First of all, thank you for your wonderful website. I have a question in wondering if there is a deeper significance than I realize. When Jesus was accused, he remained silent. When he was crowned with the thorns, the same. When he was enduring the agony of the cross, the same. His first “complaint” is when he cries, and then with a loud voice, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.”
In my human thinking, I would have first tried to defend myself, then would have constantly cried and complained of the treatment. It would only be when death was upon me that I could envision any relief…quite the reverse of what happened. I’m certain we, as humans, cannot even envision the horror of what awaits those without God. Is there significance beyond that?
I think the Lord had prepared Himself to endure the physical pain involved in His crucifixion. After all in Psalm 22 King David had described it quite vividly 1000 years earlier. What He wasn’t prepared for was the spiritual loss He suffered when for the first time in eternity He experienced separation from His Father. We’ve always been separated from God so we can’t imagine what it would feel like to be one with Him. He had always had union with the Father and wasn’t prepared for the pain that being separated would bring.
Personally, I think that in ways we can’t begin to understand the Trinity was changed at that moment, torn apart by our sins. Jesus, trapped in the body of a man, took all the sin of mankind upon Himself, literally becoming sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). God could not bear the sight of it and had to turn His back, taking the light from the world in the process (Matt. 27:45). For the first time in eternity, Jesus was left completely alone, at the mercy of His tormentors. It was too much, even for Him, and for the first and only time in the entire ordeal He cried out in anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).