Perhaps the most crucial statement of the New Testament is the recorded cry of dereliction: "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" For us it is a sure sign of authenticity in the gospel accounts of Matthew and Mark: why would authors intent on leading their readers to belief in Jesus reveal words that would otherwise appear so damaging if those words were not in fact true? My contemplation of these words began as I pondered my own difficulty in knowing God. In fundamental ways it is easier to believe in God than to know him, easier to obey, perhaps, than to know him. Faith in God is a thing of infinite worth; intimate knowledge of God seems to come with great struggle.

And we see Jesus, one who knew God intimately, "always doing those things which pleased the Father," uttering those fateful words so mysterious. Yes, we know that "he became sin for us." And Christians have wondered at the meaning of that phrase for 2000 years. Did Jesus feel the displeasure of God? No. He could in no way feel displeasure from the God to whom he was completely obedient in all his thoughts and deeds. The question of Jesus reveals his sense of being abandoned.

It is too easy to say that God "turned his back on Jesus" at the moment of his becoming sin for us. It is truer to say, I think, that God abandoned Jesus to the consequences of his own earthly righteousness. If God is to rescue us from sin he cannot rescue his son from righteousness. God abandoned his own son to the historical consequences of a faithful, true and obedient life; men rose up and slew the righteous one and God must allow their evil intentions to be carried out to demonstrate the reality of human sin and the depth of divine love. God never ceased to love his son, but the son could not escape the reality into which he been born and the purpose of his coming.

For me, the cross exemplifies such an intimacy between Jesus and the Father that the abandonment is felt by both the son and the Father. The cross is not a picture of someone gritting his teeth and bearing agony until the bitter end, as a prisoner of war might. It is not a picture of someone going through the motions of a drama which has been written and who must play the lead part to the bitter end. It is not the picture of a martyr sacrificing himself for the good of all as the last act of a reformer's life. It is the picture of intimate love and a full revelation, even to Jesus, of the horrible conseqences of a life lived perfectly in love for the Father and in that respect the final and full revelation, even to Jesus, of the divine love of God, the God who is not willing to rescue his son from the evil world into which his son has so willingly and lovingly walked.

I can take some hope, I think, that the struggle I often feel to know God is perhaps a sure sign of my own realization of lost intimacy, surely a human condition from the Fall and also a personal experience. Had there been no God to know we would surely not miss the knowing. "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men." (Eccl. 3:11) "In the heart there is a God-shaped vacuum." (Pascal)