God Forsaken by God

Psalm 22:1 was on our Savior’s lips on the cross, and it is in that context a mystery: God forsaken by God! Christians have been trying to unravel this mystery for centuries, without reaching consensus. So Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “On Cowper’s Grave,” is only one of those efforts, but an intriguing one and quite in line with biblical theology. Her interpretation is that our Lord’s cry of dereliction on the cross was the ultimate and absolute cry of despair that had no echo in the universe so that no human being would ever have to make such a desperate cry again.

Deserted! God could separate from His

own essence rather;

And Adam’s sins have swept between

the righteous Son and Father;

Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry

His universe hath shaken—

It went up single, echoless, “My God, I

am forsaken!”

It went up from the Holy’s lips amid

His lost creation,

That, of the lost, no son should use

those words of desolation!

That earth’s worst phrensies, mar-

ring hope, should mar not hope’s

fruition,

And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see

His rapture in a vision.

Introduction by Hassell Bullock, Source Material from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Cowper’s Grave,” (London: John Murray, 1914), 143. “Cowper” is the hymn writer, William Cowper (1731-1800), who wrote such hymns as “God Moves in A Mysterious Way His Wonders to Perform” and “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”