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 in life when words fail us—when the groans of our spirit feel too heavy for language, and heaven itself seems to go quiet. For trauma survivors, these silences are not theoretical. They are real, embodied, haunting. In pastoral care, I’ve sat with those who asked through clenched teeth and tear-soaked prayers: Where was God? Why didn’t God stop this? Why did I feel so alone?
Those questions are not answered with quick theological quips. And in fact, when we turn to Scripture, we find they are not always answered at all. In Mark 15, Jesus Christ—God incarnate—cries out from the cross in words borrowed from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v. 34). And there is no voice from heaven. No divine response. No rescue.
This blog post explores that moment of divine silence—not as absence, but as an act of radical solidarity. Drawing from trauma theology, biblical scholarship, and the work of Jürgen Moltmann, we will reflect on how God’s silence in Mark 15 is not the end of faith, but the place where it deepens.
Exegesis: Psalm 22 and the Cry of Dereliction
Jesus’s cry in Mark 15:34 is not spontaneous. It is scriptural. He prays the opening line of Psalm 22, a lament that begins in anguish and ends in trust. But in Mark, we never get the second half of the psalm. The narrative freezes with Jesus’s lament—and he soon dies.
Scholars like Vincent Pizzuto argue that this unresolved moment is key to Mark’s Gospel. “Mark does not rush to resolve the horror of the crucifixion with a resurrection appearance,” Pizzuto notes, “but holds us in the discomfort of dereliction”. The silence that follows Jesus’s cry is not accidental—it is theologically deliberate.
Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, writing in the Women’s Bible Commentary, emphasizes that Mark’s passion narrative is designed to be heard as trauma. “Mark’s Gospel ends with fear, trembling, and silence,” she writes, “inviting the audience into the unresolved disorientation of death”.
Jesus does not simply quote Scripture; he inhabits it. His body becomes the site where ancient lament meets divine suffering. And in doing so, he makes space for all who have prayed with weeping, “Why?”
Theological Reflection: God in the Silence
Theologian Jürgen Moltmann famously argues in The Crucified God that we cannot understand God apart from this moment of abandonment. “God does not become God by exaltation but by humiliation,” he writes. “The Christ event on the cross is not a divine performance but the self-emptying of God into suffering” .
In this view, God is not absent in the silence—but profoundly present in it. Moltmann’s theology of the cross affirms that when Jesus experiences divine abandonment, God the Father is not watching from a distance. God is in the abandonment. The Trinity is ruptured, not destroyed. The cross becomes the point at which God experiences godforsakenness for our sake.
This has deep resonance with trauma theology. As Joseph McDonald notes in his Oxford Bibliographies article, trauma disrupts “basic expectations of safety and agency.” It leaves survivors with a shattered sense of time, identity, and presence . Mark 15 honors that reality. It doesn’t rush to heal. It stays with the wound.
Application: What This Means for Survivors and the Church
If we take Jesus’s cry seriously—not as a performance, but as the honest anguish of the Son of God—then we must also make space for lament in our churches and in our theology.
This has implications for how we preach, how we counsel, and how we minister. Silence in the face of trauma is not always a lack of faith—it can be an act of faith. To say “I feel abandoned” is not blasphemy. It is Christ-like.
For those walking through grief, depression, abuse, or betrayal, this passage offers a lifeline. You are not alone in your disorientation. God has entered it. The God who does not speak still stays.
This also reshapes our image of strength. In a culture obsessed with victory and triumphalism, the crucified Christ invites us into a theology of presence—not power. We do not need to fix people’s pain with doctrinal platitudes. We can simply stay. And staying, as Jesus shows us, is sacred.
Conclusion: The Silent God Who Suffers With Us
Mark’s Gospel refuses to tidy up the cross. And perhaps that’s the gospel we need. A God who answers every question with immediate clarity may be comforting—but such a god is not the one we meet at Calvary.
The God we meet in Mark 15 is silent. But not still. Present. But not fixing. This is the God who cries out with us, who dies with us, who holds vigil in the night.
The silence of God is not the absence of love. It is its most vulnerable form.
Further Reading & Works Cited (Chicago Style)
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (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.
