Buried
A Question Of Emphasis
This is Reading Photographs, an (occasional) newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.
One of the things that has stuck with me from the years I was a practicing Catholic convert was the solemnity that accompanied Easter. The services and masses of Holy Week and Easter Sunday crank the sanctity to the max. The quiet procession of the Stations of the Cross. The altar stripped bare. The eruption of light and sound that occurred midway through Easter Vigil. And, at least for my first Easter as a Catholic, the sudden cold of water being poured over your bowed head.
Obviously the cantors read passages from the Gospels recounting Christ’s last days and final agonizing moments and triumphant resurrection. And among all those, a fragment of a phrase, one of the last spoken by Christ before he died, is etched in my mind.
Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
As with many of the things Jesus said1, this phrase is cribbed from the Old Testament. Specifically, Psalm 22, of which this is the first line. It is a psalm long cited as a plea for God’s help against persecution and one’s enemies. In Judaism, it is referenced in the long history of suffering inflicted on the Hebrews by numerous nations and empires. Christians have done the same, from the first centuries of the church when its members were indeed sometimes fed to lions to the present day by those sitting in an air conditioned megachurch nodding their head as a man on a dias bemoans the travesty of Christians being criticized for not treating their perceived enemies as their neighbors.
Now, I’m going to level with you: I’m not confident Jesus uttered “Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani?” as he died via exposure, blood loss and asphyxiation. I’m not confident that Jesus said any of the phrases attributed to him in the Bible. The Christians who first wrote down what became the Gospels could not have been present at the Crucifixion and Resurrection, much less spoken to Christ, as they weren’t alive at the time. The original Apostles had long been dead before a stylus ever touched papyrus to record the ministry of a man who was actually named Yeshua. The Gospels themselves frequently don’t agree on the same details of events, if they talk about the same events at all, despite likely being derived from one or the other.
But, in imagining that Christ did say that phrase, I like to think that he wasn’t intentionally quoting the Tanakh. No, as a man experiencing the horrific pain that is death by crucifixion, I don’t think he was calling out to God. I firmly believe that our culture has long put the emphasis on the wrong words in the phrase:
“My god, my god, why have YOU forsaken me?”
I imagine him remembering he told Peter that three times he would deny he knew who Yeshua of Nazareth was. Recall his own community’s religious leaders handing him over for death at the hands of a colonizing empire. I imagine him saying this, staring at the crowd jeering at him, a crowd made up of Hebrews, Romans and other peoples from all stations.
And if Christ were God, he would also have known how prescient his cry would be throughout history and in this present moment. How those claiming to be fishers of men were instead killers of men, enslavers of men, oppressors of men, and of women, too. How his past exhortation that whoever receives a child receives him would be interpreted to deny a child food, sanctuary and dignity. How his radical message would be twisted to condone the very inhumanity he witnessed and criticized throughout his ministry. How who he was would bear no connection to the actual man billions claim to adore, worship and praise. How even that false idol, with its faintest promotion of love and kindness, would be buried behind the refuse of dogma, tradition, misogyny, racism and “loving the sinner but not the sin.”
I don’t think this is far-fetched to believe, no more than anything else believed by mainline Christianity. If anything, it’s consistent with the Beatitudes he spoke of in the Sermon on the Mount, even more so the last one attributed to him in Luke’s Gospel in the Sermon on the Plain:
“Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil,” He says, pausing, taking a deep breath, knowing what his followers are going to do. “because of the Son of Man.”
According to a cursory Google search, Jesus directly quoted the Old Testament 78 times and alluded to it hundreds of times other that. His remarks, famously printed in red, make up 20% of the text of the New Testament.