Why did Jesus say, 'My God, why have you forsaken me?'

Jesus cries out these words from the cross, quoting the opening line of Psalm 22—a real, raw expression of profound anguish, not staged or symbolic. Christians take this cry seriously as genuine human suffering, including a genuine sense of abandonment, at the most agonizing moment of his life.

Some Christian traditions connect this to the weight of bearing human sin on the cross, describing a real relational rupture experienced in that moment. Others push back strongly against any suggestion the eternal unity between Father and Son was ever actually broken, since that would contradict core Trinitarian doctrine—reading Jesus' cry instead as a genuine experience of felt abandonment, without an actual separation within God himself.

Many scholars also note that quoting a psalm's opening line was a recognized way of invoking the psalm's entire trajectory—and Psalm 22 moves from this exact opening cry of abandonment toward eventual vindication and praise, suggesting Jesus may have been signaling far more than the first line alone.