“Why Have You Forsaken Me?” Understanding Jesus’s Cry on the Cross
“The Father Turned His Face Away”?
The crucifixion is a good case study in showing how a careful Trinitarian framework can help work through thorny issues related to the Trinity and salvation. Not only does it bring to the surface the difficult question of what the Father was “doing” (or not doing) while Jesus hung on the cross, but it also raises the question of the Spirit’s seeming absence during the event.
When Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), what does this mean? Thomas McCall helpfully frames the issue surrounding this “cry of dereliction”:
Such a question surely comes from someone who has been unfaithful—and who now blames God for their abandonment. . . . But this question, of course, does not come from someone who has been unfaithful. It does not come from a pious person who simply isn’t theologically astute enough to know better. It comes from the lips of none other than Jesus Christ. It comes from the one who has been utterly faithful. It comes from the one of whom the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). It comes from the one who is the eternal Logos (John 1:1), the second person of the Trinity. So these words ring out like a thunderbolt.1
Beholding the Triune God
Matthew Y. Emerson, Brandon D. Smith
This concise introduction to the doctrine of inseparable operations explores the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relation to salvation, revelation, communion, and more.
Did the Father turn his face away? Put another way, was there some sort of break or rupture between the persons of the Trinity on that fateful day on Golgotha? These answers require carefully handling the biblical text and retrieving sound theological method from the early church. Unfortunately, though a beautiful hymn, lyrics from “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” have perhaps shaped our view of this verse as much as or more than the biblical text and Christian history.
In popular Christianity, lyrics such as those found in this contemporary hymn are often taken to confirm what many already suspect about the cross, that it is a moment of separation between the Father and the Son. The cry of dereliction in such songs is Jesus’s cry of abandonment, meant to communicate an existential angst, a torment of soul rooted in some kind of spiritual distance between the incarnate Son and his heavenly Father due to the latter’s wrath being poured out. To say it a bit differently, many view the cross as a moment in which the Father pours out his personal wrath on the Son, and this is felt by the Son at a spiritual level and communicated via the cry of dereliction. Let’s briefly work through the issues with the ultimate goal of understanding the unity and distinction in the Godhead. Three considerations help us.
First, there is a Trinitarian consideration: anything we say about the cry of dereliction needs to retain the oneness of the Godhead, both with respect to rejecting any ontological or relational division between Father and Son and with respect to affirming inseparable operations. The cross does not produce division between Father and Son, and it is not only the Father who acts in the crucifixion. It is appropriate to talk about the Father pouring out his wrath, but according to the doctrine of appropriations, ascribing an action to one person of the Trinity does not deny that the other persons are acting inseparably. It is not only the Father that pours out wrath; the Son and the Spirit, as the other two persons of the one God, also pour out the one wrath of the one God. It is, after all, God’s wrath against sin spoken of all throughout Scripture.
On the other hand, we also remember that the Father sent the Son; he did not send himself. The Spirit was active in the incarnation at conception but did not himself put on flesh. So we need to dispel any notions of other Trinitarian persons dying on the cross. This helps us avoid the ancient heresy of patripassianism—the teaching that the Father himself became incarnate and suffered on the cross. Moreover, since we know that God is immutable and incapable of change (Mal. 3:6; Heb. 13:8), it would certainly jeopardize fundamental affirmations about the doctrine of God to assert that the cross initiated a complete three-day (or even a one-millisecond) loss of Trinitarian relations.
One Person, Two Natures
Second, there is a Christological consideration: anything we say about the cry of dereliction needs to retain the oneness of the person of Jesus Christ. He is one person with two natures, divine and human, and he goes to the cross as one person. He is not half God and half man, but rather fully God and fully man. In other words, the Son cannot die because the divine nature does not die, but nonetheless by virtue of the hypostatic union we can also say that God dies on the cross in virtue of Jesus’s humanity. God the Son in his divine nature continued to exist and to sustain the universe. Again, one person of the Trinity could not cease to exist for any time without indicating mutability (changeability) in God’s nature, and we know God does not change.
Jesus did, however, die according to his humanity, and, as with any human death, his body was separated from his soul/spirit, but his soul/spirit did not cease to exist. In his resurrection, the body and soul/spirit were rejoined, as will ours one day. If we die before he returns, our bodies will be in the ground as we await the resurrection, but we will not cease to exist because our soul/ spirit will be in or not in the presence of the Lord (1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 5:8). Again, Jesus’s body was buried in his descent to the dead, but he didn’t cease to exist.2 Therefore, the human body of God the Son incarnate died, but the hypostatic union of two natures was never separated, broken, or compromised. We affirm that Jesus Christ is the God-man, never ceased to be the God-man in his birth, never ceased to be the God-man in his death and resurrection, now stands ascended in heaven as our mediator as the God-man, and will return one day as the God-man to join our souls/spirits to our resurrected bodies; therefore, we must affirm that God the Son incarnate died that day on Golgotha in the person of Jesus Christ according to his humanity, but he in no way, shape, or form ceased to exist or experienced ontological separation from the Father (or Spirit) according to his divinity. We know that only the Son receives judgment or is capable of death, because he is the only divine person with a human nature and thus the only divine person capable of suffering and dying, and yet the salvation he secures is the salvation of the one God.
The one God is always at work sustaining the universe, sovereignly reigning over creation, and providentially bringing all things to pass according to his will.
A Canonical Consideration
Third, there is a canonical consideration: anything we say about the cry of dereliction needs to retain the canonical unity of Scripture and the covenantal and therefore relational unity between God and his Messiah. Psalm 22 is a lament psalm that ends with a confession of covenantal hope. Jesus in quoting Psalm 22 is doing so with the whole psalmic scene in mind; therefore, we shouldn’t assume that he is quoting one line of the psalm out of context. Jesus’s lament comes in a covenantal context, a context in which he is the messianic Son chosen by Yahweh to deliver his people Israel by suffering on their behalf. God pours out his wrath on Jesus, yes, but as his anointed Son who suffers in his people’s place. Further, if we consider the other crucifixion scenes where different portions of Psalm 22 are either quoted or alluded to (e.g., Matt. 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 19), we see that they record various ways Jesus fulfills this psalm, pointing us back to the point that Jesus likely had the whole psalm in mind. Finally and perhaps most strikingly, Psalm 22:24 says, “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.” The afflicted man is not abandoned in this text. We see this, in fact, in Jesus’s final words on the cross in the other Gospels, where Jesus commends his spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46); promises the thief that he will be with him in “paradise,” the place of rest for righteous human souls awaiting the resurrection of the dead (Luke 23:43); and declares the work of salvation finished (John 19:30). So either Jesus is wrong about the Father’s abandonment in that moment—to the point of contradicting himself in the aforementioned verses—or something else is going on.
With these guardrails in place, we can offer a rather straightforward response to our original question: What does Jesus mean when he says this? Most likely, he is identifying with the afflicted King David in Psalm 22. The king has been rejected, persecuted, and scorned; in his suffering, he feels a sense of abandonment, even by God himself. But we know by the end of the psalm that David knows that he is not abandoned. Indeed, he often cries out to God for deliverance, asking God to show himself. In a similar way, Jesus is the Messiah who fulfills the Davidic covenant and therefore identifies with him in this psalm. This answer gives us a much better option than assuming a break in the unbreakable God, a divide in the undividable God, or a Jesus who is almost literally split in half in his death. Divine simplicity, eternal relations of origin, et al., and a canonical reading of Scripture help us make these distinctions in a more biblically and theologically robust manner. Now, we will take a broader look at the unity and distinction of the Trinity in salvation.
The Spirit at the Crucifixion
Finally, what was the Spirit “doing” during the crucifixion? A careful reader will note that in Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, the Spirit seems to be silent or absent for large chunks of the narrative. Does this mean that he was off taking a heavenly nap? Did he get tagged in for the occasional battle with demons but mostly wait his turn to be sent at Pentecost?
We should not assume that any person of the Trinity is ever inactive or unneeded. The one God is always at work sustaining the universe, sovereignly reigning over creation, and providentially bringing all things to pass according to his will. Noticeably in Matthew’s Gospel, the Spirit is involved in Jesus’s conception and birth, his baptism, and his temptation in the wilderness. The entire foundational framing of Matthew’s account in the opening chapters shows that the Spirit works inseparably from the Father and the Son in the incarnation. Jesus also says later that he casts out demons by the Spirit (Matt. 12:28). Across the four Gospels, it is easy to point out instances where Jesus casts out demons or performs miracles and the Spirit is not mentioned, but the assumption should not be that the Spirit is not present and active in Jesus’s ministry, because other portions clearly show that he is. It is best, then, to assume that the Spirit is always at work in the ministry of Jesus and that this foreshadows the sending of the Spirit to the disciples so they can continue the miracle-working ministry by the Spirit in Jesus’s name (Luke 10:17; John 14:15–26; Acts 8:6–39). At the crucifixion, then, we can say that the Spirit is still with Jesus, comforting and sustaining him in ways consistent with the Spirit’s work in his ministry and the ministry of those who are united to him (Rom. 8).
Notes:
- Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 13–14.
- For a full treatment of Jesus’s descent to the dead, see Matthew Y. Emerson, “He Descended to the Dead”: An Evangelical Theology of Holy Saturday (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019).
This article is adapted from Beholding the Triune God: The Inseparable Work of Father, Son, and Spirit by Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith.
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