In the Agora: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

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March 25, 2005

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

Note: I started writing this post on Wednesday and did not know that Josh was going to write something very similar. Either great minds think alike, or God works in mysterious ways.

One of the most dramatic moments during the suffering and death of Jesus Christ is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark:

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"-which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" --Matthew 27:46 (see also Mark 15:34)

Traditional Christian teaching holds that at this moment God the Father turned his back on God the Son (Christ). The sins of the world had been imputed to Jesus and instead of the intimate fellowship these two members of the trinity had shared from eternity past, the Father's wrath against sin fell upon Christ---the ultimate sin offering--and Jesus experienced stark alienation from the Father.

Likewise, most Christians experience what seems to be the absence of God at some point in their lives. It is the subject of the well-known poem "Footprints in the Sand," and was even written about poignantly by C.S. Lewis after his wife's death--in his journal later published as A Grief Observed:

When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.

But if we have experienced such loneliness, we have a Savior who knows what it is like because He has experienced it more deeply than we will ever have to. He is able to sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15) and will bring us through them successfully (Romans 8:37-39).

Posted by Eric Seymour at March 25, 2005 11:59 AM

Comments

Not all "traditional" Christian teaching holds that God the Father turned His back on Jesus. Another point of view is that, Jesus, living in His mortal shell, experienced doubt, and fear. The same doubt and fear any one of us would experience. Jesus, indeed, walked a mile in our shoes. Perhaps an omnicient, omnipotent being just doesn't have the ability to understand "what it's like" for us mortal humans - what it feels like to be separated from God, what it feels like to have these frail bodies, limited lifespans, pain, infirmity, weaknessess, hormones and glands. He didn't have that ability, until he became one of us, and lived among us, and had the ability to have doubts, and fears, to feel our pain.

It wasn't that God the Father turned his back. It was that God, as Jesus, gave up hope, lost faith, as all mortals do, in times of pain or fear. When God experienced this, as Jesus - THAT is why God forgave us. He then knew firsthand that ".. they know not what they do. . "

Posted by: Osama_Been_Forgotten at March 25, 2005 03:56 PM | permalink

Eric,

Great observation. And important. The love that compelled Christ to go to the cross, knowing that we who put him there had betrayed him and that his Father would have to look away during the height of his suffering is beyond comprehension.

His loneliness must have been as hard as his physical suffering. Surely he understands our feelings of abandonment.

Posted by: ajmac at March 25, 2005 05:28 PM | permalink

God neither turned His back on Jesus nor was Jesus overtaken with doubt and fear. Everyone focuses on the beginning of Psalm 22 and ignores the end. Jesus is pointing us to this Psalm so that we will see how it ends -- that God is victorious over all.

Posted by: wrf3 at March 25, 2005 06:43 PM | permalink

I don't think the fear and anxiety was purely subjective on Christ's part. I hold to the the traditional view that for a moment, God let Jesus wholly bear the sins of the world and for that moment there was real alienation. Not that God stopped loving his son, but that the alienation, though temporary, was real, not just perceived on Christ's part. Sin is alienation from God, not the perception of alienation. Unless Jesus merely perceived that he bore the sins of the world, then it seems that the alienation must have been objectively, not merely subjectively experienced when Jesus took on our sins.

Posted by: Joel Thomas at March 25, 2005 09:25 PM | permalink

Echoing wrf3:

This is just a brief snippet overheard of Jesus' recitation from the cross of the Psalmist's cries for the Lord's deliverance (Is it too much too assume that Jesus knew the whole Psalm by heart and was reciting it to himself during his hours of wrenching agony?.

It is easy to see in even a cursory reading of Psalm 22, the obvious allusions Christ would see to his agonizing ordeal in the first half of the Psalm(particularly vvs. 7-8 and 12-18).

However, the Psalm doesn't end in despair, but in a request for and receipt of divine deliverance for which God is eternally praised.

Rather than seeing Jesus' citation through Calvinistic-Father-turns-His-back-on-His-Son eyes, we would be wise to understand the context of the WHOLE psalm Jesus was reciting which exults in the deliverance which comes from a caring God who hears and responds to the cries of the afflicted, (see particularly vs. 24) "For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; HE HAS NOT HIDDEN HIS FACE FROM HIM BUT HAS LISTENED TO HIS CRY FOR HELP."

If at any time in human history, God was involving Himself in the "sin problem" of the world rather than "turning his back on sin", surely it was at this moment.

Posted by: RocketmanMQ1 at March 26, 2005 04:08 PM | permalink