‘Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour, and about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, “My God, my God, why did you forsake me?” '
As we have seen above, in Scripture darkness represents a number of things. It is regularly the picture of judgment, the wrath of God and the withdrawal of God's face. It is a symbol of the shadow of death. And yet it is also paradoxically the place where God is found, and it is out of darkness that He regularly establishes His covenant, including the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15), the covenant of the Passover (Exodus 10-12), and the covenant of Sinai (Deuteronomy 4:11). But above all darkness at noonday is a symbol of God's rejection of Israel (Amos 8:9). It would, however, issue in a new dawn (Amos 9:11-15).
As suggested above the darkness may have been caused by volcanic action, or powerful wind stirring up dust and sand, or even an unusual storm, but above all it signified divine activity and judgment on sin.
“My God, my God, why did you forsake me?” The cry of Jesus is beyond understanding. As it has been well expressed, ‘God forsaken of God, who can understand it?' But it certainly indicated a forsakenness of soul that we, who are far too used to being separate from God, cannot hope to comprehend. The actual words in the Aramaic/Hebrew appear differently in different manuscripts, mainly because the language was unknown to the copyists. But it is probable that here we are to see them as expressed in Jesus' and Matthew's native Aramaic. They are cited from Psalms 22:1. There is no reason to doubt that Jesus had sought solace in that Psalm as He went through His anguish, but He did not use it lightly. He used it because it expressed what He saw to be at the very heart of His experience, and the evangelists cited it because they also saw it as going to the heart of His experience. It is the only cry from the cross recorded by Matthew and Mark. We may see it here in two different ways, either as the final cry of His desolation at its crisis point before coming through to victory, ‘why have you forsaken Me so that I am still forsaken?', or as the cry of triumph as at last the desolation is over, having in mind what He has been through, ‘why did you forsake Me, even though it is now over?' The use of the Psalm possibly suggests the first. But if so it would soon be followed, as also in the Psalm, by victory and vindication (‘it is finished'). It is a question that in the end cannot be answered. But either way it indicates the dreadfulness of the experience of soul that He had undergone, an experience of forsakenness that was foreign to all that He was. And the wonder of it is that it was for us. ‘He was forsaken, that we might never be forsaken'. On the other hand the fact that He is citing a Psalm is a reminder that we should not necessarily interpret every word literally as though He had thought each word out. We must neither water it down, nor theologise it. It rather conveniently expressed how He felt as a result of the darkness that had enveloped His soul. (He would know that the Psalmist was not forsaken, he only felt as though he was forsaken). We may, however, reasonably relate it to the fact that ‘He was made sin for us, who previously knew no sin' (2 Corinthians 5:21). He had thus undergone what to Him was a sense of unbearable anguish and loss, as, burdened by the weight of the wrath of God against sin, sin had separated Him from His Father's manifested presence, a presence He had known throughout His mortal life.