In Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, Jesus cries out upon the cross,“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
What are we to make of it?
The answer will differ, I think, for those who are sceptics; for those who revere Christ as a great human teacher; and for those to whom he was God incarnate. I shall try to deal with each viewpoint.
When I was a teenager, and enthusiastic about the history of the Royal Navy, I read as many Hornblower books as I could get hold of. In one of them, while Britain is at war with Spain
Politics intervenes. Peace is declared. The rebel ally becomes the new enemy. Hornblower attacks his ship, defeats him, and hands him over to the Spaniards.
At the end of the episode, Hornblower visits the Spanish ship on which the rebel leader, chained by the neck like a dog, is denied water. He consoles himself by saying that, in his divinity, he does not need it. But not before Hornblower - humane Enlightenment sceptic who dislikes priests and religious mumbo jumbo – has seen the flash of sanity in his eyes that shows an individual painfully aware of his own delusions: and desperately thirsty.
To the sceptic, the story of Christ may well be analogous. For Christ, as depicted in the Gospels, makes many hidden and overt claims to divinity. He forgives sins, which only God can do. He relates the Scriptures to himself, says anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, claims to have existed before Abraham, weeps that the people of Jerusalem ignored the prophets he sent them, calls himself son of the vineyard owner and the cryptic ‘son of man’ from Daniel etc.
But then a moment of sanity intervenes. On the cross, Christ is invited by those mocking him to come down, and he knows that he cannot. His cry of agony is his realisation of his own mere humanity. He has deluded both himself and – what is perhaps worse – those disciples who have given up their livelihoods for his sake. The one who claimed to be the source of living water has been reduced to saying, “I thirst.”
Any sceptic who has been a conscientious reader of the Gospels - for, of course, one needs to know what it is that one is rejecting – will be aware that “Eli etc” are not Christ’s final words. Thus Luke 23: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” But that is easily enough explained. In the delirium of pain caused by crucifixion, Christ reverts to his delusion: after that one brief moment of lucidity.
Those who wish to preserve Christ simply as a human teacher will be unhappy about ascribing him insanity. They must, therefore, get rid of his divinity; just as the nineteenth-century rationalists, such as Renan or Strauss, sought to salvage something of him by getting rid of everything that smacked of miracle.
Where Christ appears to have claimed to be God, the answer is simple: he didn’t really say it. It would be much easier if all the assertions of divinity were confined to one gospel; but, unfortunately, they are peppered across them all. That, perhaps, is why proponents of this sort of view do not always agree with each other as to what is an authentic saying, and what is not. The following satirical extract - S. Petrie “Q Is Only What You Make It” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959) - about the hypothetical source ‘Q’ illustrates the sort of thing I mean:
Q is a gospel; Q is not a gospel. Q includes the crucifixion story; it
does not include the crucifixion story. Q consists wholly of sayings
and there is no narrative; it includes some narrative. All of Q is
preserved in Matthew and Luke; not all of it is preserved; it is better
preserved in Luke. Matthew’s order is the correct order; Luke’s
order is the correct order; neither is the correct order.
And so on. What tends to remain as bedrock is the Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan. Christ’s ‘resurrection’ means that he is still alive in our memories as an example to be followed.
On such a view, it would have been much better if Christ had been killed in a traffic accident or died in his sleep: for the cross is both an irrelevance and an embarrassment.
Crucifixion was serious stuff: for serious criminals, or for those constituting a threat to the security of the state. No one would have incurred it simply for telling us to love each other. That’s the sort of platitude you can applaud in the abstract, and then ignore: before getting down to the real-life grittiness of trashing your neighbour.
So when Christ tells those who wish to follow him that they, too, must take up their cross – assuming he said it – does it mean that his followers, too, will cry out at being forsaken: assuming that Christ actually did?
That cry can lead us to respond in two ways. One: to keep our mouths shut so that we don’t end up in that sort of situation. Two: to speak out, but knowing that when we pay the price for doing so we shall be without a friend: human, or divine.
Claiming to be God, but being misguided; or not claiming to be God, but being misquoted. And then there is another possibility: that Christ did claim to be God because it was true.
On such a view, it is no surprise to find Christ unusually knowledgeable about the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. As a child, he amazes the teachers in the Temple
In John’s Gospel, we are told that that the soldiers divided Christ’s clothes into four piles. But because the cloak was without a seam – in itself extraordinarily suggestive – they cast lots to decide who should have it. Small wonder, then, that one who knew Scripture the way that Christ did should have quoted Psalm 22:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?...
My mouth is dry as a potsherd,
And my tongue sticks to my jaw…
A band of ruffians rings me round,
And they have hacked my hands and feet…
They share out my garments among them
And cast lots for my clothes…
That, I believe, is one explanation; but I think there is another that goes much deeper. The infant Jesus is given the sombre gift of myrrh: associated – although not exclusively – with embalming a corpse. This child – although a survivor of Herod’s assassination attempt - has come into the world to die. That, in a sense, is true of all of us; but when Christ baffles the disciples by saying the Son of Man must suffer and die he means that by his actions and words he will determine the time and nature of his own death: at the Passover, as the sacrificial lamb.
What I mean, of course, is traditional Christianity’s doctrine of the Atonement: that Christ took the sins of the human race upon himself. And insofar as sin constitutes estrangement, that must have been part of Christ’s ordeal: the moment, as G K Chesterton puts it, when God became an atheist.
The one who had lived his human life in perfect communion with the Father experienced what it was like to be without him: and hence the resultant cry of agony.
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