'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani ?'

‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani ?’
‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27.46)

Tarjei Park


The scene could hardly have been more different from Calvary. It was a crystal clear autumn morning in New York City in the opening year of the twenty-first century. Millions of New Yorkers were beginning their working day. And something happened, something that was to horrify a nation. At 8.48 a.m. a Boeing 767 passenger airliner was flown into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Fifteen minutes later America and millions more people around the world watched live news footage on their television screens of a second 767 flying directly into the south tower, it was a moment simultaneously horrifying and unbelievable. As this second plane ploughed into the tower 10,000 gallons of fuel exploded in a fireball against and within the building. Thousands would die, and the images that were seen over the following hours will never be forgotten by this generation. By the end of the day Manhattan was covered in ash. We had entered the twenty-first century as witnesses to an American tragedy which shook that nation to its core. The personal tragedies of the mourning families were shared profoundly across the USA and the world. Millions watched the scenes as they were televised and re-televised with tears in their eyes. Even in the days following it was impossible for many to look at the newspaper photographs of bodies falling from the towers without wanting to weep.

The reactions to that morning were many and various. Making sense of it was not easy. Here was violence visited on a nation whose people generally thought of themselves as being a good and upright nation among the nations of the world, and whose very banknotes expressed their trust in God. More specifically, here was violence visited upon working Americans just starting their day; here was violence visited upon Americans who happened to be making a domestic flight that morning, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children. For the citizens of the USA, and, indeed, for many across the world, there was something which made this ‘act of war’ rather different from others. Again and again came a motif: these victims were innocent.

Now, of course, the victims of 11 September were no more innocent that those of Dresden or Hiroshima. Large-scale civilian slaughter was not new and had been practised by most of the powerful nations in the twentieth century. The morning of 11 September was an horrific wake-up call to the reality of how hated the USA was by people who felt that they had been on the receiving end of American violence for quite some time. Yet for the USA and their friends a profound grief was expressed over the ‘innocent’ victims of 11 September. And there was innocence there, heartbreakingly it was there; young children holding the hands of parents onboard the planes as they struck the towers. There was such great love too; in all the horror men and women phoning answer-phones at home to say one last time to their partners and children, ‘I love you.’

In the days that followed there were many gestures and acts of solidarity inside and outside the USA. Places of worship were filled to overflowing as mourners lamented and prayed to God. Overwhelmingly trust in God remained. By and large, fists were not shaken at God, but at the demonised organiser of the outrage.

But why not despair of God? Why not believe that God is somehow answerable? Why not cry out ‘Why?’ to God. Did Jesus not do this on the cross, and in so doing echo the self-same cry made by millions of others across the ages? ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

In the midst of life we are in horror. Yet in the western world it is often presumed that horror is an intrusive element into ordered community. When horrific and cruel things happen we ask why? This is particularly true when the seemingly innocent suffer or die. Grief-stricken we cry out, ‘Why?’

Jesus Christ’s cry of dereliction on the cross contains within it a painful paradox. For although it is formally a cry for explanation, it is also an affirmation of God and an anguished accusation. It is a recognition that God is still God, but also that God has forsaken the crier to a most sadistic execution. The horrifying reality is that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who has an everlasting covenant with his chosen, has abandoned a faithful son of that covenant to a degrading, violent death. Furthermore, we must be clear as to what the cry of dereliction is not. It is not a denial of the existence of God, nor is it in itself a rejection of God. It is an affirmation and an accusation in the form of a painful cry for explanation, ‘Why?’

The cry of dereliction is an engagement with a pre-existing cry, for it is, of course, the opening cry of the psalmist in Psalm 22. Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross has both the literal, immediate meaning in the suffering of Calvary, and a simultaneous meaning, which is the gesture to the narrative of the psalm. It thus is both particular and general – it connects with moments when human beings have cried the same cry both before, and since. Yet this connecting with the cries of others has sometimes been discouraged, as what happened to Christ on the cross was not ‘just’ suffering, Christ was bringing about the salvation of the world.

Clearly, what was happening on the cross to Jesus Christ has theological significance and ramifications beyond the moments of perceived abandonment which, however cruel and painful, happen every day to human beings. The christological narratives of atonement, redemption, and salvation by the cross do frame Christ’s agonies in such a way as to make them incomparable with the suffering of other innocents. It is not possible to equate everyday horror with what was happening on the cross. It is not theologically permissible. The suffering of Christ has salvific ramifications which other suffering does not, because Jesus on the cross was who he was. The suffering of Christ on the cross was ‘once, only once, and once for all.’ Yet the cry of dereliction from the cross, the cry for explanation from the cross, is a highly charged theological verse of scripture which has unsettled theologians over the centuries because it seems to question who Jesus was, and is. It seems to question the divine nature of Christ. If Christ is divine, how can divinity abandon him?

It is possible here, as a theological ‘shorthand’, to apply the christological hymn found in the second chapter of St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians:

‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death -
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.’ (Phil. 2.5-11)

Christ, although ‘in the form of God’, empties himself of divine power. The Greek word here, kenosis (emptying), has led theologians to talk of kenotic christology. That is, that those aspects that would have given Christ ‘equality with God’ are understood as having been emptied as Christ is ‘born in human likeness’. Thus the man hanging on the cross does not have some kind of divine potential waiting in reserve which he is deliberately not using. The man hanging on the cross is fully human, having emptied himself of the predicates of divinity, having at the heart of his identity an absence.

To the person suffering the cruel agonies that happen to human beings every day christological doctrine might have little relevance. Even to the person of faith the response might be, ‘Who cares about christology!? Why, God, have you let this happen? Why have you not stood by me?’ And this is ultimately what Jesus cries too from the cross, and by using the words of the psalmist, his personal cry has within it the cry as cried by others. ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

There is no emotionally satisfactory answer to these questions when they are asked by people in despair. Talk of non-intervention as being part of the gift of free will is of little consolation, and seems to go against a good many passages from scripture. There are times when the blunt cruelty of a situation is so overwhelming that our faith in the goodness of God is tested beyond any casual theological speculation. This is movingly conveyed in David Scott’s poem ‘Dean Tait’. Archibald Tait was Dean of Carlisle, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, and in the space of one month, March 1856, five of his daughters died in an epidemic of scarlet fever.

‘Quite put aside were any thoughts
of the state of the Cathedral roof
Instead, a quiet agony, waiting
for the stethoscope’s final figure of eight,
and the click of the doctor’s bag.
He never thought there could be this routine
to death: the prayer book, the size of his palm;
his wife, half in doubt because of the fever,
hiding the sick-room drawings away;
and at their prayers each day
in a borrowed house, they tested
the Bible texts against a silent nursery.’ [1]

Where is God in all this? What responsibility does God have for it? When appalling cruelty and evil occur these are not idle questions, they are natural questions made by the faithful. The answer to these questions is not necessarily a comfortable one. And conclusions that have been reached can challenge our whole view of who God is.

Elie Wiesel recalls a hauntingly painful event that he experienced as a teenager in Auschwitz. A teacher of Talmud who had befriended Wiesel in the Nazi death camp took him one night back to his own barracks where three rabbis, ‘all erudite and pious men’, masters of Talmud, Halakhah, and Jewish jurisprudence, decided to put God on trial. They decided in ‘a rabbinic court of law to indict the Almighty’ for ‘allowing His children to be massacred’. Over several nights evidence was presented and then a unanimous verdict was reached: ‘the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, was found guilty of crimes against creation and humankind.’ Wiesel writes, ‘I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried.’ Then, after an ‘infinity of silence’, one of them looked at the sky and said, ‘It’s time for evening prayers’, and they all recited Maariv, the evening service. [2]

There can be no obvious response to this trial and to the prayerful reaction of those involved. The ambiguity remains powerfully, the God they prayed to had been found guilty.

Even to the devoutly faithful it is natural to ask questions relating to God’s responsibility when appallingly evil events happen. It is sometimes just not acceptable to lay the blame for moral evil on other human beings. And why not blame the Creator for physical evil? If God is a faithful God, what does this mean when there seems little evidence of it? If God abandons the faithful to horrific evil, what kind of God is God? Does it indeed make God morally useless?

Again, it offers little consolation to those who suffer such evil, but the default answer to such a question typically relates to the fact that as humans we have free will. That is, if we are truly free, we must be free to live without the ‘interference’ of God. So God in principal ‘abandons’ us to make of our lives what we will. But perhaps this is just part of the picture. Perhaps, our primary focus should not be on our sense of the absence of God, but rather that some of us may have a rather questionable sense of the presence of God, or more specifically, the intervention of God.

Now clearly within classical theism on one level it makes little sense to speak about the absence and presence of God. God by definition is present everywhere. What we can talk about is the perceived absence and presence of God, how far God is perceived to be part of a situation or event. We might want to draw a line between a formal theological requirement to assert that God is everywhere present and can never be absent, and the human perception of God’s presence and absence, and intervention. Yet such a line has not been so clear in the Judeo-Christian scriptural tradition. In the great historical narratives of the Old Testament God is understood as intervening for Israel, classically in the events of the Passover and escape from Egypt, and God’s presence is seen as specifically localised out in the wilderness with Moses and the Israelites. God is also understood to ‘hide his face’, and this understanding of hester panim, of the hiddenness of the face, reflects the experience of God not being there for us, and we shall return to this experience shortly.

Scripturally too though there developed an understanding of the omnipresence of God, that God is always there, beautifully evoked in Psalm 139:

‘Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.’ (Ps. 139.7-10)

Many faithful people speak readily of the presence of God in their lives, they give testimony to times and places when God has been with them and helped them – has readily intervened. Yet if God is indeed sensed as present in this interventionist way, the sense of his absence at other times is therefore most certainly guaranteed. And when the sense of an interventionist God is further influenced by personal projections, the result can be a very unhelpful misunderstanding of God.

For example, one of the distinctive shifts of emphasis or trends across the Western religious world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been an increased interest in ‘spirituality’. In the Western world forms of practice which centred on experiential approaches to God or to things ‘spiritual’ have become very popular. Much of this has taken place outside traditional Church structures. Indeed, much of this interest is distinctly unstructured. ‘Spirituality’ is seen by many as an intensely individual aspect. It is, perhaps, an individualistic space in which personal identity is a defining factor. ‘Spirituality’ is about an individual’s experience of God or, very commonly, a spiritual realm, a realm that is often that individual’s ‘personal space’. The great danger in this understanding of spirituality is that the God who is perceived is done so from a self-interested perspective. The God perceived is often a God with all kinds of projected attributes that derive from a self-interested unrelated self. God is not the ‘hidden God’, but a God who is revealed to the individual. God is individually present, or perhaps, a very heavily projected God is present.

The ‘problem’ occurs when this sense of presence is not just presence but intervention. Claims of a sense of the presence of God can find expression in all kinds of attributes given to God, but claims of God intervening take us into further problematic areas both theologically and ethically, quite simply because God does not intervene in the way in which many people assume. We cannot say that a particular event was down to an individual act of intervention by God, as it would make God sadistically selective. Why is one child healed and not another – however faithful they, their family and friends? Why is the faithful airline pilot not given some intuition that tragedy will befall a particular flight? Yet the belief that God actively intervenes in events and lives persists. And this is where christology comes back - God’s intervention is not about halting or reversing consequences in life, but it is about presence without manipulation, it is about the absence of power. And this finds expression in Christ hanging on the cross. Divinity in humanity empty of manipulative power, but carrying the cruelty of the world.

The incarnate Son of God is in who he is the greatest example of divine intervention. The birth and human life of Jesus Christ are God intervening in human history. But the incarnation is about intervention and also self-gift. It is about being so fully present to humanity that divinity is emptied. Humanity is embraced, and transcendent powers are laid aside in a life of self-offering, self-offering which leads to the horror of the undeserved human violence of the cross.

Yet powerfully the crucifixion, and particularly the cry of abandonment, are among many things the exemplar for a mature ‘spirituality.’ Spirituality which finds expression in gushing affirmations of how God intervenes for a person every day in various events is often delusional and misguided, and can bring great bitterness and pain when at some cruel point God does not ‘intervene.’ The realisation that God is not going to live your life for you, so to speak, is not a loss of belief in God, but is the recognition of who God is and who we are. To live on earth is to live as people abandoned to our own brokenness, our own fallenness. We should not assume that order and civility should prevail, because chaotic cruelty and horror are as much the nature of reality as are occasions of goodness and love. When good and lovely things happen in life they are extras, gifts – glimpses into what we can achieve when we incarnate God’s will.

Emmanuel Lévinas writes the following:

‘What is the meaning of the suffering of innocents? Does it not prove a world without God, an earth on which man is the only measure of good and evil? The simplest and most common reaction would be to decide for atheism. This would also be the reasonable reaction of all those whose idea of God until that point was of some kindergarten deity who distributed prizes, applied penalties, or forgave faults and in His goodness treated men as eternal children. But I have to ask these people: With what kind of underendowed demon, what kind of magician did they people their heaven, if they now declare that this heaven is empty? And why are they still searching, under this empty heaven, for a world that is rational and good?’ [3]

Immature understandings of God which involve indulgent parental fantasies are not going to bring us closer to God but further away. Lévinas wrote the above upon reading what purported to be a text which had been found preserved in a bottle in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, concealed amongst charred stone and human bones. A man by the name of Yosl Rakover is one of the last survivors of the ghetto, but aware that he will soon be killed as artillery fire and shells are exploding and shattering the walls of the houses round about him. He has lost his wife and six children in the horrors of the ghetto, all in the most terrible cruelty – one daughter, Rachel, ten years old, is driven by starvation to escape at night out of the ghetto with a friend in order to search for bread in the city garbage cans. She is discovered by the Nazi sentries and their Polish helpers, who pursue her. She attempts to run, but her weakness causes her to collapse, and ‘the Nazis drove holes through her skull.’ In his letter Yosl Rakover decides to call God to account, Why has God abandoned his people to the evils of the Nazis, the violence, disease and starvation of the ghetto? And he ends his letter in the following way:

‘I have followed Him, even when he pushed me away. I have obeyed His commandments, even when He scourged me for it. I have loved Him, I have been in love with Him and remained so, even when He made me lower than the dust, tormented me to death, abandoned me to shame and mockery.
…Here, then, are my last words to You, my angry God: None of this will avail You in the least! You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to make me cease to believe in you. But I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You.
Praised be forever the God of the dead, the God of vengeance, of truth and judgement, who will soon unveil His face to the world again and shake its foundations with His mighty voice.
“Sh’ma Yisroel! Hear, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my soul.”’ [4]

This is the heart of the matter: to affirm God even when God’s hiddenness is at its most real. There is this in the now famous lines found inscribed on a cellar wall in Cologne where some Jews had hidden for the entire duration of the war:

‘I believe in the sun, even when it doesn’t shine.
I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.’

The concept of the hiddenness of God is not new; it is not some modern or post-modern response to problems with theism. It is a profoundly scriptural understanding of God; a God who sometimes ‘hides the face’, hester panim. Towards the end of the Book of Deuteronomy we read, ‘The Lord…spurned his sons and daughters. He said: I will hide my face from them’ (Deut. 32.19-20), and in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah we read, ‘Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.’ (Isa. 45.15).

These understandings of the hiddenness of God stem from the human experience of the absence of God. They stem from the human inability at times to experience the presence of God. In classical theism God cannot be absent, because God is omnipresent. Yet the localised sense of the presence and, importantly, the absence of God is scripturally attested. The question ‘Where is God in all this suffering?’ is rather a way of saying ‘I cannot sense that God is present when all this suffering happens.’

To perceive that God is ‘hidden’ in this sense is not necessarily indicative of spiritual short-sightedness, but is perhaps a mature recognition of what we can know and experience of God. The God who is easily experienced is perhaps not really there.

This is not to say that all experience of God is delusional, but that discernment of our experience and understanding of the presence of God is essential. Without discernment indulgent fantasies easily develop and further delusion is never far behind.

Much of this can relate to our experience of God outside any experience of suffering. In Christian theology the notion of the hidden God, Deus absconditus, has been an important premise that has had the very necessary function of making sure that God is not completely domesticated and personalised by human psychological needs. There is always that of God which transcends human understanding; that of God which is hidden. And there are times when God seems to be fully hidden, and is perceived to be ‘absent.’

So the perceived absence of God is as much an issue in good times as in bad. But it is perhaps when we are at cruel and painful emotional extremes, that the sense of God’s absence, of the lack of intervention, is most acutely experienced.

So where do we go from here? Where does Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross leave us? Or, rather, where does it take us? It takes us to a bleak place, a place of absence. It takes us to a place of cruel punishment. It takes us to a place where we have seemingly been abandoned by our closest human companions and by God. In Matthew’s Gospel ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ are the only words spoken by Christ from the cross; Christ’s summary vocalisation of his suffering is his sense that God has abandoned him.

This should lead us to acknowledge that such a sense of abandonment is not a dangerous or erroneous sense – Jesus had it. Jesus, emptied of the predicates of God, truly human, knows that sense of abandonment and cries out that very human cry. But the dereliction of the cross is not the end of the story.

Jesus Christ suffered as a human being, and that human experience is taken up into divinity. We should not see this as a theological problem over how limited human perception can supplement unlimited divine perception. But the Christian mystery is surely this: that crucified humanity is taken up into divinity.

There is no evil which can separate us from Jesus Christ. Christ in his humanity was one of us, and in his humanity he experienced the human suffering and the dereliction of the cross. He experienced the sense of cruel abandonment, of God ‘hiding his face’, as he died. But Jesus was not abandoned ultimately; and no, that dark and desolate Friday afternoon is not the end of the story because through Jesus Christ’s risen and ascended crucified brokenness God searches out the broken of this world with the hope of new life. We could perhaps say that God ‘intervenes’ through the broken and healed humanity of Christ. And we could perhaps go further here and say that God ‘intervenes’ through all human beings who incarnate the will of God.

We could say that on a clear September morning in New York City in 2001 the love and goodness of God permeated the hearts and minds of members of the New York City Fire Department. As some were running towards the entrance to the tower they had to avoid being struck down by falling bodies slamming into the plaza around them; they were running through a twenty-first century vision of hell. Hundreds of the Fire Department died in the tragedy. We could say that such deaths are a known risk in the work they do. But few observers could fail to be moved by the dedication of the Fire Department that morning to saving whoever they could in that hell. There was something of sacrifice about their deaths. And it is not an unjustified superimposition to see something of the divine will in their saving work on 11 September; a solidarity with humanity in hell.

'Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I met a young woman whose body was burning
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.' [5]

Hell on earth is a reality. There are occasions in life that are so crushingly evil. There are sights seen that just should not be seen. There are extremes of cruelty that are just not acceptable. There are times of such sadness that they break your heart. There are places we just should not have to be.

Is it all redeemable?

He ‘was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell.’

What was Jesus doing in hell? He was looking for his friend Judas Iscariot. Judas had done something so wrong he could not forgive himself, and feeling incapable of being forgiven, in bitter tears of regret, he hanged himself. Well, Jesus went looking for him, and in hell he found him. He walked over to him, kissed him, and took his hand.

Miracles occur in hell.

When we see images on the television or in magazines and books it is often evil visited on children that makes us cry: the girl on the pavement in the Warsaw ghetto holding her starved little sister, the Vietnamese girl burning with napalm running from her village, the terrified boy in Gaza tucked up against his father crying before he is shot. And these really are moments of hell on earth.

Loveliness happens too.

I remember seeing a brother and sister on the television news, he was about eight and she was about four, they had become separated from their family following the dreadful flooding in Mozambique in the spring of 2000; their family might not even be alive. They had managed to get a bag of maize meal from one of the relief camps, but they were not going to open it – it was to be a present for their parents when they found them. After talking to the news correspondent they ran off together to continue the search for their family. The boy was so caring of his sister. The love and responsibility of these two poor children was just heart-achingly beautiful.

Jésus le Christ, lumière intérieure,
ne laisse pas mes ténèbres me parler.
Jésus le Christ, lumière intérieure,
donne-moi d’accueillir ton amour.

Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us.
Let not my doubts nor my darkness speak to me.
Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us.
Let my heart always welcome your love. [6]


Notes

[1] David Scott, Selected Poems, Bloodaxe 1998, p. 47
[2] Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God, Schocken 1995, pp. vii, xxiii
[3] ‘Loving the Torah more than God,’ Yosl Rakover Talks to God, Jonathan Cape 1999, p. 81
[4] Ibid., p. 23-25
[5] Bob Dylan, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, CBS 1963.
[6] Ateliers et Presses de Taizé, F-71250 Taizé-Communauté.