The first time that God spoke from a mountain, He gave the Ten Words (Decalogue) to His people through the mouth of Moses. The last time He spoke from a mountain, it was the Mount of Calvary seated on the pulpit of the Cross. This time, God Incarnate spoke only seven words, each of which represent the last will and testament to His people. Each of the seven words, spoken by the Eternal Son, has both a timelessness and a timeliness about it. But there is one in particular, the one packed right in the middle of the seven—“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”—that bears a special focus in our day and age. For it is in this word that we find the summation of Christ’s Passion.
The return of pagan thought, supplemented by scientism, has born witness to a reemergence of many of the early Christological heresies. This is, perhaps, put on display in no clearer manner than when the modern theologians try to explain point number four in Our Lord’s great Sermon. Whether it be the neo-Docetists who say that the Son really didn’t suffer or the Calvinists who claim that Christ suffering was so intense that He yielded to despair, there is a great need of clarity if we are to pluck all of the fruit off of the true Tree of Life. In order to have the convergence of the timeless and the timely, we must root ourselves in a proper understanding of the Incarnation. Mysteries only remain mysteries when we are precise in our language and our thinking. When we make room for ambiguity and imprecision, we come to explain them away like our Docetist and Calvinist compadres.
A Proper Christology
Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who took to Himself a human nature without any change to Himself, we must first admit the impossibility of Him ceasing to be God. He is a Divine Person Who nonetheless had two modes of action or natures—human and divine. He performed miracles using His Divine Nature. He suffered using His human nature. But in either case, it was He, that is the Second Person of the Trinity, that performed the miracle and suffered. The union of the two natures in the Person, what we call the Hypostatic Union, means that from the moment of His conception, He had the vision of God. His soul had the most intimate and unique union that a human soul can have with God and therefore His soul looked upon “the face of God and lived.” “No man has ever seen the Father, except the One Who is from God” (c.f. John 6:46). If all of what we just said is true, then how is it possible for Him to ever experience abandonment from God?
There is, of course, the connection with Psalm 22. But we must make sure that we do not put the cart before the horse. Properly speaking Christ did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament in the sense that He was bound to do certain things. The prophecies were made because the Eternal Word of God did certain things. The prophecies are “after” the events in the mind of God. The Psalm was inspired because Christ would utter those words from the Cross and not the other way around. In other words, we cannot simply say that Our Lord was reciting a Psalm and leave it at that. We must address the fact that in a real sense Our Lord experienced abandonment.
There is the obvious sense in which the words are meant. The abandonment is not so much a spiritual desolation, but the fact that He was turned over completely to His persecutors without any Divine protection or exercise of His Divine Power. It can also mean, according to Augustine, that the Son was forsaken in the sense that His prayer in the Garden to have the chalice removed was not answered.
Clearing the Way for the Deeper Meaning
By clinging to the truth of the personal union of the Divine and human natures we are able to also posit a much deeper level of meaning as well. We said that it was one of the laws of the nature of the Incarnation that Christ experienced the Beatific Vision in His soul. But through a miracle, the reverse of which was described in a previous post about the Transfiguration, He was able to suspend His awareness of the Beatific Vision in His soul. Thus, according to St. Thomas (c.f. ST III q.46, a.6 ad 4), Christ was, in His human nature, no longer aware of His union with the Father. The union was still real but He was prevented from having any consideration of it which would have alleviated sorrow. Instead He focused only on those things that could produce sorrow and desolation such as the malice of sin, the terrible ingratitude of mankind, and all the souls that would be lost despite His sacrifice.
In short, this desolation, unlike the desolation we “naturally” experience in the spiritual life, was directly willed. And like all things He did, it had a twofold purpose. The first is as an example. By experiencing the most intense of desolations, Our Lord left us an example to follow by not only “hanging in there” but by speaking words for us. He has given us a prayer to say in Psalm 22 when no prayer will come. For those who have experienced true spiritual desolation, when absolutely no words come in prayer, this is an invaluable gift.
The second purpose is that by directly willing it and experiencing it, He sanctified desolation for all of us. Despite not feeling anything except loss, the Christian is assured that by submitting their will to God’s in desolation, they are, in truth, being sanctified by it. And this ultimately is why having a proper understanding of what Christ did and suffered is important. By seeing Christ’s desolation as directly willed and not as a precursor to despair, we know we have been empowered to overcome any amount of desolation and avoid despair. For Christ redeemed every aspect of our lives including spiritual desolation. All we have to do then is to submit to it in an act of faith and trust, knowing that is part and parcel of Redemption.