Eloi Eloi Lama Sabactani (5)

Eloi Eloi Lama Sabactani (5)

At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. 34And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"—which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"(15:34)

On the cross, Jesus experienced total abandonment from God. Does it have sense that the son of God felt that he been abandoned by God? It is not easy to fully understand the intricacy of the question. It is because this question is associated with the deepest faith of early Christian community. We shall go further wherever our thought reaches.

First question is that when and how well did Jesus clearly cognize his own identity? Did Jesus have confidence that he was the son of God and the Messiah? Did he have such proof? For example, once Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us." Jesus answered, “"Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? These sorts of verses are found quite often in the Gospels.

However, we can not say that Jesus cognized himself as the Son of God and the Messiah based on such verses. Such verses are a religious confession of early Christianity. It is a religious confession of the early Christian community who talked about Jesus’ public life after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. I do not mean to say that Jesus did not have any cognition about self-identification but I mean that it is something that we cannot empirically confirm today.

We can catch a dim outline about the matter of Jesus’ self-identification when we explain ‘abandonment from God’. Why did Jesus cry out such word in such an important moment?