My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

At the ninth hour, Jesus cries with a loud voice: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which means: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Mark 15:34. These words have become an objection. If Christ is God, how can God forsake God? If he dies crying out his abandonment, what remains of his trust, and what is his divinity worth? Some read despair in it, others a rupture within the Trinity, others again a Father pouring out his anger on a victim. The answer lies in the very text Jesus utters, and in the scene where the evangelists placed it.

A word preserved by those who confess his divinity

Mark opens his Gospel with the confession the objection claims to ruin: "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" Mark 1:1. The same Mark records the cry, and records it in its original tongue: in Aramaic, "you have forsaken me" is šebaqtani (שבקתני), tracing the Hebrew of the psalm, ʿazabtani (עזבתני). Matthew keeps the form Eli, the Hebrew "my God", ʾĒlî (אלי), and notes the bystanders' confusion: "Some of those standing there, when they heard it, said: He is calling Elijah." Matthew 27:47. Eli sounds like the prophet's name, Eliyyahu (אליהו). Such a detail is not invented: it attests a cry truly uttered, heard, and misunderstood on the spot. The evangelists who proclaim the Son of God thus kept, in full and in its raw tongue, the very words the objection turns against them. They saw no contradiction in it: the whole scene they compose shows a fulfilment.

The first verse of a psalm

These words open Psalm 22. In Israel, to utter the first verse of a psalm is to summon the whole of it: tradition names the psalms by their opening lines, and whoever recites the opening takes up the entire prayer. The dying Jesus therefore prays the Scriptures, and he chooses the psalm of the persecuted just man, the very one the crucifixion fulfils before every eye. The mockers of the psalm say: "He trusted in the Lord: let him deliver him! let him rescue him, since he delights in him!" Psalm 22:8; on Calvary the chief priests take up the line: "He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he delights in him!" Matthew 27:43. The psalm says: "They have pierced my hands and my feet" Psalm 22:16, then: "They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots" Psalm 22:18; John quotes this verse at the very moment the soldiers carry it out to the letter John 19:24. To quote a psalm's opening is to quote the psalm; the whole scene enacts the psalm; the cry therefore points to a fulfilment under way. And this psalm ends in deliverance, praise, and the conversion of the nations. Whoever cries it claims its ending too.

No rupture in God

The Father and the Son are one God: "I and the Father are one" John 10:30. A rupture within that unity would mean two gods, or no God at all: the divine essence is one, and what is one is not divided against itself. The Son affirmed it while announcing this very hour: "Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me." John 16:32. Jesus thus commented in advance on the meaning of his Passion: the Father is with him at the very hour he seems alone. Likewise, the union of divinity and humanity in the person of the Son is indissoluble: God does not leave the man he has become. The form of the cry completes the answer: he who says "my God" twice holds God as his own and addresses him. Despair falls silent or blasphemes; prayer addresses. This cry is a prayer.

The exact meaning of the abandonment: delivered up

Paul names the abandonment: "He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" Romans 8:32. The Father abandons the Son in this: he delivers him to the Passion without withdrawing him from it; he lets the violence of men run its course, and the Son renounces the twelve legions of angels he could have asked for Matthew 26:53. The human soul of Christ then experiences, in its sensible part, the privation of all consolation: the very experience of man far from God, traversed without sin and without despair. Isaiah wrote it of the Servant: "The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all" Isaiah 53:6; Paul says it of Christ: "Him who knew no sin he made to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" 2 Corinthians 5:21, and again: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us" Galatians 3:13. To bear the sin of men is to bear its consequence, the estrangement from God, and to make it one's own without having sin. One reading turns Calvary into the outpouring of a hatred of the Father upon the Son. Scripture says the opposite: "The Father loves me because I lay down my life, that I may take it up again" John 10:17. And the offering rises to him as an accepted sacrifice: "Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and sacrifice to God, a fragrant aroma" Ephesians 5:2. Sin is borne, never approved; the victim is loved, never hated. The anger of God aims at sin, and it is love that destroys it by taking it on.

The answer is in the psalm

The psalm Jesus makes his own already contains the outcome: "He has not despised nor disdained the affliction of the afflicted; he has not hidden his face from him: when he cried to him, he heard." Psalm 22:24. The letter to the Hebrews applies this hearing to Christ: "He offered up, with a loud cry and with tears, prayers and supplications to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence" Hebrews 5:7. The hearing is the resurrection. The psalm then turns to praise: "I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you" Psalm 22:22, a verse the same letter places on the lips of the risen Christ Hebrews 2:12. Then the horizon opens to the nations: "All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before his face" Psalm 22:27; and Matthew shows its first fruits at the very instant of death: "The centurion and those keeping watch over Jesus with him said: Truly, this was the Son of God." Matthew 27:54. Luke records the last word: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" Luke 23:46, which is again a psalm Psalm 31:5. The two words come from the same soul, in the same hour: he who cried the abandonment breathes his last in confident surrender, and the second word gives the meaning of the first.

The objection quotes the first line of a prayer and keeps the abandonment; the psalm runs from the abandonment cried out to the answer sung. To read the verse where Jesus placed it, in its psalm, in its scene, among his last words, is to receive the contrary of what it is made to say: the trust of the Son at the lowest point of the Passion, the love of the Father who delivers up and who answers, and the salvation of the nations beginning at the foot of the cross. Whoever passes through the hour when God seems absent can make this prayer his own: to say "my God" in the night is already faith.