The Most Disturbing Words that Jesus Ever Spoke (Part 10)

On the night of his arrest, Jesus sat down at table with his little community of twelve disciples to eat the Passover meal. “Loving his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end,” St. John’s Gospel tells us. When the time came for the blessing over the bread and the wine, he gave them new words for this ancient Jewish ritual: Take, eat; this is my body, this cup the new covenant promise in my blood which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of me (MT 26:26-28; Lk 22:19-20). By “remembrance” here Jesus did not just mean “in order not to forget me” or “in order to keep a formal memorial of my death.” The word “remembrance” here in Greek is anamnesis, which to Greek-speaking Jews meant “to re-present” in the sense of “to make present again a sacred time or event” such as the first Passover — that is, in a mysterious way to break down the barriers of time so that the worshipper can participate in the saving acts of God of the past.

The disciples, however, must have been completely confused. How could God’s Kingdom come to earth by the broken body and shed blood of their Master? And why would anyone want to celebrate an anamnesis — a new form of Passover meal — continually to make present such a horrible event! It did not make any sense.

That night, while Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane in anxiety and sorrow, the Temple guards came to arrest him, and his disciples fled in terror and confusion. Following a mock trial before the Jewish authorities, he spent part of the night in prison. The next morning, after a brief hearing before the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, he was turned over to the executioners who flogged him, beat him, and spat in his face. They put a crown of thorns on his head, and ridiculed him: “Hail, King of the Jews!” Then the Roman soldiers brought him outside the city gates to the hill of Calvary, and nailed him to a cross of wood by his hands and feet. Yet with his body torn and bleeding, Jesus never ceased to love those who murdered him, saying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).

Almost all of his friends and disciples had abandoned him, but with his body in torment, he was then subjected to an even worse fate. As the death agony swept over him, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34). And moments later, entrusting his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father, he breathed his last (LK 23:46).

This brings us face to face with what are surely the most disturbing words that Jesus ever spoke. On the Cross, the Son of God actually asked why his heavenly Father had abandoned him at the very time He most needed to feel his Father's comfort and strength. This is an experience that many Christians can relate to. It often happens that in moments of crisis, in times of extreme personal and emotional suffering that is precisely when our loving God seems farthest away — when we most need to feel him near! It can come as a terrible shock to the sincere and faithful soul when he/she first goes through such an experience of seeming divine abandonment. Thus, the first thing to note about Jesus Christ's own cry of abandonment on the Cross is that he evidently loved us so much he was even willing to go through that terrible experience of spiritual desolation with us.

Now, we need to be clear that Jesus was not actually in despair on the Cross (which would have been a sin). His words about being "forsaken" actually are a direct quote from the first line of Psalm 22. It was common practice in ancient Israel to quote the first line of a psalm in order to refer to the entire text, and despite the words of desolation at the start, this psalm ends on a note of trust in God and the triumph of his saving will. Hence, it is probably wise to interpret the words "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" (Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34) in conjunction with words Jesus spoke soon after that: "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit" (Lk 23:46). In other words, at that moment on the Cross, Jesus may have been expressing, simultaneously, both the feeling of sheer physical, emotional, and spiritual misery in the midst of all of his afflictions, and yet, at the same time an underlying, almost blind surrender to divine providence. It is as if Jesus was saying: "My God, I feel as if you are infinitely far away from me, that I am cut off from you by the most terrible guilt and burden of sin, that I am worthless and accursed, and that you have abandoned me and rejected me in my misery and affliction when I most needed you; still, you are my God — though your will is now utterly dark and impenetrable to me.”

The Navarre Bible Commentary on St. Mark’s Gospel puts it this way:

One of the most painful situations a person can experience is to feel alone in the midst of misunderstanding and persecution on all sides, to feel completely insecure and afraid. God permits these tests to happen so that, experiencing our smallness and our world-weariness, we place all our trust in Him who draws good from evil for those who love Him (cf. Rom 8:28).

Part of the Gospel message in our Lord's cry of abandonment on the Cross is that he does not ask us to walk through any depth of suffering and affliction that he has not walked through and shared himself: even the temporary, spiritually excruciating experience of feeling abandoned by God. A powerful expression of this truth is found in the writings of a Protestant author from the 20th century, Borden P. Bowne:

I know something of the arguments whereby we seek to keep our faith in the divine goodness in the presence of the world's pain and sorrow and the manifold sinister aspects of existence. I do not disparage them; upon occasion I use them; but I always feel that at best they are only palliatives and leave the great depths of the problem untouched. There is only one argument that touches the bottom, and that is Paul's question: "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, will He not freely give us all things?" We look on the woes of the world. We hear the whole of creation, to use Paul's language, groaning and laboring in pain. We see a few good men vainly striving to help the world into life and light; and in our sense of the awful magnitude of the problem and of our inability to do much, we cry out: "Where is God? How can He bear this? Why doesn't He do something?" And there is but one answer that satisfies: and that is the Incarnation and the Cross. God could not bear it. He has done something. He has done the utmost compatible with moral wisdom. He has entered into the fellowship of our suffering and misery and at infinite cost has taken the world upon His Heart that He might raise it to Himself. (Studies in Christianity, p. 99)

Down through the centuries, theologians have tried to peer even more deeply into the mystery of Christ's cry of anguish on the Cross, and although their speculations do not amount to defined doctrines of the Church, they are sometimes well worth pondering.

For example, some theologians have pointed out that the very next line of Psalm 22, the one after the first verse that Jesus quotes on the Cross, in the Latin translation says "far from my salvation are the words of my sins." Thus, according to the Haydock's Catholic Commentary, "The [early church] Fathers answer that He spoke these words [from Psalm 22] in the person of sinners, for whose sake He suffered" (p. 134).

Even if the Latin Vulgate version of Psalm 22:2 is inaccurate, the point may still hold. Since Jesus was "substituting" Himself for us on the Cross (Catechism of the Catholic Church, entry 615), offering the perfect sacrifice on behalf of sinners to make up for our sins (Is 53:6; 2 Cor 5:21; Gal 3:13), then he not only had to die a physical death on the Cross for our redemption, he also had to experience spiritual death for us — that is, the ultimate state of alienation from God due to sin — if he was truly to bear on his Heart the penalty that sinners deserve.

This does not mean the Father actually abandoned Him on the Cross, of course, for that would be a metaphysical impossibility. The Father cannot actually separate himself from His Son, because the Blessed Trinity cannot be divided up into separable parts. Rather, some theologians speculate that in his human soul the Son on the Cross simply lost the Beatific Vision of his Father for a time; others say that the Son simply did not permit the comfort of that vision to sustain him on the Cross. In any case, it must have been possible for the divine Son incarnate to "taste" the terrible penalty of eternal loss in some way, and thereby bear that penalty away for all who turn to him in repentance and faith.

There are mysteries here too deep for us to fathom. Perhaps Pope St. John Paul II said it best in one of His poems:

But the depths of His words no one knows

No one knows how far

The farthest reason goes

How limitless His suffering was —

Solitude on the tree of the Cross.

Next Time: The Question of Easter Morning, the Answer of Easter Day

Robert Stackpole, STD
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