My God, My God, Why Have You Abandoned Me?

By Fr. Christopher Foeckler, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

As we continue our journey with the Lord through Lent, contemplating His Passion and Death, we can pause on the very last suffering of the Lord among the many He endured and in fact the most painful – the abandonment of the Father: “My God! My God! Why have You abandoned Me?”

It is important to get the sense of these words right because, while enigmatic and challenging, they are truly sublime and awe inspiring. First of all, what they cannot mean in the full context of Jesus’ life and teaching is fourfold. They cannot mean that the Father is angry at the Son and loves Him no more; rather, Jesus is more loveable in His suffering. Nor can it possibly be that Jesus is experiencing the pains of the damned separated from God in Hell. It certainly cannot be that the Son of God has ceased to be divine – an absurdity. The most common error is that these words indicate that the Lord has fallen into despair. This error leads to false consequences such as He failed His mission, He is not who He says He is – the Son of God, or has been crushed into failure by the sheer weight of the suffering which no man could bear.

However, the proper way to understand these words is, first of all, to see that the Lord is citing the beginning of Psalm 22 which is a prophesy about the suffering of the Messiah and, while descriptive of crucifixion – they have pierced my hands and my feet – it concludes with an assurance of God’s vindication of the victim and His triumph of redeeming the nations! To cite the opening words of a song or poem to allude to the whole piece is our common experience and every papal document is identified by its first few words, as the Lord is doing here with the first words of Psalm 22.

There is still more here. An excellent theologian, Dr. Lawrence Fiengold, has added two other ways these words can be understood. Jesus’ abandonment is like that of child whose parents don’t protect them from possible dangers in some circumstances. “It is His hour” which means it is the time His Father does not protect Him from harm as He has on previous occasions when Jesus escaped danger and death because it was not His hour. The only other sense of abandonment that the Lord could have experienced is like the deep desolation that mystics feel in the “dark night of the soul”. This feeling of complete separation from God that God has to allow and make happen in the soul leads them through  purgation that they cannot possibly do for themselves, but which Jesus, as God and perfect man with no concupiscence and perfect control of His emotions, can choose to feel no consolation from His constant union with the Father for the sake of our redemption. This is the ultimate pain of the passion – a sense of separation from the Father!

These words of the Lord then reveal the final victory of the Redeemer and at the same time the depths of suffering that He willingly endured for our salvation and, as such, the depth of love Jesus has for us!

We adore You O Christ and we bless You, because by Your Holy Cross You have redeemed the world!