Understanding the Cry of Dereliction

‘And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”’
(Mark 15:34).

What exactly was happening on the cross when Jesus spoke these words? Was the Trinity torn asunder in this moment, Father turning has face away from His Son (as one popular hymn suggests)? Or, was the cry one that could only truly be attributed to the humanity of Christ, not His divinity (as others might suggest)? These verses have been the cause for debate and question in the Christian world for a long time and questions that arise while reading Scripture are not always easy to find answers to,^[1] but one privilege of living two thousands years after the death of Christ is we have had many people work to expound upon Scripture before us who can help us think about this well. Here are some quotes from some figures in church history to help us think through the cry a little more deliberately:

The cry to God in truth is the voice of a body departing… he was forsaken because his humanity had to pass even through death.’ (Hilary of Poitiers)^[2]

As human he doubts. He experiences amazement. It is not his divinity that doubts, but his human soul. He had no difficulty being amazed because he had taken humanity fully to himself. In taking upon himself a human soul, he also took upon himself the affections of a soul. As God he was not distressed, but as a human he was capable of being distressed. It was not as God he died, but as man. It was in human voice that he cried: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” As human, therefore, he speaks on the cross, bearing with him our terrors. For amid dangers it is a very human response to think ourself abandoned. As human, therefore, he is distressed, weeps, and is crucified. (Ambrose of Milan)^[3]

In his most compassionate humanity and through his servant form we may now learn what is to be despised in this life and what is to be hoped for in eternity. In that very passion in which his proud enemies seemed most triumphant, he took on the speech of our infirmity, in which “our sinful nature was crucified with him” (Rom. 6:6) that the body of sin might be destroyed. (Augustine of Hippo)^[4]

[T]o his last breath he honors God as his Father and is no adversary of God. He spoke with the voice of Scripture, uttering a cry from the psalm. Thus even to his last hour he is found bearing witness to the sacred text.’ (Jerome)^[5]

Though the perception of the flesh would have led him to dread destruction, still in his heart faith remained firm, by which he beheld the presence of God, of whose absence he complains. We have explained elsewhere how the Divine nature gave way to the weakness of the flesh, so far as was necessary for our salvation, that Christ might accomplish all that was required of the Redeemer... In short, during this fearful torture his faith remained uninjured, so that, while he complained of being forsaken, he still relied on the aid of God as at hand. (John Calvin)^[6]

[W]e should not infer from this that God was ever hostile to or angry with his Christ, for how could the Father be angry with his beloved Son in whom, as he said, he was well pleased? Or how could Christ by his intervention have appeased the Father in respect of men, if he had made God angry with him? What we say is that he bore the burden of God’s vengeance, in that he was beaten and afflicted by God’s hand, and endured all the signs of wrath which God displays to sinners when he is angry with them and punishes them. So Hilary explains that by the death of Jesus Christ we have obtained this blessing: death is now abolished. (John Calvin)^[7]

[T]his desertion is not to be conceived as absolute, total and eternal (such as is felt only by demons and the reprobate), but temporal and relative; not in respect of the union of nature (for what the Son of God once assumed, he never parted with); or of the union of grace and holiness because he was always blameless (akokos) and pure (amiantos), endowed with untainted holiness; or of communion and protection because God was always at his right hand (Ps. 110:5), nor was he ever left alone (Jn. 16:32). But as to a participation of joy and felicity, God suspending for a little while the favourable presence of grace and the influx of consolation and happiness that he might be able to suffer all punishment due to us (as to withdrawal of vision, not as to a dissolution of union; as to the want of the sense of the divine love, intercepted by the sense of the divine wrath and vengeance resting upon him, not as to a real privation or extinction of it). And, as the Scholastics say, as to ‘the affection of advantage’ that he might be destitute of the ineffable consolation and joy which arises from a sense of God’s paternal love and the beatific vision of his countenance (Ps. 16); but not as to ‘the affection of righteousness’ because he felt nothing inordinate in himself which would tend to desperation, impatience or blasphemy against God. (Francis Turretin)^[8]

We have to say that suffering and death for him were a natural given of the human nature he assumed. (Herman Bavinck)^[9]

As a human being, he dreads death as death and prays that this cup may pass from him [in the garden of Gethsemane]… on the cross Jesus remained the beloved Son, the Son of the his Father’s good pleasure (Matt. 3:17; 17:5). (Herman Bavinck)^[10]

This brief survey of early church, reformation, post-reformation, and modern sources on this topic suggest a few things:

1. The suffering was a real, felt suffering which Christ experienced in his body and soul.
   Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, who died upon a the cross, was fully man. His human nature was constituted of the same parts that every other human is constituted of: a body and a soul. He was necessarily both body and soul because we needed salvation in both body and soul. As one early church figure says, ‘that which was not assumed was not healed.’^[11]
    
2. The suffering was one which was felt specifically according to the human nature.
   As Paul writes in Philippians 2:6–7, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.’ Jesus is both fully God and fully man united in the person of Jesus Christ (this is known as the hypostatic union). The two natures assume one person, but as the Definition of Chalcedon says,
   
   ‘This same one is perfect in deity, and the same one is perfect in humanity; the same one is true God and true man, comprising a rational soul and a body…He is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, and Only Begotten, who is made known in two natures united unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction between the natures is not at all destroyed because of the union, but rather the property of each nature is preserved and concurs together into one person and subsistence.’
   
   This definition was helpfully formulated in the fourth century to clearly articulate how the two natures (being those of divinity and humanity) can comprise one person. The distinction articulated here is based on the language of Philippians: the form of God and the form of a servant are united in the person of Jesus Christ, not to displace or remove the divinity but to display the humanity while veiling the divinity. Throughout the gospel accounts, there are moments which can be attributed to the person of Jesus while distinguishing which nature is in view (i.e. Luke 2:52, Matt. 26:39; Matt. 24:36 display the person of Jesus speaking through his human nature, to which one might add Matt. 27:46).
   
   How can we be sure that these verses are referring to the human nature specifically? In Luke 2, we are told that Jesus ‘grows in wisdom and stature with God.’ The divine nature of the Son of God can neither grow is wisdom (for He is wisdom) nor stature (He shares the same stature as the Father). Thus, one can deduce of necessity that the reference here is to the human nature of Jesus. Likewise when Jesus cries out for the cup to be taken from Him and the will of God to be accomplished, or that the Son does not know when the end of all things will come about, or when the Son cries out experiencing the forsakenness of God – these are experiences of the one man, Jesus, in His human nature. The divine nature shares the will and knowledge and plans of God; the human nature does not.
    
3. The cry of dereliction is an act of faith brought about by one who was in perfect union with the Father.
   Of significant note is that the cry is to ‘My God’! The God to whom the man Jesus Christ cries out in extortionate pain is His God. Even amidst the feeling of forsakenness, His faith is founded upon the surety that comes from an intimate knowledge of God the Father.

4. The suffering which Christ underwent upon the cross was done on behalf of those who believed upon Him for salvation.
   Jesus’s suffering was not meaningless but was part of God’s eternal plan, the covenant of redemption, for the salvation of His people – those whom He knew before the foundations of the earth and were chosen specifically by Him. Upon the cross, salvation from sin was accomplished and the wrath of God was poured out upon the man Jesus Christ. Under the punishment of God, He was stricken and condemned on our behalf. ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor 5:21).

Oh Christian, rest assured that today, Good Friday, is a glorious day: the wrath of God has been satiated through the blood of Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, poured out upon the cross. He cried out under the weight of forsakenness so that we might never need to feel such desperation and pain.

“God gave up his own Son as a ransom for us—the holy one for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, the righteous one for the unrighteous, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal. For what else could cover our sins except his righteousness?… O sweet exchange! O unfathomable work of God! The sinfulness of many is hidden in the Righteous One, while the righteousness of the One justifies the many that are sinners.”^[12]