The last words of Jesus on the cross will be much read and much reflected upon today, but what were they? In fact the gospel accounts differ on this, and the most agonising and the most challenging version of those last words appears in only two of the gospels, Mark and Matthew. It has been suggested that Luke and John omitted them because a despairing and desolate Jesus did not really fit with the triumphant Christ that the early Church was preaching.

So what were those words? As translated from the Aramaic into Greek and from Greek into the 16th-century English of William Tyndale they are, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And these were, in turn, ‘borrowed’ by the committee which produced the Authorised, or King James, Version of the Bible in 1611. And it is those words which continue to puzzle and perplex us today. Did Jesus really say them? If he did, what did he mean by them? If they are authentic, what do they tell us about him?

Given the situation in which Jesus found himself: in terminal agony on the cross, deserted by his closest disciples – the male ones, at least – with his hopes dashed and apparently abandoned to his fate, I would say that those words sound perfectly plausible. It must indeed have seemed that God had forsaken him. It can be argued that their very desolation not only testifies to their truth, but also to the truth of the crucifixion itself. If, in the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, you were trying to prove that Jesus was the Son of God, a figure of supernatural power and status, the Saviour of the world, you would hardly make up a story in which he is executed in disgrace for sedition and rebellion against Rome and dies as broken in spirit as he was in body. Which is why, perhaps, Luke and John soften things up a bit and omit the words of desolation, substituting others that seemed to them more suitable for the Anointed One of God.

So even if there were not some independent evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Roman authorities, the last known words of Jesus in Mark and Matthew would seem to support it. But what are we to make of them: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Do we take them as the very understandable cry of someone dying in the most appalling circumstances – both physical and spiritual? They are certainly credible when seen in that light, and maybe we should be content with this most obvious explanation.

However, there is another way of understanding that cry. Those exact words open Psalm 22 and it has been suggested that Jesus was quite deliberately quoting them, intending his Jewish hearers to find his meaning in the Psalm as a whole. The Psalmist writes as one who is indeed in the depths of misery, humiliation and even self-loathing – “I am a worm and no man” (v. 6). He is at the mercy of his enemies and his words seem to be a prophecy of what happened to Jesus: “They pierced my hands and my feet” (v. 17); “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (v. 18) They have been used by Christians, along with other Old Testament sources, to ‘prove’, as they see it, that the life of Jesus was the fulfilment of prophecy. Others, more sceptically, have argued that the whole story of Jesus was concocted by the gospel-writers out of a hotch-potch of Old Testament verses and prophecies.

But there is a third possibility. That when they contemplated the story of Jesus and came to write it down, they found in it echoes of Old Testament passages, like Psalm 22, and moulded their accounts accordingly. Those words of desolation may indeed have been spoken by Jesus on the cross, as remembered by the faithful women disciples mentioned later, but it was the gospel-writers Mark and Matthew who used them to reference the whole of Psalm 22. Why? Because after describing the despair and suffering of the Psalm’s unidentified subject it closes with an affirmation of faith in God’s deliverance. The psalmist’s life is restored and his powers of preaching and prophecy are renewed: “I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee” (v. 22). Interpreted in this light, those words on the cross become more positive and, for some, a promise of the Resurrection.

Without this, though, the words of desolation pose a problem for those wanting to present Jesus as God and as a supernatural divine being. For God to lament his desertion by God; for an omnipotent divine being not to know about his own Resurrection – these seem nonsensical. For the crucifixion to have any relevance for us it must involve the death of a real human being as weak and as subject to pain and despair as any other. The hope lies in his humanity, in his courage, in his integrity, in his witness for what he believed was saving truth for the human spirit. By putting his own self aside, by accepting death rather than deny the Way that he taught and lived, he revealed divine truth in a way that no magic or miracle ever could. It is in humanity in all its weakness and fallibility that the Divine Mystery is to be found. Without these there is no courage, no resilience, no faith, no love.

This is something that Jesus exemplified but we have seen it too in the response to the current pandemic at its best. Waiting around for divine intervention does no good, nor does denial, brittle bravado or a belief that one is too holy to catch the virus. It is frail, fallible human beings working selflessly with whatever gifts they have who have carried us through, and who continue to do so. Those despairing words of Jesus must have been on many lips this past year, and for some – as for him – they will have been their last words. But for many a deeper and unsought determination has been kindled – determination to serve, to nurse, to heal and to restore; determination to understand the deadly virus, to counter it and to protect us from it. And, not to be forgotten, there has been the simple determination to be a good neighbour. Yes, these are all human qualities but they are also what we really mean by divine. It is in humanity’s strength in weakness that we find God. Maybe this is what that Roman centurion meant when, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15: 39).

(CMR240321)

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