Thanks be for short, tightly written books – books that can be read in a day or two, in a couple of sittings, as the occasion demands.

James Martin’s Seven Last Words is such a book.  It emerged out of a set of reflections on the “seven last words of Christ” that Fr. Martin – the well-known Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of America – delivered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York during Holy Week a couple of years ago.   The “seven last words” devotion emphasizes the extraordinary concision of the Gospel texts, and Fr. Martin responds with a like concision, drawing out of those last words seven insights into aspects of human experience that Jesus understood – understands – because he went through them himself.

I was struck especially by a passage, rooted in the work of the great scripture scholar Raymond Brown, S.S., where Fr. Martin focuses on a single pair of words, and on the way Jesus’s turning away from the one word and toward the other suggests the profound abandonment he felt on the cross:

“When Jesus speaks to the Father in the garden, he says, `Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me …’ Abba is a familiar way of speaking, something like saying, `Dad.’  (Both times I have visited Jerusalem on pilgrimage, I have seen, in the crowded city streets, young children running up to catch up with their fathers shouting, `Abba! Abba!’

“But on the cross, when Jesus says, `My God, my God,’ he uses the Aramaic word Eloi (or the Hebrew Eli, depending on the Gospel).   That’s a more formal way of speaking to God.   The shift from the familiar Abba in the garden to the more formal Eloi on the cross is heartbreaking.  Jesus’s feeling of distance, then, reveals itself not only in the scream and not only in the line of the psalm that he utters,  but also in the word Eloi.”

It really is heartbreaking.  “Abandonment” is the word Fr. Martin and many others use to characterize what Jesus must have feel on the cross just then.  But the shift from one name to the other suggests a more precise emotion.   Just then, Jesus feels “estranged” from his father – feels like a stranger to him.  

The illustration is “The Black Crucifixion” (1963), by Fritz Eichenberg.