www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Scripture and Patristic Writings Psalm 22 and Jesus' words "My God, My God..."

I was reading through Psalm 22 this morning. It seems clear to me that when the evangelists have Jesus cry, "My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me..." that they are indicating that Jesus is really praying this Psalm. The cry is perhaps not a cry that Jesus has been abandoned, or separated from the Father. Indeed, how would it be possible that the Word made Flesh should feel abandonment by God if He always remains one in essence with the Father? Could the "Jesus feeling abandoned by the Father" them have some Nestorian connotations?

If you look at Psalm 22, the author remains fully confident that God will deliver him. Also, it is clearly a messianic Psalm, which is why the evangelists have Jesus say it in the Gospel. Finally, it is a prophecy that a new nation (the Church) will arise out of this saving event (the cross). So, when Jesus is saying "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me..." is he really uttering a cry of despair? (Isn't despair a sin?), or is He not uttering the Messianic Psalm 22 in the presence of those surrounding the cross in order to explain to them the meaning of his death. I wonder if the whole "abandonment of the Son" theme is really more a reflection of modern theological interests? What do the church fathers say? How do they treat this passage?

Here is the text of the Psalm:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

2O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

3But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

4Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

5They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

6But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

7All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head saying,

8He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.

9But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother�s breasts.

10I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother�s belly.

11Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.

12Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.

13They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.

14I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

15My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

16For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.

17I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.

18They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

19But be not thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste thee to help me.

20Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.

21Save me from the lion�s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.

22I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.

23Ye that fear the Lord, praise him; all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him; and fear him, all ye the seed of Israel.

24For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.

25My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation: I will pay my vows before them that fear him.

26The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the Lord that seek him: your heart shall live for ever.

27All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.

28For the kingdom is the Lord�S: and he is the governor among the nations.

29All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him: and none can keep alive his own soul.

30A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.

31They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.

Joe:

Remember that Jesus is fully God and fully man. As man He could feel the type of abandonment that is the burden of sin: that God is an eternal distance from one who dies in sin. Since Jesus took on Himself the entire burden of all the sin ever committed, He could thus experience the awful nature of the separation from God that is sin: acronym for "separation is normal." While being one in essence with the Father always, He still could experience all that the sinner eternally condemned could experience because He also was able to experience fully as a man. Otherwise, we'd have one of those ancient heresies that held that Jesus was God in the flesh but that the flesh was of such little consequence thaat He really didn't feel the weight of sin or really die in the flesh. It's a very balanced understanding of just Who Jesus is and the extension of that understanding then allows us to understand the simultaneous experiences that Jesus could have by being both God and Man.


Is it really despair? Or is it part of the fear of death that every person who ever lived has felt? Simply, perhaps, a call into the darkness of abandonment He felt. Compare to the threads about Mother Teresa's experiences. She does not despair; just feels a profound sense of abandonment that does not seem to respond to the comforts of having other people around or having the promises of the Faith repeated by others. Remember that Jesus lived that perfect communion with the Father that we will have in eternity all of His earthly life and it was removed at that moment on the Cross. He, perhaps, more than anyone else fully felt the awful weight of sin and its consequences. Perhaps, too, that is why it is said that over the Gate of Hell is written "abandon hope all who enter here."

In Christ,

BOB

Bob,

Thank you for your insightful comments. But, is it true that Jesus felt the full burden of sin? Is that what St. Paul means when he says that Christ "became sin for us?" I've always wondered about that passage. Certainly, Jesus didn't take on sin in any ontological sense. So, what would it mean for him to feel the burden of sin when he didn't have any sin? Also, I'm curious as to the exegesis of the fathers. If my church fathers volumes weren't packed away at my mother's house, I'd try to look this up.

Joe

Joe:

From what I've been taught, for Jesus to fully pay the debt of sin by His Glorious Passion and Precious Death, he had to absorb--if you will--all the ugliness, the stain, the pain, the separation, the abandonment, the full weight of all the sin ever committed. He absorbed, as a Divine Sponge, all that we would have had to pay for the sin we all have committed at one time or another. Sin puts us at an eternal distance from God, even the small ones. God in His infinite holiness cannot be near to or stand sin. It is antithetical to Who He is. So Jesus "became sin for us" in that He became what we had been until He came to save us and re-establish the right relationship with God broken by our first parents--whether one believes as St. Augustine that we have all been stained by it and need it removed or whether we believe that we have the inherited consequences in that we are prone to fall. Jesus absorbed all that ugliness and abolished it by His Death so that we would not have to die eternally without the possibility of attaining the Kingdom the Father wants us to have. We still must repent and try to conform ourselves to Him but the eternal consequences can be abolished in and through the Church He gave the power to apply what He did to those who live subsequent to His time on this earth.

Jesus had no sin--of His own--but He took on ours. Something like a parent who cosigns a mortgage for his child and the child doesn't pay; Dad ends us paying. Since we could never pay the debt of sin, Jesus did it for us. If by "ontological" you mean that Jesus had it of Himself, I would have to agree. But He took ours into Himself and into His own soul.

It must have been torture worse than the scourging, the beating, the crown of thorns, the carrying of the Cross, the nails, the suffocating death to take on something that HE had no direct experience of and that was so opposed to Who He was and how He had lived as a man--in perfect communion with the Father and the Divine Will all His days. That should provide us with some idea of the terrible weight of what sin is really all about and that we just cannot seem to understand the full weight, the full ugliness, the full consequences of. So we just go merrily along with but a dim glimpse of what sin is and how important penance and metanoia are. So when people think they're "going through the motions" of confession just think about what they are not seeing or understanding.

In Christ,

BOB

Bob, that is what I was taught as a Baptist and I understand that this is the standard western view of Christ's passion. But, I thought that this was not the view of the Eastern fathers. St. Gregory Nazianzus explicitly rejects this view.

From his orations

XXII.46544654 Ib. xxiv. 12. Now we are to examine another fact and dogma, neglected by most people, but in my judgment well worth enquiring into. To Whom was that Blood offered that was shed for us, and why was It shed? I mean the precious and famous Blood of our God and High priest and Sacrifice. We were detained in bondage by the Evil One, sold under sin, and receiving pleasure in exchange for wickedness. Now, since a ransom belongs only to him who holds in bondage, I ask to whom was this offered, and for what cause? If to the Evil One, fie upon the outrage! If the robber receives ransom, not only from God, but a ransom which consists of God Himself, and has such an illustrious payment for his tyranny, a payment for whose sake it would have been right for him to have left us alone altogether. But if to the Father, I ask first, how? For it was not by Him that we were being oppressed; and next, On what principle did the Blood of His Only begotten Son delight the Father, Who would not receive even Isaac, when he was being offered by his Father, but changed the sacrifice, putting a ram in the place of the human victim?46554655 Gen. xxii. 11, &c. Is it not evident that the Father accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him; but on account of the Incarnation, and because Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God,46564656 that He might deliver us Himself, and overcome the tyrant, and draw us to Himself by the mediation of His Son, Who also arranged this to the honour of the Father, Whom it is manifest that He obeys in all things? So much we have said of Christ; the greater part of what we might say shall be reverenced with silence. But that brazen serpent46574657 Num. xxi. 9. was hung up as a remedy for the biting serpents, not as a type of Him that suffered for us, but as a contrast; and it saved those that looked upon it, not because they believed it to live, but because it was killed, and killed with it the powers that were subject to it, being destroyed as it deserved. And what is the fitting epitaph for it from us? �O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?�46584658 Hos. xiii. 14 and 1 Cor. xv. 55. Thou art overthrown by the Cross; thou art slain by Him who is the Giver of life; thou art without breath, dead, without motion, even though thou keepest the form of a serpent lifted up on high on a pole.

Joe:

It seems to me that we are approaching this great mystery from two different angles, both of which are complimentary and true. I don't see St. Gregory's approach as being "against" but rather as a different approach to the same total mystery: the interaction of God with His creation and with us. That we are imperfectly made and that we have an attraction for the things that are eternal is part of our "hard wiring." That we could not approach God by ourselves is also evident. That before Christ we had a great lack in the reason for our lives and for answers to all the great questions is also evident. We still struggle with all of them--who am I?, why am I herre? why is there injustice?, why do good people die young?, why are some poor and others have far more than they can use?, etc.

Both the Eastern and Western approaches are still the struggles of men to fully understand Jesus Christ and the Mystery of God entering His creation to find His own and prepare them for Himself. The Holy Spirit is still leading us all into the fullness of Truth and we will not ever achieve it here--not now or in some subsequent generation.

As for the analogy to Isaac, I don't understand St. Gregory. I understood that incident as a test of Abraham's commitment, something God did not intend to allow to be fulfilled. But we are called to worship and worship involves sacrifice. What more perfect sacrifice was there to be had to take away the sins fo the world? St. Paul's epistles that mention the High Priest entering the sanctuary year after year with the blood that cannot take away sin and his contrast to the one perfect High Priest Who entered the eternal sanctuary to take away sin once and for all seem to point to the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

Remember that we don't take one Father and make him the end of the discussion and the struggle to make sense out of Christ, His Mission, His Death, His resurrection, and His Second Coming. The Eastern approach is to take the whole of the Fathers together and try to understand that from many differing orations the Holy Spirit is speaking, even when some seem to contradict each other.

As I read the translation, it seems to be poorly put in the English language and that may be part of what seems to be in opposition to the more Western approach I've outlined. In places it seems really obscure and may need clarification as to what St. Gregory was aiming at inhis discourse.

In Christ,

BOB

In Christ,

BOB

Joe:

Had a further thought on the way home from work. Is it not the Eastern approach to go to the liturgical texts--the source of standard theology--and then read the Fathers IN LIGHT OF those texts.

I understand that sin makes sacrifice necessary--in any religion--to the deity that is offended. That's why the Jewish people sacrificed animals, grain, etc.

Christ became the perfect sacrifice to make up for us the debt we owed the Father for separating ourselves from Him. In another vein, Christ through His Death bridged the gap between the Father and the human race that we could never bridge by our own efforts because we are all broken. It took a man without sin to be the High Priest to bridge the gap.

Again, you're right that we are approaching this great Mystery from a Western perspective. And that perspective is tied up with the language through which we view--as by a prism--the world in which we live. Greek, I'm told, has nuances that Latin does not. Latin is a legalistic language and it narrows concepts. That's why Scripture and liturgical texts transfer poorly from Greek to Latin--kind of like putting a straight jacket on someone.

It might be that we come to an understanding in between the two possibilities St. Gregory posits. God has our relationship restored through the Incarnation and life of Jesus. The "sold under sin" to the Enemy may simply be that when God withdrew because of sin the Enemy moved into the vacuum, enslaving as he came. With the Death of Christ and His Resurrection, the vacuum was no longer there and the Enemy was ejected from his hold on us. God the Father drew near as the sin of the world was taken away and reclaimed His own.

In Christ,

BOB

I'm not sure to what extent I agree with you, but I do think that your reflections here are exemplary of good theological thinking and I am edified. I'll have more to say later I think, but I want to think awhile and take care of some real world chores. God bless.

Joe

Joe:

Have to agree with you--time away to think and to pray. You have also edified me and challenged me to think further.

Your brother,

BOB