Forsaken For Our Sake

Matthew 27:45-51a
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
April 3, 2026 – Good Friday

You may have run into it as a novelty toy for a fun, albeit somewhat painful, party game.

I first experienced it, I think, in an old-fashioned penny arcade on Main Street at Disneyland. It is called the Love Tester. A couple stands at opposite ends of a device holding metal handles. The device is connected to a power source that sends an electric current out to each handle. At first, the current produces a mild tingling in the hands; but as time goes on, the current becomes stronger and increasingly uncomfortable. It eventually becomes painful. It’s supposed to show who has the strongest love by measuring how much and how long each is willing to suffer to prove their love.

By that measure, Jesus’ love was the strongest in all of history. Though crucifixion was a diabolically cruel form of execution, the physical suffering He endured was not even half of the spiritual suffering He endured. For on the cross He experienced an immensely far-apart separation from the One who meant everything to Him, the One who was the heart of His heart, God His Father with whom He’d shared an infinite love from all eternity and with whom He’d enjoyed unimpeded interaction from before time began. You can hear His anguished destitution and desolation over losing that closeness in His cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It was as if His Dearest had turned His back on Him and washed His hands of Him forever.

How hard it must have been for Jesus the Man to hold on to the reality of the Father’s steadfast love when His eyes were blinded by the blood running down His crown of thorns, when His numb hands couldn’t move from having been impaled into splintery wood, when biting insects feasted on His open wounds from His flogging, and when a confusion of pain screamed in protest from every part of His body! As a man, how could He not have felt cut off from the One who’d always brought Him such an abundance of blessings?

But is it not clear that Jesus did not live under the authority of His feelings, but “by every word that comes from the mouth of God”? And is it not evident that He had the faith to hold on to the truths that God had spoken – truths that, he knew, seemed false in times of trial but will in fact stand even when heaven and earth have passed away?

Long before Good Friday, Jesus had heard the Father tell Him that He was sent “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”. Jesus had embraced that call and thus had identified with, and stood in solidarity with, sinners – from the start of His ministry when He waited for John’s “baptism of repentance” at the River Jordan with compromised sex workers, traitorous, price-gouging tax collectors and other moral failures – to the end of His ministry when He refused to kick Judas out of His inner circle even after Judas had resolved to betray Him. For His embracing sinners like that, God the Father had affirmed Jesus as His “beloved Son” with whom He was “well pleased”; and, out of His loving concern for sinners, Jesus had hours before in the Garden of Gethsemane set aside His will in order to do God’s terrifying will at Calvary.

Surely God the Father delighted in Jesus His Son for His obedience. So, in the harmony of a shared commitment, the Father, 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us, “for our sake…made Him who knew no sin to be sin”.

That means that the forsakenness Jesus subjectively felt on the cross was also the objective reality of His choosing there to represent all sinners (even the child abusers, the slave traffickers and the perpetrators of genocide) and to be a substitute for them before God’s righteous wrath against all wickedness.

Now, to sin is to defy God’s Lordship, and to defy His Lordship is to take a step of separation away from Him. Therefore, when Jesus “owned” every sin ever committed as His own, He was taking a huge step into separation from God. Jesus’ forsakenness then came, not from God’s abandoning Him, but from His embracing His call to be sin and to suffer our penalty as His own.

Hence, the forsakenness He endured does not mean the Father washed His hands of Him. On the contrary, the Father must have been profoundly pleased with Jesus’ loving self-sacrificial obedience, even as the Father must have been in anguish over the suffering it entailed for Him. I cannot imagine that the Father distanced Himself from Jesus’ anguish; I think He shared in it.

Pastor Bruce Thielmann describes a painting in the National Gallery of Art in London. It is a picture of the crucifixion so dark that, when you first look at it, you see nothing. But if you stay with it and study it with a steadfast gaze, you soon see in its dimness the figure of the crucified Christ. Then, if you look still longer with sustained focus, you discern behind the figure of Christ the presence of God the Father, whose hands are holding up His Son with a look on His face of unimaginable grief.

Though the painting is a product of an artist’s imagination, the painting aligns with what I hear the Bible say. The Father and the Son were always of one mind and heart; and the Father loved the Son for what He suffered, even as He hated the suffering He bore. Conversely, though Jesus may have felt something different in the depths of His forsakenness, His faith assured Him that He was doing something beautiful, right and loving. By faith if not by feeling, Jesus remained true to His conviction about the trustworthiness of the Father and the reality of His pain-wracked approval of Jesus’ pain-wracked forsakenness for our sake.

Whatever Jesus felt in those horrific hours, His faith assured Him that His Father was there in empathetic, hurting concern. We can hear that in Jesus’ very last word from the cross, a word of unreserved, expectant reliance on the Father’s steadfast care. With His final breath Jesus cried out, “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit.”

Jesus lived and Jesus died by faith. He calls those who would follow Him to do the same.

Jesus lived and Jesus died to prove God’s love to others. He calls those who’d follow Him to do the same.

He was deserted by His disciples and torn from the felt presence of His Father, that He might make close and everlasting between God and human being possible. May we never forget the price He paid to create that possibility, and may we count on it being the case that, though it should have been us who suffered, He out of love chose to be forsaken for our sake!