How Jesus’ Final Words Affirm The Humanity Of The Unborn

This week is Holy Week for Christians around the world, some of the most significant days on our calendar, moving from the celebration of Palm Sunday through the darkness of Good Friday to the joy of Easter morning. I was in church last Sunday as they were reading the passion narrative, the account of Christ’s final hours, when something caught my attention that I had not paid attention to before.

When Jesus cries out from the cross, some of the bystanders think he is calling for Elijah. I had read past this detail countless times. Elijah was a towering figure in Jewish history. But why would a crowd standing near a dying man hear the name Elijah specifically? Why that name and not something else?

He cried out in Aramaic, the everyday language of Galilee, the tongue His mother spoke to Him: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.” My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And in Aramaic, Eli (my God) sounds nearly identical to the first syllables of Eliyahu, which is Elijah. They share the same root. A dying man forcing sound through His chest in the noise of a crowd, and El-ee becomes El-ee-ya fast enough. The confusion only makes sense if you know which language was being spoken.

That small detail pulled me into something much larger.

Jesus was not crying out in wordless anguish. He was quoting a psalm. In first-century Jewish practice, quoting the first line of a psalm invoked the entire text, the way you might cite a chapter by its opening sentence. The Mishnah records that rabbis tested students by reciting a psalm’s opening line and watching them complete it from memory. Every learned person at the cross who heard those first words would have known immediately which psalm He was praying and would have begun running through the rest of it in their mind. (Read more from “How Jesus’ Final Words Affirm The Humanity Of The Unborn” HERE)