“My god, my god why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far from my rescue? Don’t you hear me calling” (Psalm 22.1b).
They are, arguably, the most disturbing words in the Gospels. In agony, humiliation, and sorrow, Jesus cries out eli, eli lama sabachthani, in Aramaic the beginning words of Psalm 22: why have you abandoned me?
The words are disturbing because this is the Anointed One. This is God enfleshed: fully human, fully divine. This is what we believe about him, what we know to be, in ways we cannot fully understand, to be true. Yet, in this moment upon the cross beneath the midday sun, he cries out to God. He feels, in that moment, as if the Divine had abandoned him.
Theologians, over the centuries, have wrestled with this pronouncement. What does this mean in light of who Jesus is? In this hour of death, did the Divine part separate itself, leaving the figure on the cross as merely human? Was the weight of sin imposed so great as to smother his connection to eternity?
My own wrestling with these words leads me to disagree with the assessments above. Jesus’ human and divine natures were inseparable. He could no more exist as one nor the other any more than you or I can separate from the essence of ourselves. And while I believe that Jesus bore our sin—our desire to be like God, if Paul’s words are true, then nothing could cut Jesus’ connection to Divinity. No, I think it may be an honest emotion expressed for our benefit.
There is an overused phrase that an occurrence, good or bad, can be a “teachable moment.” Throughout his ministry, Jesus took advantage of these. When questions arose regarding what constituted a neighbor, he told of the most despicable of people—a Samaritan—acting in love and compassion. When the Disciples wondered how to feed a large, gathered crowd, he showed them.
And here, at the worst moment of his life, Jesus teaches us about the Psalms.
As a collection, the Psalms are a study in extremes. They run the gamut from ecstatic praise to absolute despair, from the beauty of trees clapping to the horror of people splashing in the blood of their enemies. Their words can give voice to our hearts one moment and shock us into silence the next.
Psalm twenty-two is a cry of anguish. They’re words for when everything has fallen apart, when hope feels not just distant but impossible. The suffering is not only external with the taunts and insults of all who pass by, but internal as well—a feeling like sickness that’s left the author with aching bones and a heart struggling to beat within their chest. These words, heard again and again since childhood, expressed exactly how Jesus felt in that moment.
But I think there may be something deeper happening here.
There are, of course, no guarantees nor promises that we will escape heart-breaking and soul-testing moments in this life. It is certain that all of us, at some point in our journey, will sit with the words of the twenty-second Psalm on our lips crying out with its author, with Jesus, and with so many others throughout history why, why have you abandoned me.
Yet in that declaration, Jesus from the Cross is reminding us that in these very real, very painful moments this Psalm is a beginning. The emotion driving those is real and present, without a doubt. And their words may echo throughout days, weeks, months of our lives. But they are a beginning.
As we encounter Jesus upon the Cross, we are present with it and within its darkness, but we are not only there. In that moment, we are also alive with the hope of what will come with the dawn on Sunday. We know, deep within our souls, that Jesus’ lament will be answered in the shaking of the earth and the movement of the stone.
So too are we called to do in those moments when hope seems gone, and God seems far away. Yes, we can and should express the anguish of those moments, to cry out to the Divine and wonder why our voice is not heard. But we do so with not only a promise but the example from Jesus’ life that no matter how dark, morning will come. And we can look and hope for light on the horizon.
Crucified One, in death you showed us not only your presence with us in the darkest moments of life but that our cries and feelings of abandonment are not the end. Through death you gave what may seem like an ending the breath of beginning, which will lead us to hope.