Abandoned

Mark 15:34  And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

"Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  These powerful words open Psalm 22, a moving plea to God in which David says, "I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by the people.  All who see me mock me."

The passage from Mark (nearly duplicated in Matthew) is familiar to most Christians; but have you ever wondered why, of all the statements of Jesus quoted in the Bible, this one is left in the original language? 

Any observant Jew is familiar with Hebrew, and we can only speculate at how proficient Jesus himself must have been in the language of his holy texts.  His mastery of Hebrew would have been complete, and he may very well have been required to memorize the psalms in their entirety.  That he responds at this moment - a moment of greatest despair, deepest fear, and highest pain - with scripture, is no surprise.  As a man steeped in the Hebrew Bible his response would have been instinctive; as the Messiah himself, the response would have been inevitable.

But there's one issue here: these words are not Hebrew.

Instead, they are Aramaic.  When Jesus quotes Psalm 22 from the cross he does not do so using the Hebrew it was written in, but using the everyday language of Jews in first century Palestine.  This is why in most Bibles we read the words as a transliteration of Jesus' original statement: "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?"

Why would Jesus cry these words out in Aramaic instead of in Hebrew, which was surely the language in which he learned the Psalms?  Perhaps it was because, at this worst of moments, he cried out not to "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" [though He was the same God], but instead, he cried out to his own father.  His cry is an intimate one, to "Abba," to the one who always heard him.  And so he cries out in his day-to-day language, though in the words of his ancestor, the Psalmist.

Shortly thereafter, Jesus would breathe his last, but only after experiencing this final, terrible moment of abandonment. 

The saddest thing is that our society is filled with people who have no idea whatsoever what was done for them, what was sacrificed for their sake.  Even our churches in this modern day are populated by many people who think they are too smart to believe in an atoning Christ, and want to see him instead as a teacher of ethics or a leader of societal change.  These people simply don't comprehend the profound truth of this moment on the cross.  Jesus died in a state of abandonment, so that we would never have to experience that same state of abandonment.  It is that simple.  He accepted the burden of guilt for our sake. All we have to do in return is accept that truth.  So easy, and yet, for the broken human race, so very hard.

"I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God."  Job 19:25-26