Church Fathers Commentary Matthew 27:45-50

"Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And some of them stood there, when they heard it, said, This man calleth Elijah. And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink. And the rest said, Let be; let us see whether Elijah cometh to save him. And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit." — Matthew 27:45-50 (ASV)

Pseudo-Chrysostom: Creation could not bear the outrage offered to the Creator, which is why the sun withdrew its beams, so that it might not look upon the crime of these impious men.¹

Origen of Alexandria: Some take this text as an occasion to raise objections against the truth of the Gospel. Indeed, from the beginning, eclipses of the sun have happened at their proper times. However, an eclipse brought about by the ordinary course of nature could only happen when the sun and moon come together, with the moon passing underneath and intercepting the sun's rays.

But at the time of Christ's passion, it is clear this was not the case, because it was the Passover feast, which was customarily celebrated when the moon was full.

Some believers, desiring to produce an answer to this objection, have said that this eclipse, like the other wonders, was an exception to the established laws of nature.

Pseudo-Dionysius: When we were together at Heliopolis, we both observed the moon interfering with the sun quite unexpectedly, for it was not the season of their conjunction. Then, from the ninth hour until evening, it continued in a direct line between us and the sun, something beyond the power of nature.

We saw this darkening begin from the east, pass to the far edge of the sun's disk, and then return the same way—the exact opposite of an ordinary eclipse.²

St. John Chrysostom: This darkness lasted for three hours, while an eclipse is brief and not long-lasting, as those who have studied the matter know.³

Origen of Alexandria: Against this, the people of this world ask: How is it that among the Greeks and Barbarians, who have made observations of these things, not one has recorded such a remarkable phenomenon? Phlegon has indeed recorded such an event happening in the time of Tiberius Caesar, but he has not mentioned that it was at the full moon. Therefore, I think that this event, like the other miracles that took place at the Passion—the tearing of the veil and the earthquake—was also confined to Jerusalem.

Or, if anyone chooses, it may be extended to the whole of Judea. As in the book of Kings, Obadiah said to Elijah, As the Lord your God lives, there is no nation or kingdom where my lord has not sent to look for you (1 Kings 18:10), meaning that he had been sought in the countries surrounding Judea. Accordingly, we might suppose that many dense clouds were brought together over Jerusalem and Judea, enough to produce thick darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour.

For we understand that two creatures were created on the sixth day: the beasts before the sixth hour, and man on the sixth. Therefore, it was fitting that He who died for the salvation of humanity should be crucified at the sixth hour, and for this reason, darkness should be over the whole earth from the sixth to the ninth hour.

And just as darkness was brought upon the Egyptians who held the servants of God in bondage when Moses stretched out his hands toward heaven, so also when Christ stretched out His hands on the cross to heaven at the sixth hour, darkness came over all the people who had cried out, "Crucify him." They were deprived of all light as a sign of the darkness that would come and envelop the whole Jewish people. Furthermore, under Moses, there was darkness over the land of Egypt for three days, but all the children of Israel had light. So under Christ, there was darkness over all Judea for three hours, because for their sins they were deprived of the light of God the Father, the splendor of Christ, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

But over the rest of the earth there is light, which everywhere illumines the Church of God in Christ. And if there was darkness over Judea until the ninth hour, it is clear that light returned to them again after that; so, when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, then all Israel will be saved (Romans 11:25).

St. John Chrysostom: Alternatively, the wonder was that the darkness was over the whole earth, which had never happened before, except in Egypt at the time when the Passover was celebrated; for the things done then were a type of these events. And consider the time when this was done: at mid-day, while it was day over the whole world, so that all the inhabitants of the earth might perceive it.

This is the sign He promised to those who asked Him, An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah (Matthew 12:39), alluding to His cross and resurrection. And it was a much greater wonder that this should happen when He was fastened to the cross than when He was walking freely on the earth.

Surely this was enough to convert them, not by the greatness of the miracle alone, but because it was done only after all these instances of their frenzy, when their rage had passed, when they had said everything they wanted to, and were filled with taunts and jeers. But why did they not all wonder and conclude Him to be God? Because the human race was at that time plunged in extreme apathy and vice. This wonder was only one, it passed quickly, and no one cared to investigate its cause. Or perhaps they attributed it to an eclipse or some other natural phenomenon.

And for this reason, He shortly afterwards lifts up His voice to show that He is still alive and that He Himself performed this miracle: And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice... etc.

St. Jerome: He used the beginning of the twenty-second Psalm.ⁱ The clause in the middle of the verse, Look upon me, is an addition, for the Hebrew has only Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, that is, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

It is therefore impious to think that this Psalm was spoken from the perspective of David, Esther, or Mordecai, when passages taken from it by the Evangelist are understood to be about the Savior, such as, They parted my garments among them, and, They pierced my hands.

St. John Chrysostom: He uttered this word of prophecy so that He might bear witness to the Old Testament to the very last hour, and so they might see that He honors the Father and is not against God. For this reason also, He used the Hebrew tongue, so that what He said might be intelligible to them.

Origen of Alexandria: But we must ask: What does it mean that Christ is forsaken by God? Some, unable to explain how Christ could be forsaken by God, say that this was spoken out of humility. But you will be able to clearly understand His meaning if you compare the glory He had with the Father to the shame He despised when He endured the cross.

St. Hilary of Poitiers: From these words, heretics contend either that God the Word was entirely absorbed into the soul when it functioned as a soul in giving life to the body, or that Christ could not have been born a man because the Divine Word dwelt in Him in the same way as a prophetic spirit.

They argue as if Jesus Christ were a man of ordinary soul and body, having His beginning when He began to be a man, and thus, now deserted upon the withdrawal of the protection of God's word, cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or they argue that the nature of the Word was transformed into a soul, and that Christ, who had depended in all things upon His Father's support, now deserted and left to die, mourns over this desertion and pleads with Him as He departs.⁴

But amidst these impious and feeble opinions, the faith of the Church, grounded in Apostolic teaching, does not divide Christ, as if He should be considered Son of God and not Son of Man. The complaint of being deserted is the weakness of the dying man; the promise of Paradise is the kingdom of the living God. You have Him complaining that He is left to death, and thus He is Man; you have Him, as He is dying, declaring that He reigns in Paradise, and thus He is God. Do not wonder, then, at the humility of these words, when you know the form of a servant and see the offense of the cross.

Glossa Ordinaria: God is said to have forsaken Him in death because He exposed Him to the power of His persecutors; He withdrew His protection but did not break the union.⁵

Origen of Alexandria: When He saw darkness over the whole land of Judea, He said this, "Father, why have you forsaken me?" meaning, "Why have you given Me over, exhausted, to such sufferings, so that the people who were honored by you may receive the consequences of what they have dared against Me, and be deprived of the light of your countenance?"

Also, "You have forsaken Me for the salvation of the Gentiles. But what good have the Gentiles who have believed done, that I should deliver them from the evil one by shedding My precious blood on the ground for them? Or will they, for whom I suffer these things, ever do anything worthy of them?" Or, foreseeing the sins of those for whom He suffered, He said, Why have you forsaken me? so that I should become like one who gathers stubble in the harvest, and gleanings in the vintage (Micah 9:1).

But you must not imagine that the Savior said this in a merely human way because of the misery that surrounded Him on the cross. For if you take it so, you will not hear His "loud voice" and mighty words, which point to something great that is hidden.

Rabanus Maurus: Alternatively, the Savior said this as carrying within Him our feelings, as we, when placed in danger, think ourselves forsaken by God. Human nature was forsaken by God because of its sins, and the Son of God, becoming our Advocate, laments the misery of those whose guilt He took upon Himself.ⁱ He thereby shows how those who sin ought to mourn, when He who never sinned mourned in this way.

St. Jerome: It follows, Some of them who stood by... etc.; "some," not all, whom I suppose were Roman soldiers, ignorant of Hebrew, who thought from the words "Eli, Eli" that He was calling on Elijah. But if we prefer to suppose they were Jews, they did it in their usual way, so that they might accuse the Lord of weakness for invoking Elijah.

Pseudo-Chrysostom: Thus the Source of living water is made to drink vinegar, the Giver of honey is fed with gall, Forgiveness is scourged, Acquittal is condemned, Majesty is mocked, Virtue is ridiculed, and the Bestower of showers is repaid with spitting.⁶

St. Hilary of Poitiers: Vinegar is wine that has turned sour, either from neglect or a fault in the vessel. Wine represents the honor of immortality, or virtue. When this, then, had turned sour in Adam, Christ took and drank it from the hands of the Gentiles. It is offered to Him on a reed and a sponge; that is, He took from the bodies of the Gentiles a spoiled and corrupted immortality, and transfused into Himself that which was spoiled in us, making it a mixture of immortality.

Remigius of Auxerre: Alternatively, the Jews, having degenerated from the wine of the Patriarchs and Prophets, were the vinegar; they had deceitful hearts, like the winding holes and hollows in a sponge. The reed signifies Sacred Scripture, which was fulfilled in this action. For just as we call what the tongue utters a "tongue"—for example, the Hebrew tongue or the Greek tongue—so the writing or letters that the reed produces, we may call a "reed."

Origen of Alexandria: And perhaps all who know ecclesiastical doctrine but live wrongly have given Him wine mixed with gall to drink; but those who attribute false opinions to Christ are the ones filling a sponge with vinegar, placing it on the reed of Scripture, and putting it to His mouth.

Rabanus Maurus: The soldiers, misunderstanding the sound of the Lord's words, foolishly looked for the coming of Elijah. But God, whom the Savior invoked in the Hebrew tongue, was ever inseparably with Him.

St. Augustine of Hippo: When nothing of suffering remains to be endured, death still lingers, knowing that it has no claim there. The ancient foe suspected something unusual. This man, first and only, he found having no sin, free from guilt, owing nothing to the laws of his jurisdiction. But leagued with Jewish madness, Death comes again to the assault and desperately invades the Life-giver.⁷

And Jesus, when He had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.

Why should we be offended that Christ came from the bosom of the Father to take upon Himself our bondage, so that He might give us His freedom; to take upon Himself our death, so that we might be set free by His death? By despising death He exalted us mortals into gods and counted those of earth worthy of the things of heaven. For seeing that the divine power shines forth so brilliantly in the contemplation of its works, it is an argument of boundless love that it suffers for its subjects and dies for its servants. This, then, was the first cause of the Lord's Passion: that He wanted it to be known how great God's love is for humanity, for He desired to be loved rather than feared.

The second cause was that He might abolish with even greater justice the sentence of death which He had justly passed. For as the first man had by guilt incurred death through God's sentence and handed the same down to his posterity, the second Man, who knew no sin, came from heaven so that death might be condemned—death which, when commissioned to seize the guilty, had presumed to touch the Author of sinlessness. And it is no wonder if He laid down for us what He had taken from us, namely, His life, when He has done other such great things for us and bestowed so much on us.

Pseudo-Augustine: Far be it from the faithful to suspect that Christ experienced our death in such a way that Life itself (as far as it can) ceased to live. If this had been so, how could anything have been said to live during those three days, if the Fountain of Life itself had dried up? Therefore, Christ's Godhead experienced death through its participation in humanity and human feeling, which it had voluntarily taken upon itself; but it did not lose the properties of its nature, by which it gives life to all things.⁸

For when we die, the loss of life by the body is without doubt not the destruction of the soul. Rather, the soul, in leaving the body, does not lose its own properties but only lets go of what it had enlivened. As far as it is able, it produces the death of something else, but it itself defies death. To speak now of the Savior's soul, it could depart from His body for the space of three days without being destroyed, even by the common laws of death, and without taking into account the indwelling Godhead and His singular righteousness.

For I believe that the Son of God did not die as a punishment for unrighteousness, which He did not have at all, but according to the law of that nature which He took upon Himself for the redemption of the human race.

St. John of Damascus: Although He died as a man, and His holy soul was separated from His unstained body, yet His Godhead remained inseparable from either His body or His soul. Yet the one Person was not divided into two, for as both body and soul had an existence in the Person of the Word from the beginning, so they did also in death. For neither the soul nor the body ever had a person of their own, apart from the Person of the Word.

St. Jerome: It was a mark of divine power in Him to dismiss His spirit in this way, as He Himself had said, No man can take my life from me, but I lay it down and take it again (John 10:18).

For by "the ghost" in this place, we understand the soul. It is so called either because it is what makes the body alive or spiritual, or because the substance of the soul itself is spirit, according to what is written: You take away their breath, and they die (Psalm 104:29).

St. John Chrysostom: Also, for this reason He cried out with a loud voice: to show that this was done by His own power. For by crying out with a loud voice while dying, He showed undeniably that He was the true God, because a person at the point of death can scarcely utter even a feeble sound.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Luke mentions the words that He cried out: Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.⁹

St. Hilary of Poitiers: Or, He gave up His spirit with a loud voice, in grief that He was not carrying the sins of all people.

1. in Hom. de Cruce et Latr.
2. ad Polycarp. Ep. 7
3. Hom. lxxxviii
4. de Trin. x. 50 etc.
5. non occ.
6. Hom. vi in Pass. (vol iii, p. 733)
7. in Serm., non occ.
8. Vigil cont. Felicianum, 14
9. de Cons. Ev., iii, 18