Jesus' Cry of Dereliction

Theologians and preachers sometimes interpret the cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46, Mk 15:34 ) to mean that God has turned his back on Jesus while the latter bears the sins of the world. Sometimes this rift is described as being between the Father and the Son, i.e., within the Trinity, and sometimes the placement of the rift gets no detailed attention. Thus Jesus bears the rejection due us as part of God’s response to our sin. R. C. Sproul, in a series of films in which he gives a survey of the New Testament, describes Jesus as “the most obscene object in the universe” at that point during the crucifixion.

It is not necessary to adopt Dr. Sproul’s assessment of “obscenity” in order to hold the view that God turned his back on Jesus at that cry, and other variations on this theme are certainly possible, so let me group them under the heading “Rift” views or interpretations. (My only intention in using this label is brevity, not disrespect.)

These Rift views, despite having some very appealing strengths, also have some insurmountable theological and exegetical problems.

Theology

The chief theological strengths of the Rift interpretation are its emphases on God’s utter rejection of sin, Christ’s exchange with us of his life for our death and his cleanness for our foulness, the horror of Christ’s experience on the cross, and the depth of God’s love for us to undergo such torture on our behalf. The New Testament presents these important points in several places, and we must not abandon them. But we must also not let our imaginations (and traditions) run away with us, based on these points and the single word “forsaken” in the saying from Jesus on the cross.

Putting a rift between divinity and humanity on the cross means that it was not God who took away our sins. Putting a rift between the Father and the Son is even worse, because it means that God has abandoned his own nature (unity), it effectively proposes a second God (the Son in isolation), and it calls into question the existence and activity of the Holy Spirit (if he is not the love of the Father and Son for each other, then who is He and what is He doing?). This interpretation allows our notion of sin to dominate our notion of God: it says that sin can split God, dividing Him against Himself.

At the crucifixion the burden of our sins heightens into an agony. Yes, Jesus dies as the Rejected of God, the Curse of God (Gal. 3:13), the One who became sin for our sakes (II Cor. 5:21). But underneath all those real and agonizing aspects of the cross lies the deeper reality that He is the Beloved, the Blessing of Abraham, the Righteous One. In his very sin-bearing he is being obedient. In dying, he takes our humanity to its agonized destruction, and thus we die in him. But he dies that, in his rising again, he may bring us also back to life. Thus we are in him a “new creation”: the old one had to be destroyed (II Cor. 5:17), and it was Jesus who bore the pain of that destruction.

Exegesis

The chief method and exegetical strength of the Rift interpretation is its attention to the word “forsaken” (sabachthani in Aramaic, 'egkate/lipe/v in Greek in both texts). Take the word “forsaken” in a straightforward sense, with all the devastation that it carries, and it aptly describes our place before God without Christ. Jesus gives us several pictures of forsakenness and accursedness in his parables, as in Mt. 25:41, “Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.” Mt. 22:13 gives another picture, “Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” That was our place, and Jesus took it for us.

The two main subsidiary texts used for interpreting the cry of dereliction this way are Gal. 3:13 (“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is every one who hangs on a tree’—“) and Hab. 1:13 (“Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?” KJV, italics in the original). The Galatians text is interpreted as implying God’s utter rejection of Christ by its use of the word “curse.” The Habakkuk text is interpreted as describing God’s aversion to sin, and thus his aversion to Christ when he carried our sin.

But the text in Habakkuk does not treat sin as if it were some substance, or even as a nature, but rather as an activity, doing evil, pursuing that which God has forbidden. Further, the Hebrews used their language in a much more poetic way than Westerners sometimes allow. Notice that in the same verse the author says both “you can’t look” and “you do look.” The NASB accurately translates the first verbs as “look with favor” for the more literal-minded. To say that sin can force God’s hand, or his eyes, attributes too much power to sin and too little to God. Thus this verse cannot apply to Christ on the cross. Although he bore our sin, he himself did not pursue sin.

The text in Galatians quotes Deut. 21:23, “for he who is hanged is accursed of God,” or more literally, “the curse of God.” Christ becomes a curse for us who have not kept the Law (3:10), so that we may, in contrast, inherit the blessing of Abraham (3:14). The application of this verse to the crucifixion scene depends on the content that we give to the word “curse.” On the one hand, we must not undercut the severity or profundity of this word; on the other hand, we must allow the scriptures, and not our own imaginations, to provide details of its content.

The biggest exegetical problem of some of the Rift interpreters is their failure to use the most important scriptural reference, Psalm 22. This cry does not originate at the cross: Jesus is quoting Psalm 22:1. No, it is not merely a quotation, but he points us to Ps. 22 because it tells us what he is going through. The whole psalm is rich in references to the crucifixion and resurrection. By the parallelism of its structure it also tells us what “forsaken” means in this case, namely, God’s inaction, his failure to deliver, to answer, to give rest (vv. 1-2). Far from denoting God’s absence, it presupposes his presence and his hearing. It also contrasts the forsakenness with God’s holiness (v. 3), showing that the psalmist (and therefore Christ) knows that, in and with and under this excruciating event, God is indeed present and delivering in a way neither presently seen nor experienced. By v. 24 the psalmist expounds this in more detail: “For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; Neither has He his is face from him; But when he cried to Him for help, He heard.”

No, this does not reduce “forsaken” to mere appearances. Jesus suffered a painful dying on the cross, both physically and spiritually, and his Father did not deliver him from it. The full brunt of the Father’s rejection of our sin and the annihilation of our fallen humanity fell on him. But underlying that reality was the deeper reality without which our salvation would not have been possible, namely, the love of the Father for the Son and for us in the Son by the Spirit; the Son’s love for and obedience to the Father in the Spirit; and the Spirit’s loving union of the Father with the Son, and us in the Son.