Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?

My church, Our Saviour's Lutheran in Arlington Heights, has been doing a seven-week study, led by Jodie Draut, based on Walter Brueggemann's Into Your Hand. Last night, for our Good Friday worship service, members of the group presented meditations on each of the Seven Last Words of Christ. This was mine:

The Fourth Word: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?"

The Reading: Matthew 27:45-49 

When we human beings are dying, words come back to us. Frequently they are words from our childhood: a song, a psalm, or a prayer. Even when dying people are also suffering from dementia and can’t remember anything else, they often remember poems or hymns from their childhood.

Jesus speaks the words,  “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross in both the Gospel According to Mark and the Gospel According to Matthew. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” is the only one of the seven last words of Christ that appears in more than one Gospel, and in both Mark and Matthew, these are also the only words Jesus speaks from the cross. He speaks them in Aramaic, the language he would have known as a child growing up in Nazareth. 

These words are the first line of a famous psalm, Psalm 22:

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

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

Oh my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;

And by night, but find no rest.

Jesus probably learned this psalm as a child— by memory, ‘by heart,’ as we would say—much as some of us here tonight might have learned ‘by heart’ the psalm that immediately follows this one, the 23^rd Psalm. Just as we would catch the reference if we heard a dying person murmur, “The Lord is my shepherd,” if there were Jews present at the crucifixion who heard Jesus murmur the opening line of Psalm 22, chances are they would have been able to fill in the rest. They would have known of the comparison of God to a midwife in verses 9-10:

Yet it was you who took me from the womb;

You kept me safe on my mother’s breast.

On you I was cast from my birth,

And since my mother bore me you have been my God.

 These Jewish listeners would have known that Psalm 22 continues:

For dogs are all around me,

A company of evildoers encircles me.

My hands and feet are shriveled;

I can count all my bones.

They stare and gloat over me;

They divide my clothes among themselves,

And for my clothing they cast lots.

The listeners would have been able to imagine that, as Jesus watched the Roman soldiers who were putting him to death, he was thinking of these dogs and evildoers. And these listeners would have known the conclusion of the 22^nd psalm:

To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth

Bow down;

Before him shall bow all who go into the dust,

And I shall live for him.

Posterity will serve him;

Future generations will be told about the Lord,

And proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,

Saying that he has done it.

Even as he drew his last agonized breath, Jesus still had the resources that had been given to him as a child; his education and his tradition had given him a way to think of his death, not as a humiliation or a defeat, but instead as an affirmation and a proclamation of the power of his God.