From noon until three there is darkness over all the land (verse 45). Amos had spoken of a day when God would make the sun go down at noon (Amos 8:9). Then Jesus cries out the opening line of Psalm 22, in Aramaic, and Matthew translates it. The mockers had already been quoting that psalm without knowing it (Matthew 27:35, 39, 43). Now the sufferer himself speaks its opening words, and there is no reason to soften what they say. The Son who had never known distance from his Father bears, in full, what sin deserves.
Psalm 22 begins in abandonment and ends in vindication, with the afflicted delivered and praise rising among generations not yet born (Psalm 22:22-31). Jesus quotes the beginning in the middle of the darkness, and anyone who knew the psalm by heart would hear its ending waiting on the other side.
Some bystanders think he is calling Elijah. One runs and fills a sponge with sour wine, and the others say 49"Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him." Even at the end they are watching for a rescue of the wrong kind.
Then Jesus 50"cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit." The verb is yielded, and it matches what he said earlier about laying down his life of his own accord (John 10:18). Even at the last moment, dying is something Jesus does.
Then everything around him opens. 51"the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." The curtain screened the place of God's presence, which the high priest entered once a year (Leviticus 16). Torn from top to bottom, it points to God as the one who tore it. The barrier between sinners and the presence of God ends at the moment of the death that makes entry possible, a way opened through the curtain, which is his flesh (Hebrews 10:19-20). The earth shakes, rocks split, and tombs are opened. Matthew notes that the saints raised from them go into the holy city after his resurrection (verses 52-53). Death's grip is loosening at the moment death seems to have won.
A Roman centurion, keeping watch over Jesus with his men, sees the earthquake and everything else, and he says 54"Truly this was the Son of God!" The title the leaders threw at Jesus in mockery (verses 40, 43) is now spoken in earnest by a Gentile soldier with no stake in getting the theology right. Matthew also notes that many women who had followed Jesus from Galilee were watching from a distance (verses 55-56), and he names them. They were ministering to him (verse 55), and they stay when the men who promised to die with him have gone.
Anyone who cries out to God in anguish today can trust that the sentence does not end in abandonment, because Jesus finished that sentence for us on this hill. He was forsaken so that forsakenness would never be the last word for anyone who belongs to him.
Prayer
Father, thank you that Christ bore the full weight of separation from you so that we would never have to. When darkness closes in and your presence feels distant, remind us that the curtain has been torn and the way to you stands open. Thank you for the centurion's confession, spoken by an outsider and echoed by us: truly, Jesus is your Son. In his name, amen.