When God Is Silent: Rethinking Divine Presence in Mark 15
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
—Mark 15:34 (NRSV)
Introduction: The Silence That Stays With Us
There are moments when words fail us. Grief can become so heavy that language itself feels too thin. Prayer can begin to feel like speaking into a room where no one answers. For people who have endured trauma, abuse, abandonment, or devastating loss, the silence of God is not an abstract theological problem. It is something carried in the body. It can settle into memory, worship, relationships, and the way a person learns to imagine God.
In pastoral ministry, I have sat with people who asked questions that deserve more than quick answers. Where was God when this happened? Why did God not stop it? Why did I feel so alone? Those questions should not be hurried past. They should not be covered over with religious language simply because the church is uncomfortable with unresolved pain. If Christian theology cannot make room for those questions, then it has not yet learned to stand honestly at the foot of the cross.
Mark 15 gives us one of the most haunting moments in the New Testament. Jesus, crucified by Rome and mocked by those around him, cries out in the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Then, in Mark’s telling, there is no voice from heaven. No rescue arrives. No explanation interrupts the scene. Jesus cries out, and the silence remains.
This post reflects on that silence, not as evidence that God has abandoned the suffering, but as a difficult and holy witness to the depth of God’s solidarity with them. Mark does not rush us away from Jesus’ anguish. The Gospel asks us to remain there long enough to see what kind of God is revealed in the crucified Christ.
Psalm 22 and the Cry of Dereliction
Jesus’ cry from the cross is not merely a spontaneous expression of pain, though it is certainly that. It is also a prayer drawn from Israel’s language of lament. By taking the opening line of Psalm 22 onto his lips, Jesus enters a scriptural world where anguish, abandonment, bodily suffering, public humiliation, and trust are held together before God.
Psalm 22 begins with the terrible honesty of forsakenness. The speaker feels abandoned by God, surrounded by enemies, physically undone, and publicly shamed. Yet the psalm does not end where it begins. It eventually moves toward praise and testimony. That movement matters, but Mark does not narrate the whole movement. Mark gives us the cry. He allows the words of abandonment to hang in the air. Jesus cries out, receives sour wine, gives a loud cry, and dies.
That restraint is part of Mark’s theological power. Mark’s passion narrative does not soften the crucifixion into serene religious symbolism. It presents the cross as public torture, imperial execution, religious mockery, and spiritual desolation. The disciples have fled. The authorities ridicule. The passersby misunderstand. Even Jesus’ prayer is misheard, as some bystanders think he is calling Elijah. The scene is thick with abandonment and misrecognition.
Mark’s use of Psalm 22 deepens that scene rather than resolving it. The passion narrative echoes the psalm through the dividing of garments, the shaking of heads, the mockery of Jesus’ trust in God, and finally the cry of dereliction itself. In other words, Jesus’ cry is not isolated from the rest of the crucifixion scene. It gathers the whole scene into the language of lament.
To read Mark 15 well, then, we have to resist the temptation to explain the cry too quickly. Christian interpreters sometimes rush to say, “Jesus was quoting a psalm that ends in praise.” That is true, but it can become a way of refusing the force of the lament. Jesus is not using Scripture to bypass suffering. He is praying Scripture from inside suffering. He inhabits the psalm bodily. His crucified body becomes the place where ancient lament and divine suffering meet.
This matters because lament is not the opposite of faith. Lament is one of faith’s most honest forms. When Jesus cries out to God from the cross, he does not model passive acceptance of violence. He does not spiritualize abandonment. He names it. In doing so, he gives the church permission to tell the truth before God.
The Silence of Heaven
The silence that follows Jesus’ cry is one of the most difficult features of Mark’s passion narrative. Earlier in the Gospel, heavenly voices have spoken at crucial moments. At Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven declares him beloved. At the transfiguration, a voice tells the disciples to listen to him. But at the cross, when Jesus cries out in agony, heaven does not speak.
That silence can feel unbearable. It also exposes shallow theology. Much Christian speech about suffering assumes that God’spresence must be obvious, comforting, or immediately redemptive. Mark 15 offers no such simplification. The presence of God is not given as emotional reassurance. It is revealed in the crucified one himself.
This is where Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of the cross remains so important. In The Crucified God, Moltmann argues that Christian theology must begin not with an abstract, untouched deity, but with the God revealed in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The cross is not a contradiction of divine identity. It is the place where God’s identity is disclosed as self-giving love. God is not distant from the suffering of Jesus. God is revealed precisely in the Son who suffers abandonment.
This claim must be handled carefully. It does not mean that suffering itself is good. It does not mean that God wills trauma, abuse, violence, or death in order to accomplish some hidden purpose. That kind of theology has harmed too many people. The cross should never be used to sanctify suffering imposed by others. Rather, the cross reveals that God is not protected from the suffering of the world. In Jesus, God enters the place of abandonment and refuses to leave the suffering alone.
Peter Stevenson makes this point well in his reading of Mark 15:25–39. The cross does not allow us to escape the pain and brutality of Jesus’ death, but neither does it leave us with brutality alone. The cross becomes the place where the truth of God is revealed in what looks, to human eyes, like weakness, disgrace, and defeat. Mark’s Gospel does not ask us to look away from the crucified Christ in order to find God somewhere else. It asks us to look at him and learn that God’s presence may be most deeply revealed where we least expect it.
Trauma, Lament, and the Refusal to Rush
A trauma-informed reading of Mark 15 helps us notice what the text does not resolve. Trauma often disrupts a person’s sense of time, agency, safety, memory, and trust. It can make the world feel unreliable and make God feel absent. In biblical studies, trauma theory does not replace historical, literary, or theological interpretation. It functions as a lens that helps readers attend to wounded texts, shattered communities, and the lingering effects of violence.
That kind of lens matters for Mark 15 because the passage itself refuses to move quickly from wound to repair. Mark does not give us an immediate resurrection appearance after the crucifixion. He does not let the reader escape too soon into triumph. Even the ending of Mark’s Gospel, with women fleeing the tomb in terror and silence, resists a tidy resolution. The Gospel tells the truth through fear, rupture, and unfinished witness.
This refusal to rush is pastorally significant. Theological language that moves too quickly toward meaning can deepen harm. It can imply that faithful people should already be healed, already grateful, already able to interpret their suffering as part of a divine plan. Mark does something different. Mark allows the wound to remain visible. He gives us Jesus’ cry before he gives us the Easter proclamation.
Shelly Rambo’s work on trauma and resurrection helps name why this matters. Christian hope is often presented as though resurrection simply erases wounds, but trauma teaches us that survival is more complicated than reversal. The risen Christ is not disconnected from the crucified Jesus. Christian hope does not require pretending that the wound never happened. It insists that God’s life can be present even where suffering has left a mark.
Jesus’ cry does not explain suffering. It dignifies the one who suffers. It tells us that the feeling of abandonment is not foreign to the life of God in Christ. The one Christians confess as Lord has prayed from the underside of pain.
What Mark Teaches the Church About Lament
f Jesus’ cry is part of the Gospel, then lament must be part of the church’s life. This has consequences for preaching, worship, pastoral care, and discipleship.
First, the church must stop treating lament as spiritual failure. People who say, “I feel abandoned by God,” are not necessarily rejecting faith. They may be praying in the language of Jesus. They may be standing closer to the cross than those who offer easy answers. The church should be careful before correcting the prayers of the wounded.
Second, Christian worship needs room for unresolved grief. Many congregations know how to celebrate victory, but fewer know how to remain present to pain that has not yet healed. Yet Scripture gives us psalms of lament, prophetic cries for justice, the grief of Job, the tears of Jeremiah, the agony of Gethsemane, and the cry of Jesus from the cross. If our worship cannot hold sorrow, it cannot hold the full witness of Scripture.
Third, pastoral care must resist the urge to explain too much. When people are suffering, theological precision matters, but presence often matters first. The friends of Job were at their best before they began to speak. Likewise, the church’s calling is not always to resolve the silence, but to remain faithfully within it. To sit beside the grieving. To believe survivors. To make space for anger. To refuse platitudes. To trust that God is not absent simply because God is not easily felt.
Finally, Mark 15 calls the church to rethink power. The crucified Christ does not reveal a God who dominates suffering from above. He reveals a God who enters suffering from below. This challenges every version of Christianity that confuses divine power with control, coercion, triumph, or invulnerability. God’s power is not less real because it is revealed in the crucified Christ. It is revealed as love willing to be present where love is most costly.
For Those Who Feel Forsaken
For those who are grieving, depressed, traumatized, betrayed, or spiritually exhausted, Mark 15 does not offer a simple answer. It offers something deeper than an answer. It offers the presence of Christ in the place where answers fail.
If you have ever prayed and heard nothing, Jesus has been there. If you have ever wondered whether God had turned away, Jesus has prayed those words. If you have ever felt that your pain made you less faithful, less whole, or less welcome in the church, the crucified Christ tells another story.
Your lament is not too much for God. Your silence is not too much for God. Your inability to make meaning quickly is not too much for God.
The cross does not tell us that everything happens for a reason. It tells us that God has entered the place where reason collapses. It tells us that no suffering person is beneath divine notice. It tells us that the Holy One is found not only in triumph, but also in the cry, the wound, the unanswered prayer, and the long night.
Mark’s Gospel refuses to tidy up the cross. Perhaps that is part of its mercy. It does not give us a polished theology of pain. It gives us Jesus, crying out with the words of the forsaken.
Conclusion: The God Who Stays
The silence of God in Mark 15 is not comfortable. It should not be made comfortable. The cross is not a decorative symbol of religious inspiration. It is the place where human violence, spiritual abandonment, political power, and divine love meet.
And yet, at the center of that horror, Christians confess that God is present.
Not present as the one who explains suffering from a distance. Not present as the one who demands that the wounded call their wounds good. Not present as the one who rushes grief toward resolution before it has been heard.
God is present in the crucified Christ.
The God we meet in Mark 15 is silent, but not absent. Hidden, but not indifferent. Wounded, but not defeated. This is the God who enters the cry of abandonment and makes even that cry part of the language of salvation.
The silence of God is not the absence of love. At the cross, it becomes the place where love stays.
Bibliography & Further Reading
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015).
Vincent Pizzuto, “The Shadow of the Cross: Lamentation in the New Testament,” The Bible Today 59, no. 2 (2021): 93–98.
Joseph McDonald, “Hermeneutics of Trauma and the Bible,” Oxford Bibliographies (2022), https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com.
Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, “Gospel of Mark,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, 3rd ed., eds. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 478–481.
Jennifer Baldwin, Trauma-sensitive Theology: Thinking Theologically in the Era of Trauma
Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining
