There are few words of Jesus more haunting than the ones he cried from the cross: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” —Matthew 27:46
For much of my Christian life, I was taught to hear these words as evidence of an actual separation between the Father and the Son. Jesus bore our sin, the Father turned away, and for the first time in eternity, the Son experienced separation from his Father. But over the years, I’ve found myself wrestling with that interpretation.
Because if there’s one thing Jesus continually revealed throughout his life, it was his unbroken union with the Father.
“I and the Father are one.”
“The Father is in Me, and I in the Father.”
“He who has seen Me has seen the Father.”
And perhaps most strikingly, shortly before the cross, Jesus told his disciples: “You will leave Me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” —John 16:32
Jesus knew abandonment was coming. He knew that Judas would betray him, Peter would deny him, his disciples would scatter, the religious establishment would condemn him, and Rome would crucify him. And yet, knowing all of this was coming, Jesus said: “I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” So what are we to make of his cry from the cross?
From “Father” to “God”
Something I’ve always found interesting is that Jesus doesn’t cry, “My Father, My Father, why have you forsaken me?” He says: “My God, My God…”
That may seem like a small distinction, but I think there’s something beautiful happening here. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus overwhelmingly reveals God as Father. Abba. The One he had known in face-to-face fellowship from before the foundation of the world. Jesus didn’t merely believe in God. He knew the Father.
But humanity didn’t. We had imagined God through the lenses of fear, shame, accusation, abandonment, violence, and separation. We knew what it felt like to hide among the trees wondering whether God was coming toward us or against us. We knew “God.” Jesus knew Father. And perhaps on the cross, those two perceptions collide.
Entering Our Cry
I don’t believe the cross reveals the moment the Father abandoned Jesus. I believe it reveals just how far the Father, Son, and Spirit were willing to go to enter our experience of abandonment. The Word became flesh and stepped into the darkness of the human experience. Jesus entered our rejection, our shame, our violence, our suffering—and ultimately, even our sense of being forsaken by God. He went all the way down.
Think about what surrounded Jesus at the cross: Betrayal. Denial. Mockery. Violence. Rejection. Most of his closest friends were nowhere to be found. If anyone ever had reason to feel abandoned, it was Jesus. And hanging there, he gives voice to the cry humanity has been making since Eden: “Where are you, God?”
Maybe Jesus wasn’t announcing that the Trinity had somehow been torn apart. Maybe he was entering the place where we thought God had left us. That’s a very different picture of the cross.
The Ancient Lie of Separation
Since the garden, humanity has struggled with the suspicion that God has moved away. Adam hides. Cain wanders. Israel repeatedly wonders whether God has abandoned them. The Psalms are filled with people crying, “Where are you?”
And if we’re truthful, we know the feeling too. There are moments when God seems distant. Moments when tragedy, grief, disappointment, rejection, or suffering become so loud that the presence of God seems almost impossible to perceive. The feeling is real.
But is the separation? That’s the question the cross has forced me to reconsider. Because perhaps Jesus didn’t come merely to tell us from a distance that God hadn’t abandoned us. He entered the feeling of abandonment himself.
The Son stepped inside humanity’s darkest perception of God and met us there. The One who knew perfect communion with Abba entered the human experience of feeling forsaken—not because the Father actually disappeared, but because he wanted to meet us even in the place where we were convinced God had. And that changes the way I see the cross.
God Was in Christ
Paul makes an astonishing statement about what was happening at Calvary: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” —2 Corinthians 5:19
Notice what Paul doesn’t say. God was standing somewhere outside of Christ. God was distancing himself from Christ. God was turning his back on Christ. Paul says: God was in Christ.
Father and Son weren’t working against one another at the cross. They were working together. The cross wasn’t Jesus rescuing us fromhis Father. It was the Father, Son, and Spirit entering humanity’s darkness together to bring us home. And perhaps that’s what makes Jesus’ cry so powerful. He enters our deepest fear: “God has left me.”
And from inside that fear, he exposes it. Because even when Jesus felt the crushing weight of abandonment, the Father had not gone anywhere. Jesus had already told his disciples: “I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” And he wasn’t.
When God Feels Absent
There’s something deeply personal here for us. You can feel abandoned without actually being abandoned. You can feel alone without actually being alone. You can walk through seasons when the Father’s face seems hidden without his face ever turning away.
Jesus knows that place. He doesn’t stand outside our darkness shouting instructions about how to escape it. He enters it. He becomes Emmanuel there. God with us. Even there, and especially there.
And that’s why I no longer hear “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” as the announcement that the Father finally turned away. I hear something much more beautiful. I hear the Son of God entering humanity’s ancient cry of abandonment so deeply that there would never again be a place in the human experience where we could say: “God doesn’t know what this feels like.” He does. And he met us there.
But here’s where this gets even more interesting. Jesus wasn’t creating a new sentence when he cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He was quoting a Psalm. And if we keep reading that Psalm, we discover something remarkable.
The very Psalm that begins with: “Why have you forsaken me?” eventually declares: “He has not hidden His face from him.”
