Psalm 22:1-8
Matthew 27:45-46

I don’t know what abandonment experiences you have had.  Some people journey through life without ever feeling abandoned while others can provide a long list of times they were forsaken.  The loneliness and emptiness caused by death may feel like the person who died abandoned us.  Many who experience great struggle or suffering in life may feel that God has abandoned them.  This certainly is one of the interpretations given to Jesus’ experience when he was dying.  The evidence used to support this interpretation is his statement, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”    
           
There are no easy last words.  The last words of Jesus are difficult, but perhaps none are as difficult as, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"  What is he saying?  What does he mean?  How are we to understand it?  As we examine this word of Jesus, we will discover it examining us before we are finished with it.
           
Was Jesus tempted to curse God and die?  He expected the enterprise of being God in the flesh to be filled with risks and difficulties, but did he know it would come to this?  The pain was more intense than he had anticipated.  The verbal and physical spit were degrading.  How could God have gotten Jesus into this?  "My God, why have you forsaken me?" may be the ultimate last word of Jesus.  As we approach this last word, we are confronted with the three "D's" of traditional interpretation:  delirium, desolation, and dereliction.
           
Was Jesus delirious?  Why else would he say, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Every person has a pain tolerance level.  A person may not be able to measure his pain tolerance, but once he has reached a level of pain that he no longer can bear, he may become delirious.  Perhaps you have reached the land of delir­ium at some time in your life.  You have, at least momentarily, entered another world.  No one can reach you there.  Have you ever tried to communicate with one who is delirious?  There is no reach­ing him, even though you are in sight and sound of him and can reach out and touch him.  Had the pain become so intense for Jesus that any consciousness was purely and completely self‑conscious­ness?  Was he aware, but only aware of himself?
           
Jesus’ last word, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me,” is the first word of the twenty‑second Psalm. That Psalm is a picture of one who feels forsaken and beleaguered but who has unshaken confidence in the glimmer that remained of the presence of God in his consciousness.  To call out the beginning of a Psalm was to call to mind the entire Psalm. In the land of delirium beyond Jesus' pain tolerance level, had all memory and hope and otherness been wrung out of him?  Is there anyone among us who, suffering unbounded pain, suspended between heaven and earth on two pieces of wood, could be aware of anything or anyone beyond ourselves?  This is delirium.  Perhaps Jesus was delirious.  If so, it happened suddenly.  Moments earlier, he had conversed with the common criminals, cared for his mother, and then asked for a drink.  Maybe, suddenly, he crossed over into the land of delirium.
           
Obviously, Jesus was feeling desolate, abandoned.  I do not know exactly what such a feeling would be like.  I have talked with a few adults who were abandoned as children, and I have sensed the panicky feeling they still experience as they tell about being left and feeling that their existence made no difference to anyone.  Their relationships with their parents had counted for naught.  You may have experienced a degree of abandonment or desolation through divorce or the death of a parent, spouse, child, or close friend.  I have sensed the ache and hurt that such events have caused in the lives of other people, but I cannot say that I understand, because I have not experienced desolation even to this degree.  But many of you have, and you can identify more than I with the feeling of desolation that Jesus may have experienced.
           
To feel there is no one with you is desolation.  To be aban­doned is to be suspended, to belong nowhere, to hang between heaven and earth.
           
This is what it means to be nailed, abandoned.  This is that aloneness where one is under the knife with no prospect of being anywhere else.  There is no elsewhere!  This is crucifixion:  to be tearing apart where one is, with no prospect of movement left, without any Other.9  The feeling of having been abandoned hangs heavy in this word of Jesus, "Why have you forsaken me?"
           
But there is more.  Is this word a cry of dereliction from Jesus?  Dereliction is a strong word.  It is the state of being abandoned as worthless.  A derelict ship is deserted by both people and the rats, being driven helplessly before the gale.  Did Jesus fling his agonized "why" against what seems an uncomprehending sky?
           
Would God abandon his own?  Why?  Jesus earlier had pro­mised he would never abandon his followers.  For what reason would God abandon Jesus?  Would such abandonment say there may come some tough times in our lives when God cannot stay with us?  There had been other cries to God from this same area of agony.  Only a few hours earlier Jesus had said, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me."  From the cross he had prayed, "Father, forgive them."  In another moment we will hear Jesus pray, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."  God heard the first prayer.  God heard the other prayers.  Later, God heard the cry, "It is finished."  These cries do not suggest delirium, desolation, or dereliction.  Quite the contrary, prayers such as these demonstrate a most intimate goodness of God and God’s ultimate rule over all of life.  Many believe that God abandoned Jesus and that this word of His depicts the depth of Jesus' despair.  Martin Dibelius, a New Testament scholar, offers another point of view by saying that one does not quote Scripture in prayer when he has given up his faith.  George Buttrick reports in a sermon that there hangs in a chapel in Milan an early Renaissance painting of the crucifixion in which, late in the evening, when the light allows it and when viewed from a certain angle, a shadowy figure seems to have been interposed between Jesus and the wood of the cross.  The artist was trying to say that God was there, too.
           
Maybe this cry, "My God, my God," was not, is not, addressed to God.  It certainly does not have the warmth of "Pappa" that Jesus' other prayers had.  What if Jesus was talking to his disciples?  "My God, my God," captures the agonizing hurt that Jesus felt by being abandoned, not by God, but by his disciples.  Mark wrote that Jesus called disciples for two reasons:  first, they were to be with him, friends, companions; and second, they were to proclaim the good news.  Jesus invited people to be his disciples to be with him.  The intent of the invitation was that they would be with Jesus, come what may.  But the cross came, and where were the disciples?  Shattered, scared, and scattered!  John is the only one of the twelve who dared show his face.
           
The others were hiding, crying out in their souls, "Is it I?"  Abandonment is betrayal by proxy.  It may be more subtle than Judas' approach, but it is just as cold and destructive, and cuts as deeply.  Hear the agony of Jesus, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  When Jesus needed companionship and friendship most desperately, his friends were not there.
           
The last word also addresses us.  We have promised to be followers, disciples of Jesus.  We have taken his identity into our lives by calling ourselves Christians.  Our promise has ex­ceeded our practice.  We too have denied and betrayed Jesus.  Whenever we have sinned we have abandoned him and as the author of Hebrews suggests we crucify the Son of God on our own account and hold him up to contempt (Hebrews 6:6).  Jesus' last word, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" also is spoken to each of us.
           
Jesus died as he lived.  Ernst Kasemann insists that this cry be understood as evidence of this.  Jesus died with God's word on his lips and with unshaken trust in God who alone and always is one's true help.  If God turned his back on Jesus, we are saying that there are some difficult times in life when we might expect God to check out on us if life becomes too strenuous.  This makes faith in God rather precarious causing us to wonder if our present situation is the one when God will pull out his support.  The promise of God is that God always will be with us.  That was a promise by which Jesus lived and died.  Jesus lived out a life the way a life is to be lived.  He invites us to do the same and the source of help and hope to live as Jesus did is God who never abandons people solely to their own resources.
           
Jesus, feeling the loneliness and abandonment of his com­panions, tells us what it is like to be utterly human, left solely to our own resources.  Jesus' word, "My God, my God," is an expres­sion of loneliness and perplexity over the betrayal, the desertion, and the cross.  As much as is possible for God to dwell in a human being, God dwelt in Jesus.   
           
Matthew and Mark are the only New Testament writers who record this abandonment word of Jesus from the cross.  It is the only last word they record.  The other six last words are found in Luke and/or John.  Abandonment was and is a difficult word for the church.  Some thought Jesus was calling for Elijah.  According to the Hebrew Scriptures, Elijah transcended death, and legend had it that he came to the aid of persons in great distress.  I do not know if anyone could have heard Jesus say "Eloi" and mistaken it for "Elijah."  People can hear almost anything they wish to hear. Those who heard his cry knew him.  Those who had no wish to hear, those who had no hope of hearing, heard him call Elijah.  They offered him a type of cheap wine similar to vinegar, probably in an attempt to deaden the pain, because they thought he was delirious from physical pain.  But the emotional pain of abandonment by friends cannot be lessened with pain killers. Jesus knew that, and his words verbalized the deep agony he felt because of the desertion of those in whom he had invested so much of himself.
           
As Jesus looked in disbelief into the absence of his friends, he was tempted to say nothing.  At this late hour, what good would his words be?  Three years of talking had brought him to a cross where his friends would not show their faces.  Jesus may have been tempted to say too much, to lash out in verbal abuse at his absent supporters.  Rather, he chose a third alternative.  He simply called out to his absent friends to give an account of themselves.  Why had they abandoned him?  This is a last word that resisted the shortcuts of saying nothing or saying too much, and it penetrated to the essence of his disciples' actions.  What a confrontive last word this is!
           
Jesus is suspended between heaven and earth on two pieces of wood.  To whom is he looking when in anguish he utters, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  I submit he is looking at the crowd, at us.  We are scared and scattered, hiding, seeking asylum somewhere, anywhere.  Cutting through the darkness of noonday is this stark cry, this last word spoken to us, "My God, my God, why have you, and you, and you, forsaken me?" Why?