“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” is one of the most unsettling statements Jesus made. We expect Him to speak about trusting the Father, obeying His will, and knowing His presence. On the cross, however, He cries out in language that expresses abandonment. We shouldn’t rush past those words simply because they’re difficult to fit into our understanding of Him.
Matthew and Mark both record the cry. It comes during the darkness surrounding His crucifixion, as He approaches death. The words are also the opening of Psalm 22, which gives us an important setting for understanding them. I believe Jesus was expressing a genuine sense of abandonment while praying through the words of Scripture, without the Father and Son becoming separated within God’s being.
Jesus Was Praying Psalm 22
Psalm 22 begins with the question Jesus voiced. Its speaker cries to God while suffering, enduring mockery, and waiting for help. Later in the psalm, the account turns toward praise and confidence that God has heard. The whole movement of the prayer deserves attention.
The psalm includes details that Christians recognize in the crucifixion accounts, including mockery and the division of clothing. These connections help readers understand Jesus as the righteous sufferer whose distress doesn’t have the final word. His quotation places His suffering within Israel’s language of lament and hope.
That connection doesn’t mean He was merely giving a Scripture reference. People can pray biblical words because those words express what they’re experiencing. Quoting a lament and genuinely lamenting aren’t competing explanations. Jesus could be drawing attention to the psalm while also speaking from profound anguish.
His Sense of Abandonment Was Real
We sometimes protect Jesus’ deity by making His human experiences less real. His hunger becomes something He could effortlessly dismiss, His temptation becomes a demonstration, and His anguish becomes a lesson for observers. But the incarnation means that the Son entered human life, including its suffering. His distress on the cross deserves the same seriousness we give His physical pain.
I understand His cry as expressing what abandonment felt like in that moment. He had been betrayed, rejected, mocked, and subjected to a brutal death. The Father wasn’t delivering Him from the ordeal. The one who had lived in faithful dependence on God was enduring suffering without the rescue He might otherwise have received.
Calling this a sense of abandonment doesn’t make it imaginary or insignificant. Our experience of God’s presence affects us deeply, particularly when we’re suffering. We don’t need to describe a rupture within the Trinity to recognize the depth of what Jesus endured. His human anguish was real even if we can’t fully explain its relationship to His divine identity.
We should also be careful about claiming access to everything happening within Him. The Gospels record His words and the circumstances, but they don’t give us a complete account of His consciousness. An interpretation should help us understand the cry without pretending to know more than the texts reveal.
Did the Father Stop Loving Him?
A familiar explanation says that the Father turned away because Jesus had taken our sin upon Himself. Some presentations go further and suggest that God could no longer bear to look at Him. The New Testament certainly connects Jesus’ death with His bearing sin. But the specific picture of the Father becoming unable to look at His Son is an interpretation, not a statement in the crucifixion accounts.
Paul says that Christ, who knew no sin, was made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). That doesn’t mean He became morally corrupt. I understand it as His taking our position as the bearer of sin while remaining faithful and holy. We shouldn’t turn that saving work into a claim that Jesus became personally hateful to the Father.
The same passage says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. That keeps the cross connected to God’s initiative and love. The Father and Son weren’t working toward opposing goals, with Jesus somehow rescuing us from a Father who didn’t want us. The Son’s willing sacrifice belonged to the divine work of reconciliation.
Some Christians understand the cry as a particular experience of judgment or the withdrawal of comforting fellowship while the Father’s love remains unchanged. Others emphasize the lament and the absence of deliverance. Those explanations differ, but we should distinguish them from the much stronger claim that the Father ceased loving the Son.
Was the Trinity Broken Apart?
I don’t believe the Father and Son became separated within God’s being. Christian teaching about the Trinity affirms one God, not a collection of divine individuals whose unity can temporarily dissolve. If the cross required God to stop being God as Christians understand Him, that would create a larger problem than the explanation solves.
This doesn’t mean nothing changed in Jesus’ experience. The incarnate Son genuinely suffered and died. He endured things that don’t describe the Father’s experience in the same way. Distinguishing those experiences helps us take His humanity seriously without imagining that the divine being was torn apart.
The word “forsaken” can concern being left without intervention or deliverance. It doesn’t automatically establish a separation in divine nature. The Father allowed Jesus to go through death rather than rescuing Him from it. That is a profound reality, but it isn’t the same claim as saying that Father and Son ceased to be united as God.
We shouldn’t use theological language to make the cross painless, either. Saying that the Trinity remained undivided doesn’t tell us that Jesus felt reassured at every moment. It establishes a boundary for our explanation while leaving room for the full depth of His human suffering.
His Cry Was Still Addressed to God
Notice that Jesus said, “My God.” Even in the language of abandonment, He continued to address the one whose absence He was expressing. The question was a prayer. His anguish didn’t mean He had stopped turning toward God.
Luke also records Jesus entrusting His spirit into the Father’s hands as He died (Luke 23:46). We should allow that statement to stand alongside the cry recorded by Matthew and Mark. Together, they give us anguish and trust within the accounts of His death. We don’t need to make one statement cancel the other.
Before His arrest, Jesus had also told the disciples that they would scatter and leave Him alone, yet the Father would be with Him (John 16:32). That doesn’t remove every difficulty in understanding the cross. It does caution us against building a complete account of His relationship with the Father from one sentence considered in isolation.
Faith and distress can exist together. A person may continue to trust God while struggling to perceive His presence or understand His actions. Jesus’ cry helps us recognize that asking a painful question isn’t necessarily an act of rebellion. Sometimes it is the form prayer takes when suffering has stripped away our ability to say much else.
What This Means When We Feel Forsaken
Christians sometimes assume that strong faith should prevent feelings of abandonment. When those feelings come, they conclude that they must have done something wrong or failed to believe properly. Jesus’ cry gives us reason to question that assumption. Profound suffering can include a sense of God’s absence without proving that the sufferer has become unfaithful.
It also gives us permission to pray honestly. We don’t have to manufacture cheerful language before approaching God. We can bring confusion, grief, and questions to Him while still seeking His help. Honest lament gives those experiences a place within prayer.
My understanding is that Jesus voiced a genuine sense of abandonment as He endured the cross, using the words of a psalm that holds suffering and hope together. The Father didn’t rescue Him from death, but death wasn’t the end of His mission. We may not fully understand everything contained in that cry. We can still hear in it the voice of a Savior who knows what it is to suffer and continue calling out to God.