On this sort of
interpretation of the cry, then, Christ is making use of a Jewish convention that cites the first line of a Psalm to express the whole of the Psalm. The cry
therefore is not to be understood as an expression by Christ of an experience
of desolation.
But this is an
implausible interpretation of the cry, in my view. After all, nothing about the
convention that lets the first line of a Psalm serve as a reference for the
Psalm as a whole prevents a person from uttering any particular lines of the
Psalm, as the citation of lines from the Psalms in the New Testament makes
clear. So it was possible for Christ to give utterance to the lines at the end
of the Psalm, as well as to the cry that expresses the Psalm’s opening line;
and doing so would obviously have been a much wiser thing to do in the
circumstances. Since the rebukes of the bystanders include the derisory
innuendo that God has in fact abandoned Christ, it is at least highly
misleading, not to say damaging to the faith of his followers, for Christ to
cite this Psalm by its first line if its last lines are that he intended to
express.
As far as that goes,
the first line itself is not cited by Christ but rather uttered
as a cry by Christ on the cross as he is dying. In that context, it is strongly
evocative of desolation. The context in which the line is uttered colors its
meaning. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” has one sort of resonance
when it is expressed as a liturgical line in a context of ritual prayer, for
example. It has another sort of resonance entirely when it is expressed as a cry
by a lone man who is being tortured to death by political and religious authorities
hostile to him. (Eleonore Stump, Atonement [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018], 148)
Further Reading
Was
Jesus Abandoned by God on the Cross?
