The Sayings of Jesus On The Cross Part 2

We’re continuing our look at the seven sayings of Jesus on the cross in this Part 2. Last time, we looked at the first three, in their traditional order (if you missed it, just scroll down and click on the link at the bottom right of the page). This time, we’ll look at the final four.   

4. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46.  

Let’s start with the saying in its context: “About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ (which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).”

Jesus is quoting Psalm 22:1, but not in Hebrew, which was the formal language of Jewish learning. The quotation is Aramaic, a Hebrew-like dialect which was the spoken language of the ordinary people. Mark and Matthew have then translated it into New Testament Greek  and we, of course, are now reading it in English. This has potential significance for its meaning, which language experts will debate (the meaning of sabachthani includes “to allow, to permit, and to forgive,” as well as “to leave, or forsake”; the phrase may be a question, “have you forsaken me?” rather than “why have you forsaken me?”).

There is a notion in biblical interpretation that a shorthand reference (or allusion) in the New Testament to one part of an Old Testament passage or story is often intended to call to mind (in other words, we are being invited to “read-in”) the whole of the passage or story from which it comes. This is known as “allusory intertextuality” and is likely to be the case here. If we read Psalm 22 with that in mind, it certainly comes across that way. Another clue is found in the religious leaders’ mocking of Jesus (Mark 15:31-32; Matthew 27:39-43) in language that directly echoes Psalm 22:7-8: All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. ‘He trusts in the Lord,’ they say, ‘let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.’ What might be the purpose of that allusion? Jesus making a faith statement, even in his questioning and doubting (Matthew 26:36; Mark 14:36), that this Psalm of David was indeed a prophetic foretelling of what would happen to Israel’s Davidic Messiah, and hence, is in the purposes of God; inviting Jewish scholars to recognize that this is what is happening.            

The traditional conservative evangelical way of reading what Jesus is saying is to take the statement literally, at face value (that’s a biblicist—aka, “biblical literalist”—way of reading, which has infiltrated from Fundamentalism). It takes it that God really had forsaken Jesus—aka, turned his back on him. They reason that this was because “God is unable to look upon sin,” when the sin of the world was figuratively laid upon Jesus at the cross. That may, of course, be so; but it only really stacks up if we start with the assumption that a literal reading as a statement of fact “must be” correct here, and then work backwards to try to figure out the reason for it: that God is unable to look on sin because of his infinite holiness.

But when sin entered the world in the story of Adam and Eve, in Genesis 3, God was still “walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” He was still pictured as personally present with Adam and Eve, in the same personified way, and he had a long conversation with them. It would be irreverently flippant to suggest God had to put a bag over his head once they’d sinned.

More to the point, God has never abandoned or turned his back on anybody. He has to look at sin all the time, otherwise he’d never look at us and our world. If he turned away from sinful people, he would never hear a sinner’s prayer to become a Christian.  

What this saying of Jesus is reflecting is not what was happening (God actually abandoning him), but that it felt like that was what was happening (per the Psalmist’s experience). It’s a reflection of Jesus’ humanity just as it was the Psalmist’s humanity. Because that’s how things feel to us at times. He experienced in his humanity what we experience in our humanity. It needs faith (aka, trust) to respond with, “No, actually—I know that God would never abandon me.”

5. “I am thirsty.” John 19:28.

This saying of Jesus appears to also reflect Psalm 22—in this case, verse 15: “My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.” Moreover, the response of the soldiers according to all four Gospel accounts—“A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips”—echoes Psalm 69: “I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched” (v.3) and “They . . . gave me vinegar for my thirst” (v.21).

As with Psalm 22, it is illuminating to read the whole of Psalm 69 with the crucifixion in mind. Harking back to saying three above, verse 17 says: “Do not hide your face from your servant”—reflective, once again, of what such distress feels like.         

Hyssop, here, may have an intended significance, certainly for a Jewish audience, since the Israelites were told to dip hyssop branches in the blood of the Passover lamb to mark the doorposts and lintels of their homes preceding the Exodus. It is no accident that Jesus was crucified at the festival of Passover (celebrating release from captivity) rather than, say, the Day of Atonement (where the focus is sin).    

The “wine vinegar” was probably a Roman drink called posca (a cheap mixture of wine, vinegar, and water, typically for soldiers, the lower classes, and slaves), or, sour wine mixed with myrrh, which was offered as a painkilling drug (refused by Jesus in Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts).   

6. “It is finished.” John 19:30.  

Most translations render this as “It is finished,” though some have “ended,” “accomplished,” “completed,” or “consummated.” The root of the Greek word, teleō, is telos, meaning “end” in the sense of “goal.” The sense is of something reaching its fulfilment—we might say, “the end game.”  

All of that meaning is probably present. However, it seems that in the first instance, we should understand Jesus’ words in the plain sense that his suffering on the cross is finished; his human life is ending.

I say that because to understand it as saying that all of Jesus’ mission is now finished in a theological sense—that everything has now been accomplished simply by his death—is to leave out the essential significance of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. Certainly, it can rightly be said that the end goal of dying for the sin of the world has been accomplished. The only proviso is that we don’t pass over the resurrection and ascension as a result.

It’s an unwitting evangelical weakness to overstate the place of the cross and understate the place of the incarnation, life, ministry, suffering, resurrection, and ascension as factors contributing to salvation—all of which are aspects of “what Jesus did for us,” in what we call “the Christ event.” We should also add to that Jesus’ second coming. All of these feature concurrently in the classic definition of Christian orthodoxy (“What Christians believe”) known as The Apostles’ Creed, which reads in the relevant part:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

7. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Luke 23:46 

The NIV and the ESV have “I commit” my spirit, but the NRSV echoes the old KJV with “I commend”—which I think is rather nice. From the continuation of this verse in the KJV, we get the well-known catchphrase that Jesus then “gave up the ghost.” Ghost was an old-fashioned way of saying “spirit,” in the sense of a person’s life essence leaving the physical body (the connection with “ghosts” is probably fairly obvious).     

So why did Jesus need to commit, commend, or (in the NASB) “entrust” his spirit into the Father’s hands? Why was any trust involved?

To figure that out, we need to do a bit of “Christological” thinking. Christology is how we think about—our theology of—Jesus as both God and man. It’s a fundamental part of understanding Jesus’ full humanity that Jesus “had to be” “made like us” in every way (apart from sin). See Hebrews 2:17; 4:15. What that means is that Jesus shared in everything that it means to be human apart from sin.

Put differently, he gave up or laid aside—literally, he “emptied himself,” in the words of Philippians 2:7—any characteristics of being God that would be incompatible with being fully human like us. Anything that would have given him an “unfair advantage” through being some kind of “hybrid” version of humanity in which he held onto certain divine characteristics that we don’t have access to. This is hard to grasp, especially for Christians who have gotten used to overstating Jesus’ divinity in the mix.

How does this relate to Jesus needing to trust—aka, “have faith”? Because we need to! We have to trust God for what happens after death (it’s not sinful to lack certainty about that). Even before we face death, during life, we have to trust that there is a God and that we have our understanding of him there or thereabouts right (as the Christian story presents him).  

Jesus was “made like us” in every way apart from sin. So what are some of those ways? It’s not sinful to not know everything. It’s not sinful to be afraid of suffering or dying. If Jesus was to be our role model for living a human life in relationship with and in dependence upon God as Father, then he had to be experiencing human life exactly as we do. He would need to trust God as much as we have to. This would include trusting that he had “heard right,” in terms of the need to submit to the cross; that this was all somehow in God’s plans. And trusting that the resurrection—the ultimate vindication of what he had believed and trusted in (that he’d even been willing in faith to allude to—John 2:19 and parallels)—was going to happen.

This is why we, too, can echo Jesus, as our own faith statement at the end of life: “Father, into your hands I commit/commend/entrust my spirit.”