Psalm 22:2
The quotation of verse 2 in Matthew 27:46, lama sabachthani, is
Aramaic, the language which Jesus apparently used for his personal
prayers.
There are two ways to read the second line of verse 2, It may be read
as a continuation of the first line: "Why have you forsaken me? [why
are you] far from saving me? [why are you far from] the words of my
roaring?” Or the second line may be read as standing alone: “Far from
saving me are the words of my groaning,” that is, my pleas do no good.
As verse 2 is translated above, the adjective רָחוֹק agrees with tho
plural דִּבְרֵי. The adjective is singular because it is treated as a
virtual adverb, which is not declined (JM 148b). If there is an
ellipsis, however, רָחוֹק agrees with "you,” "why are you far?”
Psalm 22:3
No pain compares to the pain of being separated from God, our Creator.
Such pain is the torment of the damned in hell. Nothing is more
crushing than an awareness of the wrath of the holy God. Such pain
should never be felt by an obedient child of God. In our self-pity we
at times may feel we have the right to make this prayer our own and to
cry out indignantly, “God, why have you forsaken me?" We think, “I
have served you. I deserve better than this.” But only one sufferer
has been innocent enough to truly claim, “I don’t deserve this," Only
one innocent has been truly forsaken by God.
Jesus used these words as his own prayer on the cross (Mt 27:46; Mk
15:34; Heb 5:7). To the scoffers standing around the cross, it seemed
that the Father had abandoned the one who had claimed to be his Son.
In Gethsemane Jesus had fervently prayed, "Take this cup from me.” But
on the cross it seemed that this prayer was not being answered.
Certainly God had the power to deliver his own Son. Why wasn’t he
using it? In the next sections of this prayer, the Messiah struggles
to answer this question.
Reading this psalm is like watching a pendulum swing back and forth as
the psalm alternates between expressions of distress and confidence.
But even in deepest distress, the suffering one addresses the Lord as
"my God."
Christ's Suffering, Death, and Burial
Christ's suffering extends through the entire state of His
humiliation. The whole history of Christ's earthly life, from His
birth on, is truly a “Passion story.” Baier writes of this suffering
as follows: "He was subject to government; He was regarded as equal
with, or even inferior to, others; to satisfy His hunger He ate, and
to quench His thirst He drank; when He was weary, He slept; He bore to
the end the burden of toils and the dangers of journeys, as also
perils, temp tations, sorrows, poverty, and insults.” 35 The
intensified suffering that came upon Christ during the last two days
of His earthly life, on Thursday and Friday of the Passion Week, has
been fitly denominated the Great Passion (passio magna).
A part of the passio magna was His being forsaken by God, which was
revealed in His cry of anguish: “My God, My God, why hast Thou
forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46.) We can understand the meaning of Christ's
being forsaken by God only if we fully accept the central Scripture
truth of Christ's substitution for us. Christ in Himself indeed was no
sinner. The transfer of our sin to Him was a purely juridical divine
act: “God made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin" (2 Cor. 5:21).
But this divine juridical act of God penetrated to the very heart and
conscience of the suffering Christ. When Christ was forsaken of God,
He felt the sin and guilt of all men in His soul as His own sin and
guilt. This is clearly brought out in the Old Testament prophecy in
which Christ speaks of His own sin and guilt in the words: “O God,
Thou knowest My foolishness; and My sins are not hid from Thee” (Ps.
69:5). With our sin and guilt, Christ also felt God's wrath, that is,
God's verdict of condemnation and rejection, in His soul, just as if
He had personally committed all sins of mankind. The desertion of
Christ by God has therefore fitly been described as the feeling of
divine wrath on account of the sins of men imputed to Him (sensus irae
divinae propter peccata hominum imputata), and so the cry that God had
forsaken Him expresses a very real fact and part of His suffering.
That Christ was but temporarily forsaken of God is explained by the
fact that He is the eternal, divine Son of God. When the Person who is
God was forsaken of God for a little while, this transient condition
was the equivalent of all sinners' being eternally forsaken of God.
This is not a man-made "theory of compensation,” but Scripture teaches
this compensation by the divine majesty of the Person of Christ in all
passages in which it asserts the truth that it is through the work and
suffering of the eternal Son of God that we sinners have been redeemed
(1 Pet. 1:18-19). When we inquire into the essence of this
abandonment, in what it really consisted, we face the very core of the
redemptive work of the Mediator between God and man, namely, as Isaiah
calls it, “the travail of His soul” (Is. 53:11). Luther says very
well: “This matter no man can so well depict in words as it is here
stated in frank, terse, and plain terms. It does not treat of Christ's
bodily suffering, which also was great and heavy, but of His deep
spiritual suffering, which He felt in His soul and which far surpassed
all bodily suffering. . . . In what this consisted no man on earth can
understand, nor has any man the vocabulary adequately to describe and
depict it. For to be forsaken of God is much worse than is death.
Those who have tasted and experienced a little of it can somewhat
sense it. But such as are secure, carnal,
and have not endured or experienced such suffering neither know nor
understand anything about it. . . . From Job's example we can somewhat
understand what it means to be forsaken of God. . . . And Christ has
truly been forsaken of God, not in such a way that the deity was
separated from the humanity, but that the Deity withdrew into itself
and hid itself. ... So the righteous and innocent Man had to tremble
and fear like a poor, condemned sinner and in His tender, innocent
heart had to feel God's wrath and judgment over sin, taste for us
eternal death and damnation, and, in short, suffer all that a
condemned sinner has deserved and must suffer eternally. ... He had to
quench and put out in His soul the extreme agony that is called 'being
forsaken of God and the devil's fiery darts, hell's fire and terror,
and all that we had deserved by our sins. By this heaven, eternal life
and blessedness, has been purchased for us, as also Isaiah says: 'He
shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied.”” 37
It would, however, be wholly improper to speak of despair (desperatio)
on the part of Christ. Despair is iniquity and would conflict with the
sinlessness of Christ, which is attested by Scripture. Besides,
Scripture expressly bears witness that Christ, while forsaken of God,
continued to trust in God (Ps. 22:1,19 ff.; Luke 23:46). While He was
forsaken of God, He still cried to God as His God, saying: “My God, my
God!” Gerhard writes of this: “Other men cannot, without sinning, feel
the wrath of God deserved by their sins, because of the utter
corruption of their nature; for secretly in their hearts they become
impatient, and at times they also murmur against God in words, as the
examples of Job and Jeremiah testify. But Christ bears these tortures
without any sin, persists in holy obedience to God, and retains filial
trust in His heart. For these are by no means the words of one
despairing when He exclaims: ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
Me?' But they are the words of one giving notice that He is enduring
extreme agony of the soul and pains which are truly of hell. And so
Christ, by wrestling with the power of the devil, with the horror of
death, and with the agonies of the damned, brought back from them a
glorious triumph for our salvation. ... To the Jesuits it seems absurd
that Christ in His Passion felt the wrath and agony of hell, as is
apparent from Bellarmine . . . while they nevertheless find themselves
forced to concede that the patient human nature was forsaken in His
punishment and that Christ felt no consolation whatever in His soul,
which is the very thing we mean, and nothing else, when we say that
Christ felt the wrath of God and the torment of hell.”
Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that while Christ was forsaken
of God, the Father's declaration still was true: “This is My beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). By the very fact that
Christ took upon Himself, in the place of sinful mankind, this extreme
punishment of being forsaken of God and so fulfilled the Father's
will, He remained the object of God's supreme love, even while He was
under His wrath, just as He says: “Therefore doth My Father love Me,
because I lay down My life, that I might take it again” (John 10:17).
Calvin certainly sets up a false contrast when he writes: “We do not
admit that God was ever hostile to Him, or angry with Him. For how
could He be angry with His beloved Son, ‘in whom His soul delighted
(Is. 42:1)? 39 Calvin evidently forgot, when he was writing these
sentences, that Christ is our Substitute, a truth which he means to
teach in the words that precede and that follow the quotation.
The death of Christ was a true death because in Christ's death
occurred the very thing which constitutes the nature of death, namely,
the separation of body and soul. This separation is recorded by all
Evangelists, though in somewhat differing terms. Matt. 27:50: ἀφῆκεν
τὸ πνεῦμα; Mark 15:37 and Luke 23:46: ἐξέπνευσεν; John 19:30:
παρέδωκεν τὸ πνεῦμα. True, since Christ's death is the death of the
Son of God, and, accordingly, not merely the departed soul, but also
the entombed body remained in personal union with the Son of God, the
possibility of death in the case of Christ passes human understanding,
as Gerhard in his Harmonia Evangelica (c. 202) well points out. But
the fact of Christ's death must be believed because Scripture attests
it so clearly.
Pieper's Dogmatics, p. 311 et seq.
I apologize for the somewhat lengthy quotation. But it is well worth the read. And it's well worth thinking through.
