Matthew 27 46 Sermon

When God Goes Silent: The Cry That Saves The World

Matthew 27:45-46 reads this way in the Christian Standard Bible: "From noon until three in the afternoon, darkness came over the whole land. About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?' that is, 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?'"

Stop there. Read it again. Let the weight of it settle.

This is the most staggering sentence in the entire New Testament. The eternal Son of God, the one through whom all things were made, the one who has existed in unbroken communion with the Father from before the foundation of the world, opens his mouth on the cross and cries out that God has abandoned him. Not a whisper. Not a private thought. A loud voice. A cry that carried across Golgotha and has echoed through twenty centuries of human suffering ever since.

If you have ever sat in a hospital room and felt like your prayers were bouncing off the ceiling, this verse is for you. If you have ever walked through a season so dark that God felt absent, this verse is for you. If you have ever wondered whether faith is worth holding onto when the evidence seems to say otherwise, then come and stand at the foot of this cross, because what Jesus cried out in those three hours of darkness is the most honest, the most human, and the most theologically loaded prayer in all of Scripture.

The central claim of this text is this: Jesus was forsaken so that you would never have to be.

That is the whole sermon. But we need to understand what it cost him, what it means, and what it demands of us.

The Darkness That Preceded The Cry

Matthew tells us that darkness covered the whole land from noon until three in the afternoon. This is not a passing cloud. This is not a solar eclipse. This is a sign. The sun hid its face at midday, and the darkness was three hours long.

In the Old Testament, darkness is the language of judgment. When God moved against Egypt, darkness was among the plagues. When the prophets described the Day of the Lord, they described it in terms of the sun going dark and the moon giving no light. Matthew's original readers would have felt the weight of that imagery immediately. Something cosmic is happening on this cross. The death of Jesus is not merely a political execution. It is the moment when the full weight of divine judgment against human sin is being concentrated onto one person.

And in the middle of that darkness, Jesus cries out.

The cry comes from Psalm 22. Every preacher who works through Matthew 27:46 needs to understand that Jesus is not improvising. He is praying Scripture. He is reaching back into the inspired words of David and making them his own, because what David wrote in anguish centuries earlier was always pointing forward to this moment. Psalm 22 opens with the same words: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far from my salvation, so far from my words of groaning?"

This is the cry of a man who is not merely suffering physically. He is suffering the absence of God. And that is a different kind of pain altogether.

What The Abandonment Actually Means

Now we have to be careful here, because this is the deepest water in all of Christian theology. We are not saying that the Trinity was torn apart. We are not saying that the Father stopped loving the Son. The New Testament is clear that the Father's love for the Son is eternal and unbreakable. What we are saying is that in this moment, Jesus experienced what the Bible calls the wrath of God against sin, and he experienced it alone.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. The theological term is substitution. Jesus stood in the place of sinners. He bore what sinners deserve. And what sinners deserve is not merely physical death. What sinners deserve is separation from the presence of God. That is what the Bible calls hell. That is what the Bible calls the second death.

Jesus tasted it. He tasted it fully. He tasted it so that everyone who trusts in him would never have to taste it themselves.

This is why the cry matters. It is not a cry of despair without meaning. It is a cry of substitution. It is the sound of a Savior absorbing the full penalty of sin so that the penalty would be exhausted. When Jesus cried, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me," he was not losing faith. He was fulfilling the mission. He was doing the work that no one else could do and that no one else would do.

The darkness outside was a picture of the darkness inside, the darkness of bearing the sin of the world, of standing under the judgment that belonged to us.

The Faithfulness Hidden Inside The Cry

Here is what you must not miss. Jesus cried out to God even in the moment of abandonment. He did not curse God. He did not turn away. He prayed. He cried out. He addressed the Father as "My God."

That phrase "My God" is a statement of covenant. It is the language of relationship. Even in the depths of forsakenness, Jesus maintained the posture of trust. He was not denying God. He was crying out to God. He was doing exactly what Psalm 22 models: bringing the full weight of anguish honestly before the Father, even when the Father seemed silent.

And if you read Psalm 22 all the way through, you find something remarkable. The psalm does not end in despair. It ends in vindication. It ends in praise. It ends with the declaration that God has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one, and has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help. The resurrection is the Father's answer to the Son's cry. The empty tomb on Sunday morning is God's response to the darkness of Friday afternoon.

This is the pattern of biblical faith. You bring your honest cry to God. You do not dress it up. You do not pretend you are fine when you are not. You cry out. And you trust that the God who seems silent is still the God who hears.

That is not a small thing. That is the entire architecture of faith.

What This Means For The People In This Room

Some of you are in your own version of darkness right now. Not the darkness of Golgotha, but a real darkness. A diagnosis that came back wrong. A relationship that has fallen apart. A grief that will not lift. A season of prayer that feels like shouting into an empty room.

The cry of Jesus from the cross does not give you a tidy explanation for your suffering. The Bible does not promise that. But it gives you something more important than an explanation. It gives you a Savior who has been there. He did not watch human suffering from a safe distance and offer advice. He entered it. He went all the way down into the deepest possible experience of abandonment and came out the other side through resurrection.

The writer of Hebrews says that we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. That sympathy is not abstract. It is rooted in the cross. It is rooted in three hours of darkness and a cry that shook the ground.

When you pray and the heavens seem silent, you are not praying to a God who does not understand silence. You are praying to the God who endured it, who cried out through it, and who was vindicated on the other side of it.

The Invitation Of The Cross

Matthew continues the account. After the cry, Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and gave up his spirit. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The barrier between sinful humanity and the holy presence of God was removed. Not from the bottom up, as if a human being had broken through. From the top down. God tore it. God opened the way.

That torn curtain is the answer to the cry of dereliction. Jesus was cut off so that you could be brought near. He was abandoned so that you could be adopted. He experienced the silence of God so that you could experience the presence of God.

If you are here today and you have never placed your faith in Jesus Christ, this is the gospel in its most concentrated form. God did not send Jesus to give you a better life strategy. He sent Jesus to absorb the judgment that your sin deserves, to die the death that you owe, and to rise again so that everyone who trusts in him receives not condemnation but life. That is the offer of the cross. It is not earned. It is not achieved. It is received by faith.

And if you are already a believer, the cross is still your daily anchor. When the darkness comes, and it will come, you do not have to pretend it is not dark. You can cry out. You can say, "My God, my God, where are you?" and know that you are praying in the same tradition as your Savior. And you can trust that the God who answered the cry of his Son will not leave your cry unanswered.

He was forsaken so that you would never have to be.

Cry out to him. Trust him through the darkness. The resurrection is coming.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

Psalm 22. In context of Davidic lament and Messianic fulfillment.

R. T. France. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2007.

D. A. Carson. "Matthew." In The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Volume 9. Zondervan, 1984.

John Stott. The Cross of Christ. InterVarsity Press, 1986.

Craig L. Blomberg. Matthew. New American Commentary, Volume 22. Broadman Press, 1992.