One of the most haunting moments in the passion narratives is Jesus’ cry from the cross:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34).
Many Christians have heard this interpreted as a literal statement of divine abandonment. The logic often goes like this: since Jesus was bearing the sins of the world, and since God cannot look upon sin, God the Father had to “turn His face away” from God the Son. The cross becomes a moment of cosmic rupture within the Trinity.
But there are theological and biblical problems with that view—and a closer reading of Scripture offers a more faithful interpretation.
Jesus Is Quoting Psalm 22
Jesus’ words on the cross are not spontaneous. They are the first line of Psalm 22, a psalm of David. Far from being a cry of despair that ends in defeat, Psalm 22 is a trajectory—one that begins in anguish but moves decisively toward hope, vindication, and praise.
In the ancient Jewish world, quoting the first line of a psalm was a common way of referencing the entire psalm. So when Jesus quotes, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, he is drawing the attention of all who hear him—especially those familiar with the Psalms—to the full scope of the psalm’s meaning. He is not crying out in hopelessness. He is locating his suffering within the story of Davidic affliction and divine deliverance. In short, Jesus is identifying himself as the Messiah—the Ideal David—who suffers not apart from God, but with unwavering trust in God’s faithfulness.
Psalm 22 Is Messianic
Psalm 22 is a deeply personal lament of David, but it also transcends his life. It describes a righteous sufferer who is mocked, surrounded by enemies, whose hands and feet are pierced, whose garments are divided and gambled over. The Gospel writers clearly saw these as anticipations of Jesus’ crucifixion (see Matt 27:35, 43; John 19:24).
But more than that, the psalm ends in a dramatic reversal:
“You who fear the Lord, praise him! … For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him” (Ps 22:23–24).
This is crucial. Contrary to the idea that God “turned his face away,” Psalm 22 declares that God does not hide his face from the afflicted one. The God of Israel hears, sees, and ultimately vindicates.
By invoking Psalm 22, Jesus is not only expressing the depth of his suffering; he is also proclaiming his confidence in God’s deliverance and affirming his identity as the righteous, suffering Messiah who fulfills the Scriptures.
Some people believe that God can’t even look at sin, often based on a verse like Habakkuk 1:13, which says, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil.” But that verse doesn’t mean God literally can’t see sin—it means He is deeply troubled by it. In fact, throughout the Bible, we see God constantly interacting with sinners. He confronts sin, calls people to repentance, and works to bring healing and redemption in a broken world.
So when Jesus was on the cross, the Father didn’t “turn away” from Him. That idea can actually lead to serious misunderstandings about who God is and how the Trinity works. Jesus was fully obedient, even to death, and the Father was with Him the whole time. The resurrection proves this: the cross wasn’t a moment of rejection—it was the ultimate display of God’s love and faithfulness.1
Saying that God the Father “abandoned” Jesus on the cross might sound emotionally powerful, but it creates big problems when we think about who God is. It suggests that, for a moment, the perfect relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was broken. But that goes against everything the Bible and historic Christian teaching say about God.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit aren’t just three separate divine beings working together. They are united in the deepest possible way. God doesn’t have relationships, God Is relationship. As I write in my book The Holy Spirit: An Introduction:
“The Father’s personhood is wrapped up in his relationship with the Son and the Holy Spirit. There is no Father without the Son and the Holy Spirit. The same is true of the Son, whose personhood is constituted through his relationship with the Father and with the Holy Spirit.”
Furthermore, Christian theology uses the word perichoresis to describe this—meaning that each Person of the Trinity lives fully in and with the others. The Father isn’t the Son, and the Son isn’t the Spirit, but none of them exists apart from the others. Their relationship isn’t something extra—it’s essential to who God is.
Once again, as I state in by book The Holy Spirit:
“The very nature of a Father-Son relationship is that there is not one without the other…a father is only a father if there is a child, and a child is only a child if there is a parent. There is a dynamic of reciprocal determination at work within the parent-child relationship…Mutual indwelling means the loss of one always results in the collapse of the Trinity as a whole.”
This means that if the Father had truly turned away from the Son on the cross, it would mean that the Trinity had somehow been torn apart. But that can’t happen. God’s nature is one and unchanging. To suggest otherwise would be to divide God and end up with something more like multiple gods—which the Bible clearly rejects.2 As Deuteronomy 6:4 says, “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
So what really happened at the cross? The Father didn’t reject the Son. That just cannot be. In light of Psalm 22, we understand that instead of the Father rejecting the son, the crucifixion shows us the depth of God’s united love. The Father sends the Son to redeem the world, the Son willingly obeys, and the Spirit empowers the whole redemptive mission. The cross doesn’t divide the Trinity—it reveals how deeply united God is in saving the world. As Paul puts it, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
So when Jesus cried out from the cross and quotes the first verse of Psalm 22, it wasn’t a sign that God had left Him. It was the voice of the Suffering Servant, trusting the Father even in death. He took on our pain and separation so that we could be brought back into relationship with God—not so that the eternal relationship within God would be broken.
Jesus’ use of Psalm 22 invites us to reinterpret suffering—not as evidence of God’s absence, but as the context in which trust is most powerfully displayed. His cry is not a breakdown of faith; it is the expression of it.
In quoting Psalm 22, Jesus teaches us how to pray through pain. Like David, he speaks honestly of anguish, yet clings to the character of God. And like David, he bears witness that even when circumstances scream abandonment, God has not turned away.
In the end, the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not the sound of divine disunity. It is the voice of the faithful Son, lifting up the suffering song of the righteous king—and declaring, even in death, that God is faithful.
For more, see these posts on the same topic:
- https://mattayars.com/god-didnt-abandon-jesus-on-the-cross/
- https://mattayars.com/the-cross-and-the-grace-of-god/
- It’s quite shocking (and disturbing)—to me, at least—how many interpreters opt for the reading that the Father abandons Jesus on the cross. For an evaluation of those views, see Tom McCall’s Forsaken (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012). ↩︎
- For more on the risks of a divided Trinity, see Athanasius, Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit; Gregory of Nyssa, On Not Three Gods, Basil, On the Holy Spirit; Irenaeus, Against Heresies (Books 2 and 4); Chapter 7 of Thomas Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Ediburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) and The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1992). ↩︎
