A prayer of Jesus
My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me
From the sixth hour to the ninth, roughly noon to three in the afternoon, a strange darkness covered the land while Jesus hung on the cross. He had already been mocked by passersby, priests, and one of the thieves. Near the end of those three dark hours He cried out with a loud voice in Aramaic, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. Some who stood by misheard it as a call for Elijah. It was the fourth of His seven sayings from the cross, wrung out of the deepest hour.
“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”Matthew 27:46
What he prayed
He cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. These are the opening words of the twenty second Psalm, which He now prayed as His own. It is the only saying from the cross where He addresses God not as Father but as My God, and the only one framed as a question. He asked why He had been forsaken, giving voice to a real desolation, the felt absence of the God who had never been closer to Him in purpose. Yet even here it is a prayer, still directed to God, still claiming Him as mine. In quoting that Psalm He reached for words that begin in abandonment and end in triumph, and He entered fully into its darkness so that He might carry it through.
What it teaches us about prayer
This cry teaches us that faith and anguish can share the same breath. Jesus does not paper over the horror with pious calm. He asks why, and He asks it of God. Yet the very asking is aimed at God, still called My God, so that even His forsakenness is spoken as prayer. It gives permission to the desolate to bring their why to the Father rather than away from Him. It also shows that God is not absent from our darkest hours even when He feels most absent, for Jesus was never more perfectly at the center of the Father's will than in that cry. When you cannot feel Him, you may still address Him. The lament itself is a rope thrown toward heaven.
What it reveals about Jesus
Here is the mystery at the heart of the gospel. The sinless Son, who had known unbroken fellowship with the Father from eternity, experienced the God-forsakenness that our sin deserves. He was made sin for us, and He drank the cup of judgment to its dregs, tasting the abandonment we had earned so that we would never be abandoned. This is why the darkness. This is the cost of our pardon. Yet by taking up Psalm 22, He also signaled where it was going, for that Psalm turns from forsakenness to a great congregation praising God and the ends of the earth remembering and turning to the Lord. His cry was real, and it was not the end.
Questions people ask
Was Jesus actually forsaken by God on the cross?
Christians have long held that on the cross Jesus truly bore the judgment our sin deserved, including the felt loss of the Father's comforting presence, while the love and unity between Father and Son remained unbroken. He experienced the abandonment we had earned so we would not. The darkness over the land pictured the weight of that hour. It was real desolation borne in our place, not a rupture in God Himself.
Why did Jesus quote Psalm 22 from the cross?
By crying its opening line He claimed the whole Psalm as His own. It begins in abandonment and vivid suffering, pierced hands and feet, garments divided by lot, all of which unfolded around Him, and it ends in vindication and worldwide worship. He was showing that His agony fulfilled Scripture and that its darkness was moving toward triumph. His cry was genuine grief and, at the same time, a signpost to the victory ahead.