‘My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?’| National Catholic Register

A President Preaches of Sin and Redemption

Editor’s note: Father Raymond J. de Souza recorded meditations on the Seven Last Words at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Ogdensburg, New York. They will air on EWTN on Good Friday at 1 p.m. (EDT). It will also be available at ewtn.com and EWTN+. The Register will publish those meditations through Good Friday.

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“At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ … And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last. And the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Mark 15:33-34; 37-38).

The Fourth Word from the Cross can be perplexing. Jesus is not forsaken by the Father. And Jesus does not think that he has been forsaken. He is praying the opening lines of Psalm 22, which begins with the cry of dereliction, but concludes with a determination to praise God in the midst of the assembly (22:23).

St. Paul writes that Jesus was “made sin” even though he “knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). In experiencing the deepest consequences of sin, Jesus knows the estrangement that sin brings — estranged, abandoned, forsaken.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Generations of slaves surely prayed Psalm 22, wondering if God had forsaken them. They were strong in faith, praising God in the midst of the assembly. The Black church was one of the few institutions that preserved Black dignity, Black agency, Black identity, Black culture under slavery and segregation.

The Declaration of 1776 declared that “all men are created equal.” The founders themselves, including Washington and Jefferson, owned slaves. The Constitution of 1787 entrenched slavery, despite the Declaration. God did not forsake the slaves, but the Constitution did.

We lament now that generations of Christian preachers appealed to the Scriptures to justify slavery. Some of them even appealed to Matthew 22, to “render unto Caesar.” Here, under the nave window of that scene, is a historical panel of Abraham Lincoln and Archbishop John Hughes of New York. Lincoln sent Hughes to Europe as his envoy, to persuade European powers to support the Union cause. He likely chose an archbishop in order to make the moral case for the Union — that slavery was an offense against God.

Lincoln came to the abolition position gradually. Eventually, he came to see it with moral, and even theological, clarity. God would not forsake some of his people such that they would be enslaved by others. In 1863 at Gettysburg, Lincoln appealed not to the Constitution of 1787, which protected slavery, but to 1776 — “four score and seven years ago” — to the Declaration, which held that “all men are created equal.”

Sixteen months after the Gettysburg Address, and just six weeks before his own assassination, Lincoln would give an even greater speech — the finest political speech ever delivered in the English language. In his Second Inaugural address, the president became a preacher and delivered a sermon rather than a mere speech.

Lincoln addresses forthrightly the pernicious evil of slavery, practiced by the founders, entrenched in the Constitution, favored by many people and several states. How can this original sin be washed away? How can the nation be redeemed? How can the people be saved?

Perhaps only by the bloodshed of war. Lincoln’s preaching that day is moving still, and he quotes both Matthew 18 and Psalm 19. The Second Inaugural is fitting to be read on Good Friday, on which day God himself paid for our sins with his Precious Blood. That dynamic remains in history, the dynamic of sin and sacrifice, of blood and redemption. 

In March 1865, the Civil War was in its last days. Listen to Lincoln provide its definitive interpretation:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

A few weeks later, Abraham Lincoln would be shot on Good Friday.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

“We adore Thee, O Christ, and we praise Thee, because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world.”