greek translation for his readers. According to verse 35, some thought he was calling for Elijah. The Aramaic words misheard certainly could sound like it, and in Jewish thought, Elijah, who had not died but had been lifted into heaven, would come back to help God’s people. In verse 36, they took sour wine to him, fulfilling the prophecy of Psalm 69:21, “for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” This isn’t the wine with myrrh offered to Jesus on the way to the cross. This wasn’t meant dull his pain but to prolong his life, to see if Elijah would come. But Elijah wasn’t coming. He wasn’t crying out for Elijah anyway. He was crying out for another reason—not for someone to save him but to show the kind of salvation he was securing.

His cry was the first verse of Psalm 22. Why that Psalm? Because there, the Psalmist David laments the feeling of forsakenness. The first two verses say, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.” Do you know that feeling? Have you felt forsaken? Have you felt abandoned? On the cross, that’s how Jesus felt as the darkness came over him. He wants us to know he identifies with us. His cry is our cry because our cry is his cry. Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly, says this.

New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham notes that while Psalm 22:1 was originally written in Hebrew, Jesus spoke it in Aramaic and thus was personally appropriating it. Jesus wasn’t simply repeating David’s experience of a thousand years earlier as a convenient parallel expression. Rather, every anguished Psalm 22:1 cry across the millenia was being recapitulated and fulfilled and deepened in Jesus. His was the true Psalm 22:1 of which ours are the shadows. As the people of God, all our feelings of forsakenness funneled through an actual human heart in a single moment of anguished horror on Calvary, an actual forsakenness…The world’s Light was going out.

As the Bible says, he who knew no sin was becoming sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). All our darkness was placed on him. As the prophet Isaiah said, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6). On the cross, all the iniquity of all God’s people throughout all history, past, present, and future, was laid upon his Son, and God’s wrath was poured out on him. And it killed him. Jesus did not die a normal death of mere physical expiration; Jesus died the extraordinary death of spiritual expiation. He made amends for our guilt. He atoned for our sins. By his death, Jesus set us right with God. He went into God’s courtroom of Divine Justice as our substitute and received a guilty verdict. He was led to the place of slaughter and executed for our sins. Jesus hung there, covered in darkness, physically and spiritually, experiencing the very Hell we deserve to give us the very heaven we long for. And as Psalm 22 says, he has done it!

So when Paul says in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus,” it means there is therefore now no condemnation for any who receive this offer of salvation from Jesus! Right now, you are free from the eternal punishment of sin. Right now, you are free from condemnation. You might condemn yourself, but God won’t condemn you because he condemned Jesus instead. Right now, God fully approves of you because Jesus paid it all—not some: all. There is, therefore, now no condemnation. You are utterly and eternally free forever. This is the grace of God. Grace is like looking behind you and realizing God isn’t chasing you down with a hammer to condemn but looking ahead and seeing the nail-pierced hands of Jesus open wide to welcome you.

All you need to do to receive this gift of grace is accept it with the empty hands of faith. I love what Gerhard Forde said.

We are justified freely, for Christ’s sake, by faith, without the exertion of our own strength, gaining of merit, or doing of works. To the age-old question, “What shall I do to be saved?” the confessional answer is shocking: “Nothing! Just be still: shut up and listen for once in your life to what God the Almighty, creator and redeemer, is saying to his world and to you in the death and resurrection of his Son! Listen and believe!”

We see something of this in the Centurion’s reaction to Jesus’s death. Verse 39 says when Jesus made a loud cry and gave up his spirit, the Centurion said, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!” This is the first time in Mark’s gospel a human voice refers to Jesus as the Son of God. The centurion saw the struggle of Jesus on the cross. He saw the darkness descend. He heard the words uttered. This professional executioner noticed something different was happening.

On the cross, Jesus represented his people. The Greek used for “loud cry” is what the author of Hebrews used when he said, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death” (Hebrews 5:7). The context there is Jesus’s learning obedience through what he suffered. So then, the cry on the cross was a cry of obedient suffering. Why was he obeying? Because we needed him to. His cry was our cry. His obedience was our obedience. His suffering was our suffering. His forsakenness was our forsakenness. Like Isaac taken up the mountain by his father, Jesus is there as a sacrifice, but this time the Father will not relent. The knife is plunged. The Son dies.

When he died, verse 38 says the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. That’s important because it tells us another result of the cross. Where there was once separation between man and God in the very heart of God’s temple, there is now open access. The Great High Priest has gone behind the curtain and offered himself as the final sacrifice. When his flesh was torn, the temple curtain came down with it. No more separation. No other mediator between God and man is needed. By his blood, we now have all the access to God we will ever need (Hebrews 10:19-22). We can come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). God will hear us now because, on the cross, Jesus wasn’t heard. We will never be forsaken because on the cross, he was.

Psalm 22 starts with lament, but it ends in praise for God’s deliverance. Jesus cried verse 1 to give us the rest of the Psalm. He asked for our deliverance through him, and we received it! Satan can’t condemn us. The world can’t destroy us. We can’t even ruin ourselves anymore. Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice conquered it all!