Originally given at a community Good Friday service in Kokomo, Indiana on April 10, 1998

As I thought about what I might say today about the end of Jesus' earthly ministry, I found myself thinking about how it began. And it occurred to me that there's a point of view that the Bible doesn't give us. We know how Earth saw Christ's birth; the Bible tells us how it looked to Mary and Joseph, to the shepherds, and to the wise men. But I want to try to imagine how it looked from heaven. In "A Psalm for Christmas Eve"*, Joseph Bayly writes in part

Tonight I will sing praise to the Father who stood on heaven's threshold and said farewell to His Son as He stepped across the stars to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. And I will sing praise to the infinite eternal Son who became most finite a Baby who would one day be executed for my crimes.

Imagine the sorrow of separation that night as Jesus left his heavenly realm to join us here on Earth, to become fully man as well as fully God. As Jesus grew older, the sense of isolation must have grown as well. After all, since before the beginning of time, God the Father and Jesus the Son had enjoyed an intimacy far beyond anything we as parents or children have ever experienced. It's true that Jesus spent countless hours with his Father in prayer and I'm sure these moments were a comfort and a blessing to the Son. But still the separation was real. There surely must have been times when Jesus longed for the day when he would return to his place beside his Father in Heaven. And yet, the cross stood between him and that day.

Luke tells us that in Gethsemane on the night before his death, Jesus cried out "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me". "And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground". He told his disciples "my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death". The prospect of the cross would fill anyone with terror, but I wonder if there wasn't more to it than that. I'm certain Jesus knew in excruciating detail what the next day would bring. The physical agony would be horrible, the despair of his mother and his followers would be terrible to see. But surely to the Son of Almighty God these would be just fleeting moments. He knew how the story would end.

I believe that he was looking past his physical and emotional torment to the dreadful spiritual cost of his ministry among us. Once again, let's try to imagine the heavenly perspective. The next day, through some mystical process that we can't understand, all of the sins of the world, yours and mine, would be heaped upon him. I believe he knew full well that this burden of sin would make him a loathsome and detestable thing in his own Father's sight. The world's dirt would so stain him that his Father, holy and pure, would have no choice but to turn away from His own Son's death. **

In the church, we talk of death as more than the body's dying; we also talk of death as separation from God. I believe that Jesus knew as he prayed in the garden that night that there would come a time when the separation that began that night in Bethlehem would be complete. And so it was. Hanging on the cross, Jesus the faithful, obedient, and wholly innocent Son was cut off from his Father. For the first and only time, he was utterly alone in the universe that he and his Father had made. And so he cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?".

Ironically, these words must have given a certain satisfaction to those who had taunted him and called out to him to save himself. They were words that you might expect from an ordinary man who was just now realizing that his extraordinary claims about himself were a delusion and that nothing would save him from death. And they must have been devastating to the few followers who heard them.

But in three days, his followers – and we – would learn the real truth of that lonely cry: That Jesus' dreadful, undeserved separation from his Father has given us the assurance that we need never be separated from Him. That the death Jesus suffered was suffered once and for all. That "neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God."

*Psalms of My Life by Joseph Bayly is available from Amazon

** Now, several years later, I have come to doubt doubt that this statement represents sound doctrine. After all, if I a sinner am indwelt by the Holy Spirit, then God lives with my sin every day of my earthly life. Still, Jesus' words lead me to believe that something terrible and heart-rending happened as God the Father, having always seen his Son in his naturally pure and sinless state, had now so see him as the one person guilty of all the world's sin.