The cry of dereliction We return to the synoptic account. It is now the ninth hour, the land is still in darkness, and Jesus has reached the lowest point in his humiliation and the most awful moment of his agony. The physical pain is no worse than before, perhaps less, but his soul is in torment: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27: 46; Mark 15: 34). The words are from Psalm 22, a reminder that what Jesus suffers was not without its parallels in the lives of prophets and patriarchs, or even in the lives of Christian believers. But the parallels do not make for identity. Jesus stands where no-one ever stood before or since, knowing himself the bearer of the sin of the world, destined to pay the price for its redemption (Mark 10: 45), and now drinking the bitterest dregs of the cup which had so discomposed him in Gethsemane. In its very nature, the spiritual content of this climax of his suffering is inaccessible to us. Even he himself had to appropriate the words of the psalmist, as if he could find no words of his own; and perhaps no human words could express what his ‘hell’ meant. The most striking thing is the form of address: ‘Eloi ’ (this is Mark’s Aramaic; Matthew gives the Hebrew ‘Eli’). This is the only occasion, even on the cross, when Jesus does not invoke God as ‘Father’. In Gethsemane, for all its anguish, he had held fast to this: ‘Abba, everything is possible for you’ (Mark 14: 36). Even in the moment of his immolation he retained this sense of his own divine sonship: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ (Luke 23: 34). And by the end, after the dereliction, he has recovered it: ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Luke 23: 46). Clearly, the forsakenness is only a moment in the long journey from the third to the ninth hour; for much of the time Jesus remained in communion with his Father. But now comes a moment of well-nigh unsustainable awfulness. Abba is out of reach, not listening. The intimacy is broken: an intimacy that had never been broken before. It was a breach for which nothing could have prepared Jesus. Like Abraham and Isaac going up to Mount Moriah (Gen. 22: 2), Father and Son had gone up to Calvary together, and throughout his life Jesus had been assured that he was not alone, but that the Father was with him. Even at the cross, his Father, like his mother, had been there. But now, at the ninth hour, Abba was not there, and Jesus can say only ‘Eloi!’ God is certainly there, but not as Abba. There is now no sense of his own divine sonship, no sense of God’s love and no sense of his Father’s approval. God is not hearing him. He cries, but there is no answer, and God even seems to mock his trust (Ps. 22: 8). Trouble is near, but there is no one to help (Ps. 22: 11). There are no comfortable scriptures to fill his mind, nor any assurance of ultimate victory, nor any vision of a redeemed multitude too great to count. At every other time of crisis, Abba had spoken great words of encouragement: ‘This is my son, whom I love’ (Mark 1: 11; 9: 7). How he needed these words now! But no such words came. He hears only the derision of the spectators, the curses of the soldiers and the whispers of the Prince of Darkness. He is on his own. But did the forsakenness involve more than loss and deprivation? It clearly did. In everything he saw around him, and everything he heard, there was the hand of God. It was the Father who was delivering him up (Rom. 8: 32) and everything spoke of his anger. That anger was no additional fact or circumstance. It was in the circumstances: in the pain, in the loneliness, in Satan’s whispers and in heaven’s deafness; and under that anger his identity contracted to the point where the whole truth about him was that he was the sin of the world. He was carrying it, heaven held him answerable for it, and he was it. It was here, all of it, in his body (1 Pet. 2: 24), being condemned in his flesh (Rom. 8: 3); because of it he was a doomed and ruined man, korban, devoted to destruction. God’s pure eyes could not look on him, nor heaven entertain his cry. ‘Christ cried, “Is there not a word, dear Father, not a look?” And He answers, “No, not a look for a world.” ’[ 40] Yet, somehow, there is no despair. Even at the lowest point, in the black hole of dereliction, faith and hope still breathe, as they must, for unbelief and despair are sin, and would have rendered his sacrifice void. Faith must walk where there is no light (Isa. 50: 10). Even when Jesus cannot say ‘Abba!’, he can say ‘Eloi’, my God: the God he loves and serves and still, somehow, trusts. Maybe this is what he dreaded as he trembled in Gethsemane, that his mind would break in an unbearable anxiety of separation, when he realized that Abba was out of sight and out of hearing. But in the end, though hope may not burn, it flickers, even in the darkness. Yet there is a ‘why?’. It is not the ‘why?’ of protest or self-pity, but the ‘why?’ of the Righteous One, conscious of personal innocence and knowing that not even Holiness itself can find a spot in him. But it is also the ‘why?’ of a unique sufferer who has momentarily lost sight of the great divine purpose which his suffering was progressing, and asking, like the great Afro-American spiritual, ‘Lord, how come me here?’ Let us remember that Jesus’ human mind was finite and that at any one moment he could be in possession of only some, not all, of the facts. Had the great mutual undertakings and promises of the covenant of redemption slipped out of his mind? Had he lost sight of what he had earlier known so clearly: that his life would be a ransom for many (Mark 10: 45)? Had he forgotten that he had a future as well as a present, a rising again as well as a dying? Almost certainly, for a moment. All he ‘knows’ is that he is a ‘worm and not a man’ (Ps. 22: 6); and his faith is a question, not an answer: 'why?' Donald Macleod (2014-05-19T05:00:00+00:00). Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement (Kindle Locations 784-829). Kindle Edition.
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