NOTES for Mar 15:22-25; Mar 15:33-41
The abandonment by God that the Saviour experienced on the cross has always raised questions for readers of the Bible, often bewildered questions. How can the Messiah, who bears within Himself all the fullness of God, experience abandonment by God? If this concerned an ordinary person, for whom, after the Fall, a kind of spiritual broken line, so easily interrupted, became the normal pattern of relations with God, everything would be understandable and explicable. For fallen humanity, abandonment by God is, unfortunately, an almost normal state, if only because communion with God is possible only in spite of our own sinfulness and in opposition to it. But how can abandonment by God be possible for the One who said: ‘I and the Father are one’?
Clearly, if it is possible at all, it can only be through a special act of God, freely accepted by the One who would never otherwise have had to experience anything of the kind. But then the next question arises: why? Perhaps so that death might be real? Indeed, in the biblical books death is usually described as complete abandonment by God: God is absent from the realm of the dead, the world of shadows. That is why resurrection, victory over death, becomes a sign of God’s triumph over all His enemies. There is no death in the Kingdom, but it is possible on the way to the Kingdom. And if the Messiah sent by God into the world was to die, His death had to be as real and complete as His life, so that His resurrection too might become the triumph of the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness.