He quoted the first line of Psalm 22, and that psalm does not stay where it starts. The harder question is whether the Father actually left, and we think the text says no.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me is the first line of Psalm 22, quoted out loud from the cross. In a world without verse numbers, saying a psalm's opening line was how you referenced the whole psalm.
And Psalm 22 does not stay where it starts. It runs through imagery that matches the crucifixion in unsettling detail, and then turns, and ends in public praise and vindication. He chose words that carry an ending.
The harder question underneath is whether the Father actually turned away at that moment. A lot of preaching says yes. We think the text says no, and the strongest reason comes from something Jesus said a few hours earlier.
“And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? which means My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Mark 15:34Paul Berge of Luther Seminary notes that this is the moment, at three o'clock, when Jesus cries out with a loud voice in Aramaic, and that the bystanders interpret it as a call for Elijah.
Mark and Matthew both preserve the sound of the words and then translate them. They rarely do that. It suggests these words were remembered exactly as spoken rather than summarized.
Eloi sounds enough like Eliyahu that bystanders think He is calling Elijah. Which tells you the cry was loud, distinct, and heard by people who were not close enough to follow it.
Mark says it twice, here and at the moment of death. Crucifixion killed by suffocation, so volume at that stage costs something. This was not a whisper.
The one thing everybody at that execution would have recognized. A psalm, in the mouth of a dying rabbi, at three in the afternoon.
Psalm 22 opens in what looks like abandonment and contains details that are difficult to read casually.
All who see me mock me, hurl insults, shaking their heads. He trusts in the LORD, let the LORD rescue him. In Matthew 27:43 the crowd says almost exactly that.
They pierce my hands and my feet, in the reading most English Bibles follow. A description written centuries before crucifixion was in use in that region.
They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. All four gospels record the soldiers doing this.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. John records Jesus saying I am thirsty.
Then, in the middle of verse 21, the psalm turns with no explanation. No rescue is described and no change in circumstances is reported. It simply moves into praise, and the last third is about telling future generations, about the poor eating and being satisfied, and about people not yet born being told what He has done.
Quoting line one invoked all of it. The people who knew the psalm knew where it was going.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
This is where the subject gets serious, because the common answer has consequences. The teaching usually goes that God cannot look on sin, so at the cross the Father turned His face away and the Son was genuinely abandoned.
We do not teach that, and here is why. Three things in Scripture make it very hard to hold.
“A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered... You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.”
John 16:32Jesus says that on the same night, hours before. He is describing the exact situation He is about to be in, He names the abandonment by everybody else, and He explicitly says the Father is with Him. That is not a small detail to read past.
“For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”
Psalm 22:24And that is inside the very psalm being quoted. The psalm that opens with why have you forsaken me says twenty three verses later that the face was never hidden. The prayer answers its own opening question.
Third, Paul writes that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Not watching from a distance and not turning away, but present in it. And we hold the Trinity without hedging, which makes a real rupture between Father and Son a serious problem rather than a poetic flourish. See the Trinity in the Bible.
What does Psalm 22:24 say about God hiding His face?
Psalm 22:24 says He has not despised the suffering of the afflicted one, has not hidden His face from him, and has listened to his cry. That is in the same psalm Jesus quotes from the cross.
The anguish in that cry is completely real and we are not smoothing it over. He was in agony, He said so, and He said so in the most desolate words available to Him. What we do not think is that the Father left. Feeling forsaken and being forsaken are two different things, and Scripture has Jesus experiencing the first while stating the second was not happening. That distinction is not a technicality. It is the most useful thing on this page.
Something people are rarely told: roughly a third of the psalms are laments. Complaints, protests, and questions aimed directly at God, kept in the songbook of His own people.
How long, LORD. Why do you stand far off. Why have you rejected us. Those are not doubts that slipped past the editors. They were collected, set to music and sung publicly, which means God gave His people vocabulary for talking to Him when He seems absent.
That good faith stays positive, that saying the hard thing out loud is dangerous, and that questioning God is a step away from unbelief.
Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, David and finally Jesus, all addressing God directly with the hardest sentence they had. Lament is a form of faith. You do not complain to somebody who is not there.
The most desolate sentence in the Bible is on the lips of the Son of God, and He was not wrong to say it and He was not abandoned when He did. Which means your own version of that sentence is not a failure of faith and it is not evidence that you have been dropped.
You are allowed to say it. Out loud, in those words, without softening it first. And if you want somebody to say it alongside you, we are at Need Prayer and a real person reads every one of those.
God put the complaints in the songbook. That is not an oversight, it is an invitation.
Psalm 22 ends with a line that is worth knowing about, given where it started.
The final verse says that future generations will be told about the Lord, that they will proclaim His righteousness to a people not yet born, and the last three words in Hebrew mean something very close to He has done it.
John records the sixth saying from the cross as one Greek word, tetelestai, which means it is finished, or it is accomplished. The psalm that begins with why have you forsaken me ends with He has done it. The man quoting it ends with it is finished.
That is either a remarkable coincidence or the point, and I do not think it is a coincidence. He started the psalm out loud and He finished it out loud, and everything between the first line and the last one is the worst afternoon in history running its course without the Father ever leaving the room.
For more, see all seven sayings from the cross, why Jesus was crucified, how many prophecies Jesus fulfilled, the significance of the resurrection and what the Bible says about fear.
He quoted a psalm that answers its own question, He had said hours earlier that the Father was with Him, and feeling forsaken is not the same as being forsaken.
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He was quoting the opening line of Psalm 22, and in a world without verse numbers quoting a psalm's first line was how you referenced the whole thing. Psalm 22 runs through imagery that matches the crucifixion in unsettling detail, including mockery, pierced hands and feet, and garments divided by lot, and then in the middle of verse 21 it turns into praise with no rescue described. The anguish in the cry is real, and the words He chose carry an ending.
We do not teach that, and three things make it hard to hold. On the same night, in John 16:32, Jesus describes being left alone by everyone and then says explicitly that He is not alone because the Father is with Him. Psalm 22:24, inside the very psalm He quotes, says God has not hidden His face from the afflicted one but has listened to his cry. And Paul writes that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, which is presence rather than distance.
Because the Aramaic Eloi sounds enough like Eliyahu to be misheard by people standing at a distance. Both Mark and Matthew preserve the original sound of the words before translating them, which they rarely do, and that suggests the cry was remembered exactly as spoken. Mark also says it was cried with a loud voice, which cost something at that stage of a crucifixion since the manner of death was suffocation.
In public praise and vindication. The final verses speak of future generations being told about the Lord and His righteousness being proclaimed to a people not yet born, and the last words in Hebrew mean something close to He has done it. John records Jesus later saying tetelestai, one Greek word meaning it is finished or accomplished. The psalm that begins with why have you forsaken me ends with He has done it, and the man quoting it ends the same way.
No, and Scripture gives you language for it. Roughly a third of the psalms are laments, containing complaints and protests aimed directly at God, and they were collected, set to music and sung publicly rather than edited out. Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk and David all do it, and so does Jesus. Feeling forsaken and being forsaken are two different things, and the gospels show Jesus experiencing the first while stating the second was not happening.