The Forsaking

The real sacrifice of Jesus was not being crucified as people believe!

On the cross, before he surrendered his last breath, and according to the scriptures of Mathew and Mark, Jesus said: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Until today, and after relentless questioning of different kinds of people, from theologians, to scholars, and pundits, no one was able to give me a convincing or a logical explanation for why Jesus Christ, and we all know his life story and message, would pose this question to his God few seconds before he died. This statement has remained one of the biggest unresolved mysteries of Christianity.

The common explanation, that most of the clergy agrees on, is that Jesus was also a human, and just before he expired, he went through a moment of weakness and doubt in the power of God, as every human might experience in his life, hence the famous question. This explanation is sadly and blatantly ignoring whom Jesus was. If those who invented this explanation are serious then they are ignorant, and if they are not ignorant, then they are insulting our intelligence. In addition, the current belief is that, right after posing that question, Jesus carried on saying: “my God, I commit my soul to you”, putting God back in his right place. The truth is that this sentence was mentioned only in the scriptures of Luke, where the “why” question didn’t appear anywhere…

Other scholars argue that the real question was not about forsaking but about sacrificing, meaning Jesus really said: “my God, my God, why have you sacrificed me?” and to that the expected answer from all Christians is supposed to be: “to reconcile us with God”. This modifies slightly the nature of Christ’s cry; it is not anymore the complaint of a desperate victim, but the shout of a savior. This marginal change betters the image of Jesus Christ, but is not entirely satisfactory, especially to explain the regrets of Jesus the Nazarene!

I was not with Jesus when he was crucified, therefore I would never know for sure which words he uttered before he died. Nonetheless, if I base my thinking on what I know, understand and feel from the personality of Jesus, then I am inclined to say that he did say these last words, and he didn’t follow up this sentence with any other words, good or bad, about God. Moreover, my understanding of Jesus’ life and character, allows me to guess in a relative but effective accuracy what he meant through this famous question, which has occupied the mind of the Christians and their clergy for over 2000 years.

Jesus the Nazarene, as he was about to die, his past unfolded in his mind, with all the things he lived and felt deep down in his soul, so he said to himself:

• My luck, my life, why did you forsake me without a father and from a fooled mother, for whom my early existence was an unwanted and undesired burden?

• Why did you abandon me with a young girl not ready to be a mother and an old man as my adopted father? I neither got the tenderness of a mother nor the strength of a father.

• Why did you deprive me from the necessary wisdom to understand this little girl and young mother difficult situation and behavior?

• Why did you transform my heart into stone, not capable of forgiving her when she was seeking my nearness?

• Why did you allow me to disown her in front of my brothers, and wound her heart, as my unknown father did before me?

• Why did you leave me without the courage to face up to the past of the woman I loved, to stop running away from her, to ignore the stupid traditions of a society I criticized in every occasion, and to marry her?

• Why did you desert me surrounded by a bunch of dwarfs? The most intelligent of them is a traitor and the most loyal is an idiot.

• Why did you abandon me, alone and lonely?

• Why did you forsake me when I needed you and you did not forsake me when I wished you did?

Jesus Christ, the guide and the teacher, living the last moments of his short life and unexpected death, felt compelled to share with us his last vision. In that specific moment of clarity, he was overwhelmed with the original feelings that were at the inception of his entire journey. Disappointed, sad and enraged, he said to all of us:

• My God, my God, why did you forsake me and thus let me start what I started?

• Why did you make me convince all the people to believe, while you didn’t give me enough strength to believe myself?

• Why did you delude me in inciting people to live for an illusionary deliverance and an imaginary eternity?

• Why did you allow me to give parables that no one can possibly live?

• Why did you let me guide everyone on a path they believe I crossed, while I haven’t made any step into it?

• Why did you accept that I live the easy life and demand from others to live the miracle life?

• Why, after leading me to believe that I can, did you abandon me and made me understand that I cannot?

• Why did you leave me in a slow and long agony, humiliated among all these ugly people?

• Why did you deliver me a sacrificial offering on the altar of humanity? Is that your way to fulfill your greatness?

• Why did you vanish from my thoughts when I arrived to this level of clarity?

• Why did you instill in me the faith of your real existence, while you are merely an illusion of my imagination?

• Why did you desert my imagination leaving in it the mere truth, just few seconds before I surrendered my life?

• Why did you forsake me when the forsaking became useless?

The last teaching of Jesus is about who we are as humans, a mixture of instinct and intelligence (knowledge), feelings and thoughts, emotions and wisdom. Jesus tried to tell us that, up until the very end, we might not know who we are and what we want. He showed us that in the last instants preceding our awaiting death, our instinct might win over our intelligence, and we feel and understand that the God we were adoring, loving, fearing and praying for, all our lives, is nothing else but an illusion of our imagination. He alluded to us that in these last moments, the illusion abandons us and vanishes like a lightening that struck and disappeared, leaving us with the rumbling thunder of our anger against the hopes that were destroyed, and the flowing torrents of our tears from the disappointment in a life wasted between the illusion of an eternal God and the certainty of an ephemeral human being! Finally, he comforted us, by allowing us to follow his lead and join him in screaming, disappointed, sad and enraged: “my illusion, my imagination, why have you forsaken and sacrificed me?”

The real sacrifice of Jesus was not being crucified as people believe, but it was the uttering of these words, sacrificing thus all what he once believed in and made us believe in, in order to offer all of us the way to the true deliverance. By saying this famous sentence, he made it possible, to those who would reach his level of clarity, to be also delivered like he was, by crying out these exact same words!