Hi Chris,

Thanks for the question.

Not being an official theologian, let me share with you what the Catechism states and submit my answer to the Magisterium of the Church for any correction.

For brevity, I'll just quote from the In Brief for this section. If you wish to go theologically deeper and try to understand (more|better), which I would encourage you to do, click on the link title below:

• Paragraph 1. The Son of God Became Man.

and read down through paragraph 478.

You said:

• Is it true that Jesus suffered a spiritual separation from God while on the Cross
  when He said:
  
  "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
  (Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46)

I'd be interested in what my colleague's think but here's my two cents.

When you said, from God, I'm assuming you mean God, the Father, seeing that Our Lord is the God in the Second Person of the Trinity.

These paragraphs from the Catechism may help:

One might say He suffered a spiritual separation only to the extent that His Will was submissive to the Father's Will but seeing His Will was one with the Father, and Jesus is consubstantial, meaning of one substance, with the Father, I would tend to say,

No, He did not suffer a spiritual separation from the Father because His Will was:

• submissive and
• one with the Father's Will.

CCC 475 states:

What you should derive from my No Answer is the love the Trinity has for us in undoing Adam's sin.

That's my two cents.

Mike

Chris —

I think that Mike gave a good response, taking spiritual in the true and technical sense however, we often use the word in the United States to mean not really, but in feeling.

In that sense, it is true that Christ in His human nature somehow mysteriously felt abandoned by the Father. He took on that separation from God (though not in Will) that we had deserved, and felt intellectually and emotionally the lack of the presence of the Father.

Nevertheless, as the Psalm He spoke from (Psalm 22:1) immediately shows, on this occasion He spoke in confidence that the Father would rescue Him so He was not separated from the Father morally, but, in a way, existentially.

Mary Ann

Hi, guys —

Jesus' point here was not to express separation from God. He was citing the first words of a Messianic psalm (Psalm 22). The Jews knew Scripture backwards and forwards, and there were no chapters and verses, so they'd refer to Scripture by the first few words, much like we refer to the Our Father.

Jesus' point was to say that he was fulfilling this Psalm. For example, the Psalm says,

And,

Obviously fulfilled at His Crucifixion.

Read the whole psalm to get a flavor of what Jesus was saying. He wasn't grousing about being abandoned by God, he was proclaiming a Messianic Psalm about Himself.

Eric

Chris,

I will add another thought to these very good answers. It's important to remember though, none of this is defined by the Church, so we are giving educated guesses, through the use of reason, based on the data of how the Church defines the nature of Christ and the nature of sin.

We know the only thing that separates man from God is sin, and that Jesus did not sin. However, Isaiah prophesied that Christ bore our sins (Isaiah 53:4-6) and St. Paul states that Christ became sin on the Cross so that we may be saved. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

• What might this be referring to?

Like all people who bear the sin of Adam in their nature, we might say that Jesus bore original sin and all of the repented sins of every individual human being — past, present, and future — in His Nature on the Cross. When He died on the Cross, so too did all these sins, including the ones we repented of; they died in His Flesh. When He rises from death on the third day, in His new glorified state, He is then ready to share His divine Life and Spirit with us, His extended body, the Church.

So perhaps Jesus, in His Human nature, did for a moment feel alienated from the Father, and even from His own divine nature, by virtue of temporarily bearing the sins of the world on the Cross. His Divine Person was never separated from the Father but His human Nature that bore our sins properly felt that way. The Psalm that Jesus recites ends well, as Eric noted, but the psalmist did feel temporary abandonment at the beginning.

So this consideration is summed up by saying:

Christ's Human nature became sin on the Cross — our sins, not His — and when His Human nature died, so did our sins that are absolved in Confession. When He rose, so too did all human nature rise to the opportunity of sharing His Divine Life.

Peace,

Paul