# The Cry That Was Not a Mistake A friend of mine—a surgeon, not given to sentimentality—told me he nearly lost his faith on Good Friday. Not because of the crucifixion itself, but because of the words. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." He had expected a death full of dignity, perhaps a final sermon. What he got sounded like a man whose theology had collapsed under him. He said it quietly, almost embarrassed: "It sounds like Jesus didn't know what was happening." He is not alone. Most Christians either rush past the cry or flatten it into an abstraction about penal substitution, and either way they miss what is actually going on. ## The Words We Flinch At Matthew sets the scene with a strange piece of stagecraft. Jesus calls out in Aramaic, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" and somebody in the crowd hears "Elijah" and reaches for vinegar. It is a misunderstanding that the Gospel writer preserves. He could have tidied it up. He does not. This matters, because it shows that even the people standing closest to the cross got the words wrong. They heard a name and missed a sentence. They were looking for a miracle and missed a sermon. We are often no better. The two evasions I hear most are these. The first is to skip the cry entirely—preachers will move briskly from the Last Supper to "It is finished," and the moment of dereliction gets folded into a general atmosphere of suffering. The second is the opposite: to over-explain, to treat the cry as a theological proposition that needs immediate defusing. "God did not really forsake Jesus, of course—the Trinity cannot be broken." Or: "This is the moment the Father turned his face away because of our sin." Both responses, in their different ways, reach for the off switch. I want to suggest that the cry is neither a moment of theological breakdown nor a riddle to be solved with a doctrinal formula. It is a deliberate, scripturally loaded act of worship, and we have been thin about it for too long. ## What Jesus Was Actually Doing with a Psalm First-century Jews did not handle the Hebrew Scriptures the way we handle a verse-of-the-day app. They knew long stretches of the text by heart, and they had a habit—visible all over the New Testament and the rabbinic literature—of citing the opening words of a passage as a way of invoking the whole thing. Quote line one and you summon the rest of the song. When Paul writes in Romans 4 that Abraham "believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness," he is not making a passing allusion to a single verse; he is hauling the entire Genesis narrative of covenant into his argument. When Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, says "beginning with Moses and all the prophets," he is treating the whole Hebrew Bible as one coherent voice. This is how the text was used. So when a Jewish teacher, dying on a Roman cross, opens his mouth and says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," he is not muttering a confused complaint. He is naming the script. He is telling anyone in the crowd with ears to hear: read this whole Psalm. This Psalm is what is happening here. That changes things. Considerably. ## Read the Whole Psalm Before You Decide What He Meant If you have not read Psalm 22 recently, do it now and watch what happens. The opening is the line we know: a cry of abandonment, raw and unresolved. "Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?" But then David begins to circle. He remembers that his fathers trusted God and were delivered. He returns to the desolation. He describes himself as "a worm and not a man," scorned, despised. The form is classic Hebrew lament: oscillation between grief and memory, dread and hope. And then the descriptions begin to get strange. "All my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax... My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth." "Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet." "People stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment." David is writing centuries before crucifixion exists as a method of execution. And yet the bodily details—dislocated joints, unquenchable thirst, pierced hands and feet, gambling soldiers—read like a medical report from Golgotha. The Gospel writers noticed this. John explicitly cites the division of garments. Matthew records the mocking. The Psalm is not an arbitrary cry plucked from memory; it is, in extraordinary detail, the Psalm of the cross. And then comes verse 24, and the whole thing pivots: "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." Read that carefully. The Psalmist is saying, in the body of the text, the opposite of what the first line seemed to claim. Not hidden his face. Has listened. The Psalm then opens out into one of the most extraordinary endings in the Hebrew Bible. "All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him." "Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it." He has done it. The Psalm that begins "why have you forsaken me" ends with global worship and a declaration of accomplished work. If you only know the first line, you do not know the Psalm. And if you only know the first line of Jesus's cry, you do not know what he was doing on the cross. ## Why the Lament Is Still Real Here, though, I want to slow down, because there is a danger of swinging too far the other way. Once you discover the Psalm 22 background, it is tempting to drain the cry of all its anguish—to turn it into a piece of liturgical theatre. "He did not really feel forsaken; he was just citing Scripture." That will not do. Augustine, who thought about this as carefully as anyone, argued that Christ on the cross speaks both "in us and for us"—that is, he takes up the language of human desolation not as a performance but as one who genuinely inhabits the experience he names. The Word made flesh does not skim the surface of suffering. He goes the whole way down. The cry is real. The desolation is real. Hebrews tells us that Jesus "offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears." Gethsemane was not a rehearsal. Whatever it means that "the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all," it was felt, in the body and the spirit of a man who had until that moment lived in unbroken communion with his Father. So the cry holds two things together that we tend to want to separate. It is genuine lament, and it is also deliberate Scripture. It is not either a cry of confusion or a cool citation—it is both: a real human voice taking up a Psalm precisely because the Psalm was written for moments when the gap between what God has promised and what your body is feeling has become unbearable. This is, I think, what we have lost. Our discomfort with lament has made us suspicious of any prayer that does not resolve quickly into reassurance. The Psalms are not embarrassed about this. Jesus was not embarrassed about this. We should not be either. ## What Penal Substitution Gets Right and What It Flattens The most common evangelical reading of the cry of dereliction goes roughly like this: at the cross, Jesus bore the sin of the world; God, who cannot look on sin, turned his face away; therefore the Son experienced, for the first time in eternity, a rupture in his fellowship with the Father; the cry is the audible evidence of that rupture. There is something true here, and I want to say so carefully. The New Testament does teach that Christ bore our sin. Paul says he "became sin for us." Peter says he "bore our sins in his body on the tree." Isaiah's suffering servant is wounded for our transgressions. To strip the cross of its substitutionary dimension is to strip it of a category the apostles themselves use, and I am not interested in doing that. But I am interested in noticing that when we reduce the cry to a single transactional moment—God turns face, Son feels absence, debt is paid—we end up with something thinner than the text gives us. Three problems. First, it ignores the deliberate Psalm 22 framing. Jesus did not cry out a doctrinal formula. He cried out a Psalm, and that Psalm explicitly states that God has *not* hidden his face. The substitutionary reading is forced to argue against the very text Jesus is citing. Second, it tends toward a kind of inner-Trinitarian rupture that the church has historically been very nervous about. The Father does not stop being the Father of the Son for a Friday afternoon. The Spirit, through whom Christ offered himself (Hebrews 9), does not vacate the scene. Whatever happened at the cross, it was not a temporary suspension of the Trinity. Third,and this is pastoral,it leaves people without a model. If the cry was a unique forensic event, a one-off accounting transaction, then it has no language to give to a believer who feels forsaken on a Tuesday morning in a hospital corridor. Whereas if the cry is the great prayer of lament taken up by the Son of God himself, then it is exactly the prayer the suffering church most needs. So: keep the substitution. But do not let it eat the Psalm. ## The Cry as Worship Under Catastrophe Here is the constructive claim. What Jesus is doing on the cross, when he opens his mouth and says "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani," is what the Psalmist did: bringing devastation *into* the presence of God rather than away from it. This is the move that distinguishes biblical lament from despair. Despair turns its face away. Lament looks up and addresses God directly, even,especially,when the heavens seem closed. The Psalmist does not say "there is no God." He says "my God, my God." He is still addressing. He is still in covenant. The very form of the cry presupposes the relationship it appears to question. And this is faith. Not the brittle faith that requires good outcomes to stay intact, but the faith that can scream at God without ceasing to call him God. The faith that knows, somewhere underneath the desolation, that the only place to take desolation is to the throne. Nietzsche, who was nothing if not a careful reader of his enemies, accused Christianity of being a religion for the weak,a slave morality that dressed up resentment as virtue and turned cowardice into a creed. "Christianity has waged a deadly war against this higher type of man." He thought the cross was the symbol of everything contemptible in the human spirit. He was wrong, and he was wrong precisely here. The man on the cross was not whimpering. He was praying a Psalm. He was, in the moment of maximum bodily and spiritual catastrophe, performing the most demanding act of worship ever performed: bringing the whole weight of human suffering and divine silence into direct address with the Father, refusing both denial and despair, and trusting that the God who seemed absent was the same God whose face had not, in fact, been hidden. That is not weakness. It is a strength so deep that Nietzsche's category of the strong man cannot reach it. ## What This Means for People Who Feel Forsaken I sit with people sometimes who have run out of words for God. A woman whose marriage has ended in a way she did not choose. A father whose son has cut him off. The hospice visits. The miscarriages no one knows how to talk about. The depressions that do not lift when the sermon promises they will. To these people, "everything happens for a reason" is not a comfort but an insult. "God will not give you more than you can handle" is theologically false and pastorally cruel. What they need is not an explanation but a permission,permission to pray the darkness, to bring it into the room with God rather than locking it in a cupboard until they feel better. The cry of dereliction is that permission. It is the divine endorsement of lament. It is the sound of Jesus telling the church, forever, that there is a kind of prayer that does not require you to feel God's presence in order to address God's person. The Psalms gave us the language. The cross authorized it. And it does something more. The cross is not a proof that God is absent in our worst moments. It is the permanent evidence that he has *been* to the place of felt abandonment himself. Whatever depth of darkness you are in, you are not in a place that is foreign to him. He has been there. He has prayed Psalm 22 from the inside. That is not a slogan. It is, when you grasp it, the only thing that holds. ## The Ending the Crowd Missed The crowd at Golgotha got the first line and missed everything else. They heard "Eloi" and thought of Elijah. They reached for vinegar. They stood and watched. They did not finish the Psalm. But the Psalm finishes. "All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord... Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it." A people yet unborn. That is us. That is the church, two thousand years downstream from the cross, still proclaiming the righteousness of a crucified king to people who were not yet a glint in their grandparents' eye when the Psalm was written. The Psalm anticipates the resurrection. It anticipates the church. It anticipates the global worship that the book of Revelation will eventually describe in full colour. Jesus on the cross was not narrating his defeat. He was narrating Easter in seed form. He took up a Psalm that ends in vindication and global praise and prayed it from the place where vindication seemed least plausible. He prayed the ending while suspended in the beginning. He proclaimed "he has done it" while the doing was still tearing through his body. And the church's job is to finish the Psalm aloud in the world. To take the line that the crowd misheard and read on to the line they never reached. To carry the cry of dereliction and the song of vindication together, because they are the same song, and the man who prayed them is the same man, and the God who seemed silent on Friday spoke in unmistakable terms on Sunday morning. My surgeon friend, in the end, did not lose his faith. He told me later that what brought him back was finding out that the cry was a quotation. "It changes the whole thing," he said. "He was not lost. He was praying." He was praying. And he is praying still, in every believer who has ever taken those words onto their own lips and found, at the bottom of them, not abandonment but the floor of the Father's house. "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).