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Thursday, August 20, 2009

Excerpt from The Furious Longing of God

"And then a moment in Jesus' life that is more shrouded in mystery, denser with misunderstanding and incomprehensibility than perhaps any other.
Jesus, the eternally beloved Son of the Father, is abandoned by His Abba. Sin appears to have its way over the entire world. For the first time since He was an infant, Jesus feels Himself to be without the sustaining presence of His Abba, and inner bleakness of forsaken aloneness in the desolation of abandonment.
In a scream that surely split the sky:
My God, My Abba. Why, Why Have You Forsaken Me Now?

St. John of the Cross said it will never ever be given to any human heart to understand the depth of desolation, utter abandonment, indescribable, loneliness and complete forsakenness that lay behind Jesus' cry. But even in that cry, there is no indication that Jesus ever lost trust or hope or confidence in His Abba.

After 35 years of praying over the passion and death narratives in Luke's gospel, French biblical scholar Pierre Benoit believed that the Abba of Jesus spoke to His Son as He hung naked, nailed to the wood with spit dripping down His face, His body bathed in blood. And Benoit believes the words Abba spoke were words from the Hebrew Scriptures, Song of Songs 2:10-14

Come now, my love. My lovely one.
Come.

For You, the winter has passed
the snows are over and gone
The flowers appear in the land,
the season of joyful songs has come.

The cooing of the turtledove is heard in our land

Come now, my love. My lovely on.
Come. "

-Brennan Manning

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