‘Christ’s Seven Last Words’ is a production of the University Church in Oxford, featuring Professor Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, which will be released each evening throughout Holy Week.
In this fourth episode, Professor Graham Ward reflects on the words, ‘“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Music sung by the University Church Choir.
Sound design by Ana-Maria Niculcea
Nowhere is the solitude of Christ more pronounced than in his fourth words from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” You leave the world naked, stripped to the very core of who you are, because our deaths are most poignantly and particularly our own. No one else can experience our deaths; only us. Whatever the stories surrounding Mary’s death, whatever the rumours among the early church that John “would not die”, mentioned in the closing pages of the Gospel, they and they alone will experience their isolated deaths. We can watch another person die, hold their hand, close their eyes, but we cannot die for them. Here we leave to memory all our assumed importance, for some even our dignity. As Christ did also.
But we die in Christ and, as the words to the penitent thief disclose, we will be with Him - having passed through the termination of our time in the world. But the dereliction remains real. Yes, in this cry from the cross, Christ is citing a psalm, even fulfilling a psalm, but here we are also overhearing an exchange between Father and Son. We are interlopers of an inner Trinitarian address, the meaning of which we cannot grasp. Some unimaginable abyss opens within the Godhead and we can only gasp at its depths. They are incomprehensible and we cannot go there into an exchange far, far more profound than the interchange between Christ as his mother. It is not a matter of gender, though the language is gendered. It is a matter of origin: of the only begotten and the one who begat him (to use language that sounds antiquated, but I know no other). Something is opened for us, some new and awful intimacy in Trinitarian relations, quite different from the prayers to God that Jesus utters as part of the Farewell speeches recording in John’s Gospel or the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. Abandonment? How can that be possible? It is something about love’s encounter with death that gathers into that cry the cries of all those who must die with words on their tongues and faith in their hearts. A moment of panic? Is that possible? A night descends far darker than any night we can experience on earth, like the night from out of which creation itself was birthed. “Do not go gently into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, Dylan Thomas wrote. But here the words of Christ are forked lightning illuminating, momentarily, the vast chasm between God and creation. It is far, far more vast and dark than the suffering of being crucified, mocked, and violated by others – all the consequences of sin. But there is a passage beyond and into being “with me in paradise”. There is a passage through this dark abandonment. Is Christ as mediator going before us, opening some stargate into oblivion? The ‘Why’ in this fourth of Christ’s seven last words articulates this unanswerable question, while upon its answer lies every possibility of meaning to our lives and for our redemption. We are humbled by it; ashamed by our own ignorance. We are silenced.
