"Son, there is your mother."
And from that time Mary, the mother of Jesus, lived with the disciple John, as though he was her own son.
It was now noon, and Jesus had been upon the cross three long, terrible hours; the sun beating with its rays upon his head. Just at noon a sudden darkness came over the sky and the earth, and the darkness did not pass away until three o'clock. This darkness alarmed the people, and those who had been speaking to Jesus words of contempt, now stood still, full of fear.
At about three o'clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice these words:
"My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"
These are the opening words of the twenty-second psalm, written many hundred years before as a prophecy of what Christ should suffer. It may be that Jesus spoke those words to show that all his suffering had been foretold long before. Jesus in speaking those words used the old Hebrew tongue, the language in which the psalm was written. In the old Hebrew the words, "My God! My God!" were "Eloi! Eloi!" But the language had changed so greatly since the psalms were written that the people who heard him did not understand the words. Some said, "He is calling upon Elijah the prophet to help him!"
Then Jesus spoke again and said:
"I am thirsty."
There was standing by a jar full of vinegar. One of the men took a sponge, soaked it in the vinegar, fastened it on the end of a stick, and placed it on the lips of Jesus. This also had been foretold in the sixty-ninth psalm, in the words,
"In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink."