Annotatio CLXI

”My God, I shall cry by day, and thou wilt not hear.” — Psalm 21:3

Jerome, in the commentaries on the Psalms which are said to be his, treating this verse, says:¹ “Christ cried on the cross, and prayed for his own: he was heard, and he was not heard. He was heard for the predestined — as in the eight thousands, or for those hundred and twenty and five hundred brethren; and he was not heard — that is, for those who were not predestined, concerning whom the Evangelist said, ‘His blood [be] upon us and upon our children.’”² St. Thomas, in the third volume of the theological Summa, question 21, article 4, judges that it is wrongly said or believed that Christ — who says of himself, “Father, I knew that thou always hearest me,”³ etc. — was at some time not heard, and especially crying out on the cross; since of him, crying on the cross, Paul says, “With a strong cry and tears offering [prayers], he was heard for his reverence.”⁴ Accordingly he judges that Christ prayed neither for all the crucifiers, nor even for all who were going to believe in him, but for those only who were predestined to eternal life,⁵ and that for these he was heard. But as to what the psalm says, “I shall cry, and thou wilt not hear,” he thinks it is to be understood not in respect to the desire of reason (which was always heard), but in respect to the affection of the flesh, refusing death. Thomas Cajetan, to the solution of St. Thomas, adds this also: that every prayer of Christ — both according to reason and according to the will of the flesh — was heard; because what the flesh sought, it demanded not with a fixed determination, but on this condition, “if it should so seem to the Father”: so that, if [it seemed] otherwise to him, then at last it asked to fulfil the Father’s will, saying, “Thy will be done.”⁶ Therefore, according to this last condition proposed by the flesh, Christ’s prayer was most fully heard.