Word XVIII. On Great Friday

April 20, 1907.

“«My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me» (Mt 27:46).”

Thus cried out the Lamb of God, our Lord Jesus, crucified for the sins of the world, who suffered voluntarily, and by the price of His sufferings and death redeemed it from God’s righteous curse and from eternal death.

This is a bitter cry not of Him alone, but of the whole human race. It fell to our race, by the justice of God, to be forsaken by God, deprived of His grace and His life, and to be cast into eternal torment. It is dreadful even for a moment to imagine the torments of hell; dreadful is eternal separation from God, the Source of life. Dreadful is the seething of the eternal fire, fearsomely burning and never consuming its victim. Dreadful and unbearable are the wailings of sinners tormented in hell. Calling to mind this dreadful abandonment of sinners, and having given Himself as a ransom for them to the justice of His Father, He, the Lamb of God, lifts up His final cry from a heart overflowing with sorrow: My God, My God! why have You forsaken Me? that is, given Me over to the whole ferocity of these torments?

But glory to Your sufferings, O Lord! You accepted not only the punishment of the cross, from Your heavenly Father, to deliver us from eternal punishment, but also abandonment by Him—that is, the trial of the whole ferocity of the torments to which we, sinners, ought by God’s justice to have been subjected. In return, we shall not be forsaken by the goodness of God, if we believe and hope in You to the end, but shall be received into eternal, joyful communion with You in the age to come.

Let us take a lesson from the cross and from its innocent, crucified Sufferer, before whom heaven and earth and all that is in them tremble, and who could in a single instant reduce heaven and earth to nothing, to non-being, if He but willed it. — What lesson? The lesson of obedience to our Savior, the lesson of self-denial, that is, of the rejection of the old man, hateful to God, with all his passions rooted deep within us. If you wish to follow Me, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me,—He says to you (Mt 16:24). Cut off, then, root and all, your sins—weak faith and unbelief, pride, envy, fornication, and all the passions, all these hellish, wild, death-bearing growths, which, through your own negligence, the first apostate from God and adversary has planted and made to grow within you; and then sow your heart’s field with every seed of good—faith, humility, repentance, and every good work. Learn this lesson well, fulfill it—and you will inherit, with the repentant thief, the kingdom of heaven.