As we discussed in part one, there are few statements of Jesus more familiar, or more haunting, than the words he cried from the cross: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” —Matthew 27:46
For many of us, those words have become the primary lens through which we understand what was happening between the Father and Son at the cross. Jesus bore our sin. The Father couldn’t look upon him. So, the Father turned away. Jesus was forsaken. And for a brief moment, the eternal fellowship between Father and Son was somehow broken. At least, that’s the way I heard it explained for much of my life.
But there’s something rather important that I overlooked for years: Jesus was quoting Scripture. More specifically, he was quoting the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”
And here’s where things get really interesting. Psalm 22 doesn’t end at verse one. In fact, when we keep reading, we eventually encounter a statement that seems to challenge the very interpretation many of us have inherited concerning the cross: “For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.” —Psalm 22:24
Wait a minute. He has not hidden his face from him? If that’s true, then maybe we need to take another look at what was actually happening at the cross.
We Can’t Stop at Verse One
It’s easy to isolate Jesus’ cry from the rest of the Psalm. I know I did. We hear, “Why have you forsaken me?” and understandably conclude: Jesus was forsaken. But that’s not where David’s song ends.
Psalm 22 begins in anguish. The writer feels abandoned. God seems distant. Enemies surround him. His body is weak. He is mocked and ridiculed.
Sound familiar?
The parallels with the crucifixion are striking. “They pierce my hands and my feet…They divide my garments among them…They cast lots for my clothing.” Those images inevitably draw our attention toward Jesus. But something happens as the Psalm progresses. The language begins to change. The one who feels abandoned begins remembering the faithfulness of God: “In You our fathers trusted; They trusted, and You delivered them. To You they cried out and were delivered; In You they trusted and were not disappointed.”
Then: “Yet You are He who brought me forth from the womb…Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother’s womb.”
Do you see what’s happening? The Psalm begins with the experience of abandonment, but it doesn’t remain there. Something deeper begins breaking through: Trust, presence, and faithfulness.
And eventually we arrive at what I believe is one of the most important verses for understanding the entire Psalm: “He has not hidden His face from him.” That’s quite a statement. Especially when we’re talking about the cross.
Did the Father Really Turn His Face Away?
For years, I heard it said that because Jesus bore the sins of humanity, the holy Father could no longer look upon his Son. So he turned his face away. Maybe you’ve heard something similar. But when I read Psalm 22 in its entirety, I have to ask: Where does the Psalm actually say that? Because Psalm 22:24 appears to say the opposite. The afflicted one cries out, and God hears him.
The suffering is real. The anguish is real. The feeling of abandonment is real. But the abandonment itself? That’s where I think we need to look again.
David begins with:“Why have You forsaken me?”, but later declares: “He has not hidden His face from him.” I don’t think we should rush past that tension. Perhaps that’s actually part of the beauty of the Psalm.
It begins with what abandonment feels like and eventually reveals what is true beneath the feeling. God is still there. His face has not turned. He hears the cry of the afflicted. And if Jesus intentionally places Psalm 22 on our radar from the cross, perhaps he’s inviting us into the entire movement of the Psalm, not merely its opening sentence.
“I Am Not Alone”
There’s another statement from Jesus that I think belongs in this conversation. Shortly before the cross, Jesus tells his disciples that they will abandon him: “Behold, an hour is coming, and has already come, for you to be scattered, each to his own home, and to leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” —John 16:32
I find those words incredible. Jesus knows what’s coming. He knows Judas will betray him, Peter will deny him, and his disciples will scatter. He even understands he will be mocked, beaten, humiliated, and crucified. And still he says: “I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.”
So what happened a few hours later? Did the Father who Jesus said would remain with him suddenly leave? Did the union Jesus had spent his entire ministry revealing suddenly cease to exist? Did “I and the Father are one” become temporarily untrue? Or did Jesus enter something even deeper?
Did he enter the human experience of feeling completely abandoned while remaining held within the Father’s presence?
I believe the latter gives us a beautiful way of understanding what happened at Calvary.
God Was in Christ
Paul gives us another window into the cross: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” —2 Corinthians 5:19. God was in Christ. Not standing at a distance. Not hiding behind the clouds. Not abandoning his Son while Jesus accomplished the unpleasant work that the Father couldn’t bear to watch. God was in Christ.
The cross wasn’t Jesus trying to convince an angry Father to love humanity. The cross was the Father, Son, and Spirit revealing just how far divine love was willing to go to meet us in our darkness and bring us home. Whatever else we say about the cross, I believe we have to begin there.
Father and Son weren’t working against one another. They were together in the work of reconciliation. The One Jesus had revealed as Abba hadn’t suddenly become someone else. Jesus wasn’t saving us from the Father. He was revealing him.
Maybe We Were the Ones Who Thought God Had Turned Away
This is where the cross has become especially beautiful to me. Perhaps the problem was never that the Father had abandoned humanity. Perhaps humanity had become convinced that he had. Go all the way back to Eden. After Adam and Eve eat from the tree, who hides? God? No. Humanity does.
Adam hears God coming and retreats into the trees. Fear enters the human imagination, and suddenly the God who created humanity for communion is perceived as someone to hide from. That suspicion follows humanity throughout the biblical story: God is distant. God is angry. God has abandoned us. God has hidden his face. God doesn’t want anything to do with us. And then the Word becomes flesh.
God doesn’t remain at a distance shouting at humanity to find its way back. He comes looking for us. Jesus enters our fear. Our shame, rejection, violence, and suffering. And ultimately, even our experience of feeling abandoned by God. He goes all the way down into it. Not to confirm our suspicion that the Father had forsaken us, but to expose it.
The Feeling Was Real
I don’t want to minimize what Jesus experienced on the cross. Quite the opposite. Jesus wasn’t pretending. His suffering wasn’t theatrical. His anguish was real. His friends really had abandoned him. His body really was being tortured. His own people really had rejected him. And from within that unbearable suffering, Jesus gives voice to perhaps the deepest cry of the human heart: “Why have You forsaken Me?”
Haven’t we all asked some version of that question? Where were you? Why didn’t you stop this? Why can’t I feel you? Why am I going through this? Why do I feel so alone? That’s why the cross matters so deeply. Jesus doesn’t respond to those questions from a safe distance. He enters them.
The Son of God knows what it is like for everything around him to scream: You’re alone. And yet beneath the screaming remained something deeper. The Father was there. Psalm 22 tells us: “He has not hidden His face from him.” Jesus had already said: “I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” And Paul would later declare: “God was in Christ.” Three different windows pointing us toward the same beautiful possibility: The Father never left.
The Cross Reveals Presence, Not Abandonment
And maybe that’s one of the greatest things Jesus accomplished at the cross. He entered the darkest place of perceived separation and filled it with divine presence. He entered the place where humanity cries, “God has abandoned me,” and revealed Emmanuel: God with us. God with us in suffering. God with us in rejection. God with us in grief. God with us when everyone else walks away. God with us even when our emotions tell us otherwise.
This doesn’t mean we won’t experience the feeling of abandonment. Jesus did. But feelings of abandonment aren’t necessarily evidence of actual abandonment. Sometimes our experience screams one thing while something much deeper remains true. The Father is still there.
That’s what I see happening in Psalm 22. The Psalm begins: “Why have You forsaken me?” But it doesn’t end there. It moves through suffering and darkness until eventually declaring: “He has not hidden His face from him.”
Maybe we’ve spent so much time building theology around the first line that we’ve failed to hear the rest of the song.
Keep Reading
I wonder how differently we might see the cross if we stopped reading Psalm 22 at verse one. What if instead of seeing a Father turning away from his Son, we saw Father and Son entering humanity’s darkness together? What if instead of seeing the Trinity fractured, we saw the Triune God united in love, descending into the deepest reaches of human suffering? What if the cross isn’t the place where Jesus finally experienced the Father’s rejection, but the place where Jesus entered our experience of rejection and revealed that even there, the Father had not gone anywhere?
Maybe that’s why Paul could say: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” He was there, and he had always been there. And perhaps that’s the good news hidden in plain sight within Psalm 22.
The Psalm begins with the haunting question: “Why have You forsaken me?” But if we’ll keep reading, we eventually discover the answer: “He has not hidden His face from him.”
Maybe the cross wasn’t the moment the Father turned his face away. Maybe it was the moment humanity finally discovered that he never had.
