“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” – which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34 (cf. Psalm 22:1)
Of all the seven last words spoken from the cross, this one silences everything else. It does not offer comfort to a dying thief. It does not make provision for a grieving mother. It does not ask forgiveness for the crowd. It is a cry, stripped bare, unguarded, addressed to a God who, in this moment, appears to have turned away.
To understand the full weight of the Fourth Word, we must first understand its position. The seven last words are not random utterances scattered across the hours of crucifixion. They have a shape, a movement, an arc. The first three words are spoken outward, toward others around the cross: forgiveness for the soldiers who drove the nails (Luke 23:34), a promise of paradise to the dying thief beside him (Luke 23:43), and a word of tender provision entrusting his mother to the Beloved Disciple (John 19:26-27). The last three words turn inward and upward: a cry of thirst (John 19:28), the declaration that it is finished (John 19:30), and the final committing of his spirit into the Father’s hands (Luke 23:46).
But the Fourth Word stands alone at the centre. It is the hinge. It is the mid-point of the cross in every sense: structurally, narratively, and theologically. Everything before it is Jesus still reaching outward. Everything after it is the beginning of the end. Here, at the midpoint, when he has given all that he has to give to those around him and is now fully exposed to the darkness alone, here is where the deepest truth of the cross is spoken. Three meditations follow on what that truth is.
The Fourth Word is spoken by a man condemned by both religious establishment and colonial state power. A Galilean Jewish peasant, publicly executed as a criminal and a political threat. The cross was Rome’s instrument of maximum humiliation, reserved for those the empire needed to erase. Before we reach for its spiritual meaning, we must not look away from its political reality. God chose to be most fully revealed here, not in a temple, not in a palace, not at the seat of power, but on a rubbish heap outside the city walls, among the disposed of. The margins are where God shows up.
The Fullness of His Humanity: Revealed at the Bottom, Not the Top
We are accustomed to looking for Jesus in his moments of glory. The transfiguration, where his face shone like the sun (Matthew 17:2). The raising of Lazarus, where he stood at the entrance of a tomb and commanded the dead to walk. The triumphal entry, with the crowd spreading cloaks before him and crying Hosanna. These are the moments we place in stained glass, the moments we return to for strength and wonder.
But the Fourth Word tells us something we have not fully reckoned with: Jesus is most fully revealed as the Son of Man not in those high moments but here, stripped of garments, nailed to wood, gasping, crying out into silence. This is not the eclipse of his glory. This is its fullest expression.
The title “Son of Man,” the one Jesus used of himself more than any other, more than Messiah, more than Son of God, carries in it the double weight of Daniel 7:13-14: a figure who comes through suffering and yet is vindicated by the Ancient of Days. Both sides are present at the cross. He is fully, completely, irreducibly human. He does not suffer at a distance. He does not experience pain from behind protective glass. The nails are real. The thirst is real. The cry is real. And the feeling of abandonment is real. There is no divine anaesthetic. The Incarnation, which began with a borrowed manger in Bethlehem, arrives at its fullest point here: God-with-us, as far into the human condition as it is possible to go.
The writer to the Hebrews does not flinch from this: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are” (Hebrews 4:15). The Greek word translated “feel sympathy” is sumpathesai, to suffer together with. Not to observe, not to manage from above, but to suffer alongside, in the same flesh, under the same sky, in the same helplessness. The Fourth Word is the proof of that claim. This is what suffering-together looks like at its most complete.
And crucially, this revelation comes not at the beginning of the cross, when there was still energy and voice and the presence of those who loved him. It comes at the centre, the nadir, the most exposed moment. His humanity is not revealed in the easier hours. It is revealed when everything else has been stripped away and there is nothing left but the cry.
The incarnation is a political act. When God chose to enter the world not as emperor but as a refugee child born to an occupied people under a census ordered by Rome, God made a choice about where to stand. The Fourth Word is the completion of that choice. Jesus does not cry out from a throne. He cries out from a cross, the execution device the empire reserved for slaves, insurgents, and those who threatened the social order. The Son of Man is fully revealed among the people Rome most wanted to silence. For communities who have been told that God is found in wealth, in stability, in the structures of power, the Fourth Word says the fullest disclosure of God took place among the condemned and the abandoned.
This is the Jesus of whom Isaiah wrote: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem” (Isaiah 53:3). The suffering servant is not a diminished Jesus. He is the fullest Jesus. The Fourth Word is where we see him most clearly.
Forsaken at the Peak: The Double Sacrifice of Father and Son
This is the point that must not be softened. The Fourth Word is not a moment of spiritual weakness. It is not Jesus losing faith. It is not a lapse in the middle of an otherwise composed death. It is the fulcrum of the entire event, the moment at which he is carrying the fullest weight of what he came to carry.
Consider again the structure of the seven words. The first three are acts of ministry, still giving outward even from the cross. The last three are acts of completion and surrender. The Fourth Word stands between them as the point of maximum weight, the moment when the cup that he asked to pass from him in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42) is fully drunk. He is not forsaken because his mission has failed. He is forsaken because his mission has reached its peak. The desolation is the cost of the fulfilment.
The sin of the world, the sum of all human estrangement from God, is being borne in this body, on this cross, in this hour. And the consequence of sin, which is separation from God, must be experienced fully and truly. Not symbolically. Not theatrically. If the separation is to be healed from within, it must first be entered from within. The Son of God must go to the place of absolute God-forsakenness so that God-forsakenness might be redeemed. This is the cost of atonement: not a performance of suffering but a genuine entry into the darkest human reality of all.
But here we must look beyond the Son and see the Father. The Fourth Word is not only about what Jesus endures. It is about what God the Father does, and what it costs him to do it. John 3:16 says God “gave” his only Son. Romans 8:32 says he “did not spare” his own Son but gave him up for us all. These are not the words of an indifferent God watching the execution from a safe distance. These are the words of a Father who enters the anguish of giving up the one he loves most, and does so deliberately, at cost, for the sake of those who could not save themselves.
Both suffer. The Son in the darkness of felt abandonment. The Father in the agony of having forsaken the beloved. This is not a transaction between a punishing God and a suffering victim. It is a sacrifice that runs through the heart of the Trinity itself, a love so total that it does not stop at the threshold of the worst.
Among the most devastating testimonies of the Holocaust is a category of sacrifice that defies easy language: Jewish parents who gave their children away to strangers, not because love had failed, but because love demanded it. To hand a child to an unknown family, knowing you might never see them again, knowing they would grow up with a different name, a different faith, perhaps never knowing they were Jewish, was to lose them in every sense except life. It was an act of love that would feel, to the child, like abandonment.
Abraham Foxman, who later became the long-serving National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, was one such child. In 1941, his Jewish parents in the Vilna ghetto entrusted him, barely one year old, to their Polish Catholic nursemaid. They surrendered his name, his identity, his daily life with them, and any certainty of reunion. They had no guarantee they would survive the war. They had no guarantee she would protect him. They gave him away because the alternative was to keep him in a ghetto that was being liquidated. Foxman was baptised. He grew up attending church every Sunday. He did not know he was Jewish. His parents survived, which was exceptional among Vilna Jews, and reclaimed him with great difficulty after the war. Years later, as a grown man, he wrote of the question that had haunted him above all others: “How could they have given me away?” The answer was never fully speakable. They did it so that he might live.
This story does not explain the cross. Nothing fully explains the cross. But it gives us a human shape, broken, partial, but real, through which to feel toward what the Fourth Word discloses. The Father does not forsake the Son because love has failed or because he is satisfied by suffering. He gives him up because love, at this hour, has gone to its absolute limit. Like the Jewish parent watching a child disappear into the arms of a stranger, God does the most costly thing love has ever done, and does it entirely for those who could not save themselves.
“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)
The God revealed in the Fourth Word is not the god of empire, the god who blesses conquest, underwrites power, and remains unmoved by the suffering of the poor. The God of the Fourth Word is the God of Hagar, abandoned in the desert with a dying child and met there by the one who says: “I have heard the cry of the boy” (Genesis 21:17). The God of enslaved Israel whose cry went up to heaven and was heard and acted upon (Exodus 2:23-24). The God who, in the Fourth Word, does not send a delegate to suffer on his behalf but enters the suffering in person, at cost, to the point of dereliction. For those who have been told that God is on the side of those who oppress them, the Fourth Word is a direct counter-testimony. This is where God was. This is what God chose.
“My God, My God”: The Intimacy That Holds Even in the Dark
We have heard the desolation. Now hear what the desolation is spoken inside.
Jesus does not cry “God, why have you forsaken me?” He says “My God, my God.” The possessive comes first. Before the accusation, before the question, before the anguish, the claim. “My God.” Twice. As if once were not enough to hold onto in this darkness. As if he must say it twice to keep his grip on it.
In the extremity of loneliness, and this is the extremity of loneliness, the furthest reach of what any human being can experience, to feel cut off not merely from other people, not merely from comfort, but from God himself, from the source of all being and love, even in that extremity, Jesus does not let go of the relationship. He does not say “the God who has forsaken me.” He does not say “a God somewhere.” He says my God. The relationship persists in the form of the question. The intimacy holds even when it feels shattered.
This is the cry of Psalm 22, which Jesus prays from the cross. And it is worth feeling the full weight of what that psalm is doing. It begins in desolation: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” (v.1). It does not quickly resolve. The psalmist cries day and night and hears nothing (v.2). He is mocked by those who watch: “He trusts in the Lord; let the Lord rescue him” (v.8). He feels like a worm, not a man (v.6). And yet, through all of this, the psalmist does not stop addressing God. “Yet you are enthroned” (v.3). “In you our ancestors put their trust” (v.4). “Do not be far from me” (v.11). The prayer continues even when the prayer seems to go nowhere. The relationship persists even when it feels entirely one-sided.
This is the theology of holy persistence. It is not the confident prayer of someone who feels God close and warm. It is the battered, tenacious, white-knuckled prayer of someone who keeps addressing God even when God seems absent, because the alternative, the silence of no longer calling, is more unbearable than the silence of no answer. “My God” is an act of faith when faith feels impossible. It is the hold that cannot be broken even by what feels like abandonment.
This is the movement of “My God, my God.” Jesus does not turn away from the Father in this moment. He turns toward him with a cry that is equal parts accusation and address, equal parts anguish and trust. I feel you have forsaken me. And yet you are still my God. I cannot stop calling to you even when you seem absent. I cannot leave the one I love even when the love feels broken. This is the intimacy that the cross does not destroy but discloses: a closeness so deep that it can hold a cry like this without shattering.
The Fourth Word is not the breaking of the relationship between Father and Son. It is the proof that the relationship holds under the most extreme pressure imaginable. The covenant love, what the Hebrew Scriptures call hesed, the steadfast love that does not let go, holds even here. “My God.” Even here.
The Loneliness That Gathers Us In
There is one more movement in this third meditation that cannot be skipped. The extremity of loneliness that Jesus enters in the Fourth Word is not only his. It is ours, all of it, gathered into one place, carried into one body, taken all the way down.
Every human being who has ever felt utterly alone, not merely physically isolated, but cut off from meaning, cut off from love, cut off from God, presses up against the edge of what Jesus experiences at the centre of the cross. And what the Fourth Word declares is this: Jesus went to the floor of it. Not to the edge. All the way to the bottom of human desolation.
Which means the bottom is no longer empty. He was there before us. By entering the deepest human loneliness, he ensured that no human being ever has to be alone in it again. The dereliction is real, and so is the presence it has made possible within it. Every person who has ever cried out in the dark and heard nothing has, without knowing it, been standing in the same place as Christ. And Christ has been standing with them.
“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 22:24)
Psalm 22, which Jesus prays from the cross, was the prayer of the one mocked by those who said God had abandoned him: “He trusts in the Lord; let the Lord rescue him” (v.8). This is the logic of those who use God to shame the suffering: if you were truly faithful, you would not be in this situation. We hear this still, in theologies that equate prosperity with blessing and poverty with sin, in communities that treat illness or grief as spiritual failure, in churches that tell the oppressed to submit quietly because suffering is God’s will for them. The Fourth Word, spoken by the one the mockers said God had abandoned, tears that logic apart at the root. The one whom God has not abandoned is precisely the one the powerful have written off. Suffering is not God’s verdict on a person. The cross makes this permanently, irreversibly clear.
A Final Word: Holding the Silence
After the Fourth Word, there is a silence. Not a theatrical pause but a real silence, the silence of hours passing, of the crowd beginning to drift, of the disciples scattered and hiding. There is no voice from heaven. No angel appears. The sky goes dark. And then, eventually, it is finished.
The Fourth Word stands at the centre of all this not as a problem to be solved but as a depth to be inhabited. It is the deepest point to which divine love has gone. It is the proof that God does not stand above suffering but enters it all the way, at cost, for us. It is the cry that holds the relationship even in the moment of felt rupture. It is the loneliness that, by being fully entered, was made into a place where no one need be alone.
Good Friday asks us to resist the rush to Easter. To sit in this darkness long enough to feel its weight. To be present with those in our communities who are living inside this cry right now: those pushed to the margins, those whose suffering has been weaponised by the powerful, those who have been told God has abandoned them. The Fourth Word says: God was here. At the bottom, not the top. Outside the gate, not inside the temple. In the cry, not the comfortable silence.
“It is finished” is still three words away. For now, we wait, and we wait together.
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