Why Have You Forsaken Me

But if you insist on pushing your case further, I will find a way to answer you more strictly still. I will meet you with an exclamation of the Lord’s own and put the question to you with it: what is there for you to ask, or to argue, faced with that? You have him crying out in the middle of his suffering: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [a]

Either, then, the Son suffered while the Father “forsook” him — and in that case the Father suffered nothing, since he was the one doing the forsaking; or else, if it was the Father who suffered, what God was he calling out to? But this was the voice of flesh and soul, that is to say of a man — not of the Word and the Spirit, that is to say not of God. And it was uttered precisely in order to show that God cannot suffer: he “forsook” his Son in that he handed his human substance over to the suffering of death. The apostle saw this as well, when he writes, “If the Father did not spare his own Son.” Isaiah had seen it before him, when he declared, “And the Lord handed him over for our offenses.” That is how he “forsook” him — by not sparing him; “forsook” him — by handing him over.

In every other respect the Father did not forsake the Son, for it was into his Father’s hands that the Son entrusted his spirit. Indeed, the moment he had entrusted it, he died; and because the Spirit remained with the flesh, the flesh could not undergo death to its full extent — that is, in decay and dissolution. For the Son, then, to die amounted to being forsaken by the Father.

So the Son both dies and rises again, according to the Scriptures. It is the Son, too, who goes up to the heights of heaven, and who goes down to the inner parts of the earth. “He sits at the Father’s right hand” — not the Father at his own. Stephen sees him, as he is being stoned, still sitting at the right hand of God, where he will go on sitting until the Father makes his enemies his footstool. He will come again on the clouds of heaven, just as he appeared when he went up into heaven.

Meanwhile he has received from the Father the promised gift and has poured it out: the Holy Spirit, the third name in the Godhead and the third degree of the divine Majesty; the herald of God’s one Monarchy, and at the same time the interpreter of the Economy, for everyone who hears and accepts the words of the new prophecy; and “the one who leads into all truth” — the truth that is in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, according to the mystery of the teaching of Christ.

Otherwise, what you are holding is the Jewish faith, and it comes to this: to believe in one God in such a way as to refuse to reckon the Son alongside him, and after the Son the Spirit. What difference would there be between us and them, then, if not this very distinction that you are set on breaking down? What need would there be of the good news — which is the substance of the new covenant, and which lays it down that the law and the prophets lasted until John the Baptist — if from that point on the Father and the Son and the Spirit are not believed in as three, and as making one God only? [n]

God was pleased to renew his covenant with man in such a way that his oneness might be believed in after a new manner, through the Son and the Spirit: so that God, who in ancient times was not plainly understood, although he was declared through the Son and the Spirit, might now be known face to face, in his own proper names and persons.

Let them look to it, then — those “antichrists who deny the Father and the Son.” They deny the Father when they say that he is the same as the Son; and they deny the Son when they suppose him to be the same as the Father, assigning to each what is not his and taking away from each what is. But “whoever confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” — not the Father — “God lives in him, and he in God.” Do we not believe God’s testimony, the testimony he has given us about his Son? “Whoever does not have the Son does not have life.” And the man who believes him to be anything other than the Son does not have the Son.