...it is startling to hear God’s Son scream from the cross, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Being forsaken does not mean being ignored or overlooked. It means ... abandoned. Jesus did not just feel forsaken, he was forsaken. God truly turned His back away from His one and only Son and left him to die a horrible and cruel death.
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Secular people have a hard time believing that Jesus was truly divine, but conversely too many Christians have a hard time believing that God truly became a man. C.S. Lewis said, “The central miracle asserted by the early Christians is the incarnation.”
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Mary knew from the very beginning that this child, her son, would be unique. Son of God, Savior of sinners, and yet Jesus was still her little boy. We do not have much information about Jesus’ childhood, but Mary truly experienced being his mommy: all the diaper changes, the cuddles, the rocking to sleep and even all the knee scrapes that needed her kisses.
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Adding insult to injury, these guys were not placed there next to Jesus as mere witnesses or even out of convenience, but as symbols of disgrace. The soldiers used their presence to further increase Jesus’ own humiliation by sandwiching Him between the rejected and discarded of humanity. It is amazing how the prophecy of Isaiah comes to life, “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; ... and he was numbered with the transgressors”
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About 80 years before the crucifixion of Jesus, the famous Roman politician and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, said, “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to slay him almost an act of murder: to crucify him is – what? There is no word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.”
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