Note 159 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

As the address of Jesus to his mother and the favourite disciple is peculiar to the fourth gospel: so, on the other hand, the exclamation, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? ἠλὶ, ἠλὶ, λαμὰ σαβαχθανί; is only found in the two first gospels (Matt. v. 46; Mark v. 34). This exclamation, with the mental state from which it proceeded, like the agony in Gethsemane, constitutes in the opinion of the church a part of the vicarious suffering of Christ. As however in this instance also it was impossible to be blind to the difficulties of the supposition, that the mere corporeal suffering, united with the external depression of his cause, overwhelmed Jesus to such a degree that he felt himself forsaken by God, while there have been both before and after him persons who, under sufferings equally severe, have yet preserved composure and fortitude: the opinion of the church has here also, in addition to the natural corporeal and spiritual affliction, supposed as the true cause of that state of mind in Jesus, a withdrawal of God from his soul, a consciousness of the divine wrath, which it was decreed that he should bear in the stead of mankind, by whom it was deserved as a punishment.159 How, presupposing the dogma of the church concerning the person of Christ, a withdrawal of God from his soul is conceivable, it is the part of the defenders of this opinion themselves, to decide. Was it the human nature in him which felt so forsaken? Then would its unity with the divine have been interrupted, and thus the very basis of the personality of Christ, according to the above system, removed. Or the divine? In that case the second person in the Godhead would have been separated from the first. As little can it have been the God-man, consisting of both natures, that felt forsaken by God, since the very essence of this is the unity and inseparableness of the divine and the human. Thus urged by the self-contradiction of this supranaturalistic explanation, to fall back on the natural mode of accounting for the above exclamation by the sense of external suffering, and yet repelled from the idea that Jesus should have been so completely subdued by this, commentators have attempted to mollify the sense of the exclamation. It consists of the opening words of Ps. xxii., a passage which is classical for this last scene in the life of Jesus. Now this psalm begins with a complaining description of the deepest suffering, but in the course of its progress soars into joyful hope of deliverance; hence it has been supposed that the words which Jesus immediately utters do not give his entire experience, and that in thus reciting the first verse he at the same time quotes the whole psalm and especially its exulting close, just as if he meant to say: It is true that I, like the author of this psalm, appear now forsaken of God, but in me, as in him, the divine succour will only be so much the more glorified.160 But if Jesus uttered this exclamation with a view to the bystanders, and in order to assure them that his affliction would soon be merged in triumph, he would have chosen the means the least adapted to his purpose, if he had uttered precisely those words of the Psalm which express the deepest misery; and instead of the first verse he would rather have chosen one from the 10th to the 12th, or from the 20th to the end. If however in that exclamation he meant merely to give vent to his own feeling, he would not have chosen this verse if his actual experience in these moments had been, not what is there expressed, but what is described in the succeeding verses. Now if this experience was his own, and if, all supernatural grounds of explanation being dismissed, it proceeded from his external calamities; we must observe that one who, as the gospels narrate of Jesus, had long included suffering and death in his idea of the Messiah, and hence had regarded them as a part of the divine arrangements, could scarcely complain of them when they actually arrived as an abandonment by God; rather, on the above supposition, we should be led to think that Jesus had found himself deceived in the expectations which he had previously cherished, and thus believed himself forsaken by God in the prosecution of his plan.161 But we could only resort to such conjectures if the above exclamation of Jesus were shown to have an historical foundation. In this respect the silence of Luke and John would not, it is true, be so serious a difficulty in our eyes, that we should take refuge in explanations like the following: John suppressed the exclamation, lest it should serve to countenance the Gnostic opinion, by admitting the inference that the Æon which was insusceptible of suffering, departed from Jesus in that moment.162 But the relation of the words of Jesus to the 22nd Psalm does certainly render this particular suspicious. If the Messiah was once conceived of as suffering, and if that psalm was used as a sort of programme of his suffering—for which it was by no means necessary as an inducement that Jesus should have really quoted one of its verses on the cross:—the opening words of the psalm which are expressive of the deepest suffering must appear singularly adapted to be put into the mouth of the crucified Messiah. In this case the derisive speech163 of the bystanders, he calleth for Elias, etc., can have had no other origin than this—that the wish for a variety of taunts to complete this scene after the model of the psalm, was met by the similarity of sound between the ἠλὶ in the exclamation lent to Jesus, and the name of Elias which was associated with the Messiah.