But the supposition that Jesus cries for Elijah is significant in its own right. Elijah was a major figure of Jewish prophecy. In Christian Bibles, the Old Testament ends with a promise of Elijah’s coming “before the great and terrible day of Yahweh” (Mal 4:5). Earlier in Matthew, when the disciples ask about Elijah, Jesus identifies John the Baptist as the Elijah who comes to “restore all things” (17:11). First-century Jews expected Elijah’s advent to wind up the prophetic clock and trigger the arrival of the kingdom. Jesus’s call for Elijah was a call for the new creation. The mockery of the Jewish leaders has an eschatological edge: “Let’s see if Elijah comes. Let’s see if Jesus’s sufferings are the birth pangs of the kingdom.”
Funny thing is, the great and terrible day of the Lord does arrive, on Golgotha, in the darkness on a Friday afternoon. Everything Israel hoped for starts happening as soon as Jesus’s cry fades to silence.
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Then there is this one by the editor, which is another instance of the magazine's Judeo-Christian leanings... Learning From the Jewish Easter by R. R. Reno. In so far as it reflects some memory of God's wondrous deeds and the tradition of the Israelites it may be somewhat useful, but the Seder meal is a post-Christian development necessitated by the destruction of the Temple (and thus the resulting inability to perform the Paschal sacrifices), and thus a product of Talmudic Judaism and not of the religion of the Israelites.
This sort of Judeo-Christian sleight-of-hand is not just misleading but really deceitful.
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