“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”—St. Matt. xxvii. 46; St. Mark xv. 34.

There are three peculiar and distinguishing features of this fourth word which our Saviour uttered from His Cross.

1. It is the only one of the Seven which finds a place in the earliest record of our Lord’s life, contained in the matter common to St. Matthew and St. Mark.

2. It is the only one which has been preserved to us in the original Aramaic, in the very syllables which were formed by the lips of Christ.

3. It is the only one which He is said to have “shouted” (εβοησεν), under the extremity of some overpowering emotion.

In fact, we are here at the very heart of the Passion. In this dread cry I see something of the height of the Divine love, something of the depths of my own sin.

The meaning of this dread “cry” is not perhaps so difficult to understand as some have thought. It is to be found in the entire reality of that human nature

which the Son of God assumed—not merely a human body, but a human consciousness like our own; in the thoroughness with which He identified Himself with every phase of our experience, the knowledge of personal sin alone excepted.

In this identification more was involved than we commonly think. Sin cannot be in a world of which the constitution is the expression of the Mind of God, without introducing therein a fatal element of discord, confusion, and pain. To all consequences of sin the Saviour necessarily submitted Himself, by the mere fact of His entry into a world which sin had disordered. In respect of the external consequences, this is abundantly clear. We have seen, and it is, in fact, obvious, that His sufferings and Death were the result of the actual sins of men. But there were, it is important to remember, internal sufferings attributable to the same cause. We are at once reminded of His tears over the doomed city, doomed by the persistent refusal to recognise the Divine voice. But we are here on still deeper ground. The true explanation of the fourth word is to be found in that great principle which St. Paul has laid down in a familiar, but little understood, sentence: “the sting of death is sin.”

The simplest and most obvious meaning of these words is that, whatever be the physiological meaning and necessity of human death, its peculiar horror and dread, that which makes death to be what it is