The Fourth Last Word

My God My God

As our Lord hangs on the tree he belts out in the language of his youth the 22nd Pslam. Our Lord only recites the opening verse of the Pslam but it would be similar to one saying the opening lines of the “Our Father.” We know how the rest of the prayer goes and so the rest of the psalm was also on Jesus’ mind.

In his greatest moment of suffering. He cries out Eli Eli, which means God, my God but which more specifically signifies strength and the Might of God. Later in the Pslam, it writes, “But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts. 10 I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother’s belly.” The God who planted him in his mother's womb and who took him out of that womb had always been his God. Not only was the Father his God, but he was the Father’s God, “The Lord said to my Lord sit at my footstool.” Eternally begotten in love he eternally returned that love freely from eternity to eternity. But when the eternally begotten one was temporally begotten in the Virgin’s womb he experienced his Father in a new way. Enwrapped in flesh, robed and intermingled with our human nature, he now too experienced his Father as his strength as “Eli Eli.” As one who like us was deeply dependent on the sustaining power of the Father by His Spirt. In his humility, his Father was his strength as he was to Israel and us.

In this time of need, he recites a Psalm that he had memorized. Following the example of his mother who as the Magnificat states “treasured all these things (referring to the scriptures) in his heart” from his youth. As the incarnate Son, our Lord communed with his Father in the temple and sought him out. Though he loved his earthly parents, his longing was always to be with his Father as he had been from eternity past. Throughout his ministry in all the business, he would depart just to be with his Father. At the cross, he cries out to the one he always sought to please and to be with, the psalm that he treasured in his heart. Not only that but with his dying breaths he exclaimed it with the tongue of his youth.

He speaks in his mother tongue, “Aramaic”, though he often ministered in Hebrew and most likely knew Greek, in this moment of extreme anguish we see in his humanity the deep bond that had always existed in the divinity. He seeks out the most intimate expression he can in desperation. For often in our greatest moments of anguish all pleasantries leave the door. It is vulnerable, it is not a courtly language, it is not a professional language, and proper grammar is not his concern. Rather the nakedness and vulnerability and shame that Adam felt creep upon after he ate from the fruit is beginning to loom over our blessed Lord. He is beginning to descend into the quicksand of our state of abandonment and sin plunging into death. The waters of our state of guilt and shame are rising slowly but surely and soon it will swallow him up in his dying breadth.

Now, we see the grace hidden in the expulsion of the Garden when Adam and Eve did not die immediately after eating the fruit. Not only did they not die immediately, but they were promised a seed and their offspring continued. The covenant of grace withheld the true death and abandonment that was deserved from the fall. That finality and extremity did not come. That is because there would be one who would truly die in the way that God’s people deserved. One who would experience the terror, the shame, and the abandonment with no mercy or promise.

As St. Gregory of Naziansus said reflecting on this text, “He made our thoughtlessness and waywardness his own.” Jesus experiences the fullest extent of abandonment and shame that we deserve to experience for Sin. That is abandonment unto death. He moves from abandonment to death of Psalm 22 into the dark valley of Hades in Psalm 23, so that he may be the first fruit of the gates of resurrection in Psalm 24. Therefore not only experiencing and making our sin his own but redeeming it. That is why the call to bear our cross and die to ourselves is not a tragedy but rather a redemptive call of victory.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen