The dying words of Christ on the cross are an Avataric poignancy, expressing the love of God for Man. If only Man recognises it! Perhaps then he won’t any more be a Man! In his intimate personal letter, dated 28 September 1928, Romain Rolland writes to Dilip Kumar Roy as follows:

On the cross he cried out at the last moment: “Eli, Eli, lamma sabactani?”—“My father, my father, why hast thou forsaken me?” This tragic cry moves me to my depths even now every time I hark back to it… It is perhaps the most poignant tragedy that has ever been enacted under the vault of the sky! Picture to yourself a heroic Godhead, a God among men, who, wanting to sacrifice himself for humanity, ends on the point of winning Immortality by losing faith in his mission! And why? Because, having been married to mortal condition, he had perforce, to plumb the depths of human suffering and humiliation of mortal capitulation. Could there be anything more moving, more sublime?

The “My God, my God”-passage as we have in St Matthew is as follows:

He trusted in God let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God.

The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, E’li, E’li, la-ma sa-bach-tha-ni? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for E’li-as.

And straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink.

The rest said, Let be, let us see whether E’li-as will come to save him.

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

“Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”—asks St Luke. The perception of Romain Rolland that “having been married to mortal condition, he [Christ] had perforce, to plumb the depths of human suffering and humiliation of mortal capitulation” is far deeper than the small human mind can comprehend. The full occult-spiritual connotation of it comes out in Narad’s description of the crucifixion event in Savitri. He was responding to Savitri’s mother Malawi about the problem of evil and tells her “he who would save the race must share the pain, pay the debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind, must sign the salvation’s testament with his blood. Only by the dread mysterious sacrifice offered by God’s martyred body for the world can the dark account be settled.” Indeed, (Savitri, pp. 445-46)

Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls

His crucified voice proclaims, `I, I am God;'

`Yes, all is God,' peals back Heaven's deathless call.

How can the suffering mortal be left behind? If the seed of Godhead sleeps in his heart, and the flower of Godhead grows on the world-tree surely, then, all shall discover God in self and things. When God's messenger comes to help the world and lead the soul of earth to higher things, he too must carry the yoke he came to unloose. (pp. 446-47)

Even worse may be the cost, direr the pain:

His large identity and all-harbouring love

Shall bring the cosmic anguish into his depths,

The sorrow of all living things shall come

And knock at his doors and live within his house;

A dreadful cord of sympathy can tie

All suffering into his single grief and make

All agony in all the worlds his own…

He dies that the world may be new-born and live.

It is for this spiritually destitute that the divine soul comes and accepts the law of pain, that thus alone can he redeem his lot, the lot of his suffering mortality. “See, how compassionate your Swami is,” cried Girish to his friend Sadananda—as we read it in the life of Vivekananda.