Pain upon pain, grace upon grace.

(A personal reflection on the Fourth Word of Jesus from the Cross, guided by a meditative reading of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen's Life of Christ throughout the season of Lent.)

“And about three o’clock
Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 

‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ which means,
‘My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?’” 

(Matthew 27:46)

Imagine, for a brief moment, someone you hold dear to your heart, a person you trust with your very life suddenly abandon you – your parent, your sibling, your best friend, your loved one, your child. In your time of great agony, in your darkest hour, just when you needed them the most… alas, they are nowhere to be found. They left you high and dry, without any apologies or explanations. A ton of different emotions begin to well up: loneliness, helplessness, disappointment, disgust, rage, all while still bearing the pain that prompted you to seek relief in the first place. These remain bottled up inside of you, and you find yourself deprived of any opportunity to unburden yourself because no one is around. In the end, all you’ve got and all you have left is you. That is what it means to be forsaken – pain upon pain.

Could God do such a thing to His only begotten Son, as He hung bleeding and nearly lifeless upon the Cross? Would He act the same toward us, when we ascend our own Calvary in life? Does God ever forsake His children? 

There were times in the past when I thought He actually did. I had prayed to Our Lord unceasingly, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and asking Him for help or for certain favors to be granted. I was assured by Jesus’ promise: “Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.” But every so often, He refused. I knew I was doing my best to hold up my end of the deal; after all, didn’t St. Augustine also say, “Pray as if everything depended on God, work as if everything depended on you”? Still, my pleas fell on deaf ears and I was deeply hurt. It was worse than being deserted by peers, ignored by friends or even neglected by my own father. The absence of God causes much suffering to a man’s soul.

My faith was tested when, one early morning in June last year, we received the news we had waited two long decades for: our family’s petition to immigrate to the U.S. was finally being processed, and we would be leaving very soon. As intriguing a prospect as this was, in my heart of hearts I could never bring myself to embrace a future outside the Philippines because I knew no other life or home than the one I had there. I was happy, perhaps the happiest I’ve been in my young twenty-six years of existence, and everything felt right – a steady job, a fulfilling parish and ministry life, many wonderful friends and a caring family, all of which I attribute to no less than Divine Providence and Mercy. But one by one, like overdue books borrowed from a library, everything was slowly being “recalled” as we prepared to embark on this new journey in a foreign land.

I didn’t know what to make of the whole ordeal. I wasn’t excited, but I wasn’t depressed either. Still in denial over the news and without thinking straight, I carelessly lashed out at my mother the very next day and attempted to bargain with her that maybe I could stay behind then follow them at a later time, or maybe not. But I never felt angry or frustrated; I snapped, and it just sort of happened. For months, I kept a straight face and didn’t breathe a word to others. I wasn’t going to allow myself to be distracted when there was still plenty to take care of – transitioning my roles and projects in the office and in the parish, preparing for the diocesan World Youth Day celebration, planning our vicariate’s Vocation Day, and many others. The only time it ever really sunk in was during the final week before our departure, when we started saying our goodbyes to close friends and colleagues, and even then it was difficult to wear my emotions. I just simply didn’t know what, or how, to feel.

In my numbed state of mind, a single thought lingered: God allowed this to happen. I looked back on all the unanswered prayers in the past, how it hurt to realize you were deemed unworthy to receive such favors and how it mustered every ounce of humility to accept Our Lord’s decision, only to be weighed down all the more by the drastic turn of events that got piled on top of these. What was there to say, except why? Why must this happen, Lord? Why now? And what are you looking to accomplish? 

The one person that put things in perspective was our spiritual adviser in the Youth Ministry. It was difficult to break the news to him; he and I were already planning various activities in the coming months to foster the faith of the young in our parish community, and to suddenly bail out on him like this was understandably disappointing. But he took it rather well, which was a relief, and he reminded me of something important that got lost in all the mess – something I failed to see from the very beginning. All it took for me to finally grasp what was happening were three simple words: “It’s His plan.” 

And that’s when everything made sense.

Does God ever forsake His children? In order to understand the cry of anguish from Our Lord, we have to remember what exactly took place atop Calvary. In his renowned book Life of Christ, Venerable Fulton J. Sheen put it ever succinctly: “Every other person who ever came into this world came in it to live. He came into it to die.” This was the sole purpose of Jesus’ coming. The whole of mankind, fallen from grace by the sin of Adam, needed to be redeemed with a sacrificial offering, for “the wages of sin is death”. No purer or worthier victim was there than the Lamb of God, foretold by prophets and visionaries of old, Whom the Father would send “when the fullness of time had come” to dwell among men as Emmanuel and redeem them as Messiah at the cost of His own life – a life He would lay down freely in His Death, then take up again in His Resurrection.

On the Cross, Jesus took upon Himself the sins of man from all of time. Not just those from before His coming or during His day, but from all of time – even from centuries and millennia later, including the present age and beyond. Bishop Sheen wrote further, “The sacrifice of Christ was universal in three ways: time, place and power. As regards to time, its efficacy was not limited to one generation or dispensation.” He willingly took our place, submitting to the Divine Plan as He pledged at the Garden the night before: “Not my will but yours be done.” He would endure the humiliation and punishment we rightly deserved in order to reconcile the world to the Father by His holy and perfect Sacrifice. Our pain would thus become His pain; our sorrows, His sorrow. And just as man in the depths of his depravity soon discovers there is nowhere left to go once he hits rock bottom, Jesus would make our lonely and desperate cries for help His own.

But His words ring oddly familiar. Those very words begin the twenty-second Psalm (twenty-first in the Latin Vulgate), which in its entirety foreshadowed His Passion in gruesome detail. It is somehow fitting that Jesus would recite this verse; He did mention once before, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” And indeed, the imagery depicted and the sentiments expressed by the psalmist David could not have been any truer-to-life than in His current predicament. However, if we were to take the text as a whole, we will find that Psalm 22 does not end as somber as it started:

“‘You who fear the LORD, give praise! 

All descendants of Jacob, give honor; 

show reverence, all descendants of Israel! 

For he has not spurned or disdained 

the misery of this poor wretch, 

did not turn away from me, 

but heard me when I cried out.’ […] 

The generation to come will be told of the Lord, 

that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn 

the deliverance you have brought.” 

(Psalm 22:23-25, 32)

The centurions standing nearby who heard Jesus misunderstood what He was saying; they thought He was looking to be relieved from His suffering by Elijah, of all people! But perhaps Our Lord merely wanted those with discerning ears to recall this Psalm and remember how it ends not in defeat but in jubilation. In a sense, He is reassuring us that although things appear bleak at the moment, they will not stay that way for long. Even if the dark clouds of Good Friday are looming, the glorious light of Easter Sunday is just around the bend. 

Yes, for now, it would seem that the Father had distanced Himself from this tragedy. But in truth, He does hear the cries of His own Son – or rather, the cries of a fallen humanity given voice by His own Son – and soon enough He will respond, in a manner that will draw out praises from men’s lips. In Jesus’ particular case, the Father’s answer was the deliverance of all mankind from the clutches of sin, a victory so awesome that it literally shook the earth to its core and provoked a profession of belief from spectators and skeptics:

“And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. 

The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, 

and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. […]

 The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesus 

feared greatly when they saw the earthquake and all that was happening, 

and they said, ‘Truly, this was the Son of God!’”

(Matthew 27:51-52, 54)

It was as true on the first Good Friday as it is today: God will never forsake us. We may not know where this life on earth will take us, and the road that lies ahead may not be as easy. There may be moments when we are led to think that no one – not even God – is there for us. But from the Cross, Jesus reminds us that we do not suffer in vain. God always listens. All that is required is to place our trust in Him and persevere to the bitter end. We need not worry; His Divine Plan for our lives will soon unfold. And just as the Cross of Christ was transformed from an instrument of death to a means of salvation, so too will He change our “mourning into dancing,” and refresh our weary souls with an outpouring of “grace upon grace.”