Seven Statements from the Cross • Week 4
Statement IV — Matthew 27:45-46 • Sunday Kickoff
This is the darkest sentence in the Bible. Three hours of unexplained darkness had fallen over the land, and then from the cross came a cry that shook the people standing nearest to it. Jesus, who had been in perfect communion with the Father since before creation, experienced something in that moment that no theology fully explains. The weight of every human sin. The silence of heaven. The feeling of total abandonment.
And he aimed it at God.
Not at the soldiers who nailed him there. Not at the religious leaders who arranged it. Not at the disciples who ran. He took the question that had no human answer and aimed it at the only address that actually holds the answer — even when that address seems to return nothing but silence.
What This Statement Costs Us
Most of us do not aim our hardest questions at God. We aim them at the people closest to us. The spouse who cannot fix what is breaking us. The parent whose choices started something they do not know how to finish. The sibling who is not doing their share. The child who is not becoming what we hoped. We pour our unanswerable grief into people who were never built to hold it, and the weight of that misdirected pain cracks the very relationships we need most to survive the season.
Proverbs 24:3 says that by wisdom a house is built and through understanding it is established. The houses that collapse under pressure are the ones built on the wrong foundation. When our pain has no godward address, we start laying it on people — and people are not load-bearing walls for that kind of weight. Only God is.
Where Love, Joy, and Peace Enter
Love is what keeps us from aiming our grief at the people we love most. Joy is the power to endure unanswered questions without being hollowed out by them, because Joy is not the absence of suffering — it is the confidence that God is present in it. And Peace, the kind that is whole and complete and lacking nothing, cannot come from another human being confirming our feelings. It comes from laying the question at the feet of the one who holds the answer and trusting that he has not looked away.
The Question for This Week
Where have we been sending the questions that only God can answer? And who has been absorbing the weight of something that was never theirs to carry?
stumbleup.me • #StumbleUp • #SevenStatements • #AimUpward
Leave a Reply