The Ultimate Silence
“And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ (which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).” — Mark 15:34, NIV.
In full transparency, the past year of my life has felt like God has gone completely silent. I have often cried out, wondering where he is and why I can’t feel him near. There are moments when the silence can feel unbearable. You may be able to relate to these feelings. We pray for an answer, direction, healing, relief, reassurance—anything—and hear…nothing. Throughout Scripture, some of God’s people experienced similar seasons where they wondered where he was or why he seemed silent. But perhaps nowhere in Scripture is the silence more startling than here—Jesus hanging on the cross.
For three hours, darkness has covered the land. The One who healed the sick, raised the dead, calmed storms, and opened the eyes of the blind is suffering beyond anything we can truly imagine. The One who had constantly spoken of his relationship with the Father now cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And there is no recorded answer from heaven.
Earlier in Jesus’ ministry, the Father’s voice had dramatically broken through the heavens. At Jesus’ baptism, God declared, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11, NIV). Again at the transfiguration, the Father said, “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!'“ (Mark 9:7, NIV).
But now, at the cross, there is darkness. And silence.
To understand the reason for this ultimate moment of silence, we have to understand what Jesus was doing there. Jesus was not dying for his own sin—he had none. 1 Peter 2:22 says, “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth” (NIV). He was hanging there because of ours (this thought should give you chills). Paul explains it this way: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NIV).
Every sin, every act of rebellion, every hidden thought, every failure, every sin committed before that day and every sin that would come after it—the judgment humanity deserved was placed upon the sinless Son of God. Isaiah had described this hundreds of years earlier: “The Lord had laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6, NIV). Jesus took our place.
The cry in Mark 15 is not random. Jesus is quoting the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1, NIV). The psalm begins with what sounds like total abandonment. The writer cries out and hears no answer. He is mocked, surrounded by enemies, and his suffering seems unbearable. It sounds a lot like the cross…and maybe like your circumstances.
But, thankfully, Psalm 22 does not end as it begins. Eventually, the psalm turns from agony toward confidence and praise. The suffering one declares that God “has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help” (Psalm 22:24, NIV). What begins with “Why have you forsaken me?” eventually becomes a declaration that God has heard. The silence was not the end of that story—neither was the cross.
Jesus entered completely into the judgment and darkness of human sin. He experienced the horror of God-forsakenness as he bore what belonged to us. He did not merely observe human suffering from a safe distance. He entered into its deepest darkness. And he did it willingly.
Even more overwhelming to me is why he endured it—he experienced forsakenness, total silence, so that we could be reconciled. Paul writes, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19, NIV). The cross was not God abandoning his rescue plan. The cross was the rescue plan. The silence of that afternoon was accomplishing something we could never accomplish for ourselves.
Sin separates us from God, and there is ultimately nothing we can do to repair that separation on our own. We can never become good enough, obedient enough, religious enough, or moral enough to erase our sin. So Jesus took upon himself what belonged to us and gave us what belonged to him. He took our sin—we receive his righteousness. He took our judgment—we receive mercy. He bore the separation our sin deserved so we could be brought near.
Knowing the reason can help shift the way we view the silence of the cross. The Father’s silence was not evidence that nothing was happening. Absolutely not!! In what may have looked like the darkest and most hopeless moments in all of history, God was accomplishing the greatest act of redemption the world would ever know.
For us, that can help us remember that sometimes silence looks like absence when really something much deeper is happening. The resurrection proves that the silence of Friday was never the final word. Jesus had cried, “Why have you forsaken me?” But three days later, the tomb was empty. Death did not win. Sin did not win. Darkness did not win.
Because Jesus endured the cross, those who belong to him are given a promise very different from the cry he made from it that afternoon: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5, NIV). Think about the weight of that! Jesus bore the forsakenness our sin deserved so that those reconciled to God through him could hear: I will never leave you; I will never forsake you.
There will be plenty of moments or even seasons when God seems silent. There will be prayers we do not understand, suffering we cannot explain, and times when heaven feels painfully quiet. But because of the cross, God’s silence does not mean God’s absence. We can look back to the darkest, most undeserved silence in history and see what was actually happening in the midst — God was saving us.
Hallelujah.
bytaylormcgee
