TODAY IS PALM SUNDAY in many Christian churches. In the Catholic church is read the story of Jesus entering into Jerusalem and people laying down palm fronds in front of the donkey carrying him - a clear implication of his Messiah-ship, a provocation of the kind the Romans were always looking out for among the Jews and which often led to mass crucifixion of those who might follow such a potential threat to Roman rule. Followed by a Gospel account of the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus.
Growing up, going to Mass, the thing I found the most disturbing, scandalous, were the last words of Jesus after his torture and just as he was dying, as Mark gives it:
And at three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice,
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
which is translated,
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Some of the bystanders who heard it said,
“Look, he is calling Elijah.”
One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reedand gave it to him to drink saying,
“Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to take him down.”
Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.
I never could understand how Jesus could have believed himself to be what the later churches taught about him, that he was consciously some kind of aspect of God, divine, though the churches and Christians in general articulated many different meanings of what they meant by that, mixing the Gospel accounts, what Paul and the other letter writers said with ideas from outside the Scriptural tradition to arrive at those different holdings.
When I was young our catechism classes were taught by not terribly well educated nuns from a teaching order from a Catholic school in an adjoining town. It being a French-Canadian parish they were all heavily influenced by priests largey educated at a notoriously reactionary seminary in Quebec, some said it was the last stand of Jansenism which continued with that heresy centuries after it was declared one due to the remoteness of Quebec from hierarchical figures who had an interest in suppressing it. I do know that we were taught some rather silly ideas about the implications of Jesus's divinity, I remember one of them saying that Jesus must have known everything even as an infant, that Jesus had to have had all of the knowledge of God even then. It would seem that a number of the earliest heresies that denied the humanity of Jesus were alive and flourishing in 1950s and 60s New England, too.
How can anyone understand that passage from the Gospel if they believe that Jesus had total knowledge and total confidence in his own divinity? It makes absolutely no sense unless you think that in the extremity of his pain and suffering he temporarily forgot what he is asserted to have known, which would certainly mean that Jesus didn't share in the divine attributes of being all powerful and all knowing - I mean, how, if you're going to assert those things about God, are you going to explain a lapse in that state of being?
I certainly don't understand it except that what Jesus said is certainly an expression of the feeling of total abandonment I expect to feel at the point of death, if I am conscious of it. Of fear of being extinguished, or of just the terrible pain of the kind of death by torture an in a total theft of all dignity and life. In that cry Jesus is not only totally human, he shares in the common experience of all creatures at the point of death when we are awake to death.
Someone I was very close to, though, as they died from a heart attack, on their way to the hospital told the paramedics just as they died not to try to revive them. I was very close to the person and that has both haunted me and been a source of hope that though they had been fully expecting to die before the ambulance came, they became reconciled to it in the end. I know that's not how it always is, I've got family lore of a few rather beautiful deaths as well as the most terrible. But that would not have been a demonstration of God's solidarity with his creatures in the most challenging of all circumstances. The expression of doubt contained in those last words of Jesus in their rawest and unmitigated form in Mark's Gospel is, I think an expression of that.
If Jesus, IF EVEN JESUS harbored doubts about his relationship to God, who he called his Father, I think we lesser beings can be forgiven for our lapses which every honest believer, I believe, has, especially when we are up against it, at the point of death. I don't think our condition as created creatures will be held against us. Perhaps that is part of why it happened the way it did, as a demonstration that we won't be expected to be more than what we are or can be. Paul said that Jesus was like us except in that he was free of sin. If that is true and consistent with the Gospel, our doubt isn't a sin in itself.
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