Did God Forsake Jesus on the Cross? | Tom McCall on Matthew 27:46

In this episode of What in the Word?, Thomas H. McCall joins Kirk E. Miller to discuss one of the most emotionally arresting lines in the Gospels: Jesus’s cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; cf. Mark 15:34). These words have raised questions, like: Did the Father actually forsake the Son? Was the Trinity ruptured? And how should this utterance shape our understanding of the atonement, if at all? Tom surveys different historical interpretations on this passage and helps listeners navigate its exegesis and theological implications. He also gives suggestions on how to avoid important pitfalls.

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Episode guest: Thomas H. McCall

Thomas H. McCall is Timothy C. and Julie M. Tennent Professor of Theology at Asbury Theological Seminary. Previously, he pastored churches in Alaska and Michigan and was formerly Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Professorial Fellow in Exegetical and Analytic Theology at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author and co-author of several articles and books in historical theology and systematic theology.

Episode synopsis

The cry in context: regal authority

Tom begins by situating the cry within the respective Gospel narratives.

This line is not a random emotional outburst placed on the periphery of the crucifixion story. In both Matthew and Mark, it’s one of Jesus’s final utterances, intentionally placed near the climax of the passion narrative. Yet, at the same time, the evangelists don’t pause to interpret it. They simply record the cry in transliterated Aramaic, translate it, and leave the statement to confront the reader without explanation. Tom argues that this “non-explained” quality is part of its effect, drawing attention to the intensity of Christ’s suffering.

But Matthew’s Gospel, in particular, adds another layer of tension because of how Matthew has been narratively developing the theme of Jesus’s sovereignty throughout. Tom briefly sketches this theme across Matthew’s Gospel:

• Matthew’s so-called infancy narrative highlights Jesus’s kingship. He opens with a genealogy framed to highlight Jesus’s royal identity, the magi asking for the location of one born “king of the Jews,” and Herod’s violent reaction.
• This theme continues into Jesus’s wilderness temptations, where a central issue is authority: Who rules, who has the right to command, and what kind of kingship will Jesus embody?
• By the time Matthew reaches the crucifixion, the regal theme has become a sharp paradox: Jesus is publicly labeled “king of the Jews,” yet he appears helpless, executed like a criminal under another ruler’s judgment.

Thus, powerful themes collide at this precise moment: the proclaimed kingship of Jesus and his apparent defeat. The cry—“Why have you forsaken me?”—emerges from the center of that collision. As such, in Matthew’s framing, the cry of dereliction does not merely express grief. It injects a seeming plot twist that throws Jesus’s entire identity into question—or at least confronts misconceptions about the nature of his rule.

In his book, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters, Tom expounds upon the shock value:

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

Why this verse is so debated

This verse has become a battleground where rather different theological commitments often surface. In their book, Beholding the Triune God: The Inseparable Work of Father, Son, and Spirit, Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith introduce the issue as follows:

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? [Many see in] the cross … a moment of separation between the Father and the Son. The cry of dereliction … 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.²

Interestingly, Tom observes that recent interpretations of this passage (especially in the last century) differ significantly from how earlier theologians (patristic, medieval, and early modern) tended to understand it. This shift itself raises questions: Why the change? What assumptions are driving it?

And a central reason such interpretations matter is the way they impinge upon one’s doctrine of God. According to Tom, certain modern readings arguably undermine core Christian claims about God’s unity, the Trinity, and Christ’s person. In other words, differences over this text involve not merely alternative interpretations of Christ’s cry, but alternative understandings of what can be said of God.

Additionally, many people resonate with this verse because it names a universal human experience: the feeling of abandonment—even abandonment by God. For some, the verse brings comfort: Jesus knows this experience. Yet for others, it’s destabilizing. If even one like Jesus experienced God’s abandonment, what hope is there for the rest of us? In this way, Jesus’s cry often becomes a “mirror text,” reflecting people’s own grief, doubt, trauma, or longing.

3 interpretive approaches

To help us sort through the theological issues, Tom outlines three general approaches to the text, admitting these are rather “broad strokes.”

1. Forsaken to death while maintaining the beatific vision

Tom begins by stating the dominant view among medieval theologians like Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas. On this account, the Father “forsakes” the Son in this specific sense: The Father hands the Son over to suffer death at the hands of sinful humans. The forsakenness is real, but it is not a loss of divine love or an internal conflict within God. It is God the Father permitting God the Son to be crucified.

Far from experiencing an interruption in the Father’s pleasure, Aquinas insists that Jesus would have even enjoyed the beatific vision—the uninterrupted communion with God that Christians hope to enjoy in the future—throughout his passion. Thus, this view maintains the reality of Christ’s suffering while also insisting that the Son never ceases to trust the Father, and the Father never ceases to love the Son.

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2. A “God against God” rupturing of the Trinity

A view like Aquinas’s can be sharply contrasted with a modern theologian like Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann famously read Jesus’s cry as indicative of a kind of internal contradiction within God (“God against God”), a stasis or rupture within God’s own life—even an ontological break in the Trinity.

Tom strongly objects: This view doesn’t merely interpret the verse differently. It implies a fundamentally different doctrine of God. According to Tom, it sits far outside what classical Christian theology would even consider metaphysically possible.

Tom also argues that versions of this “rupture” interpretation can sometimes show up in some popular evangelical presentations, namely, those that describe the Father as disgusted with Jesus and turning away from him in revulsion, implying a divine hatred or intra-trinitarian fracture.

3. An experience of forsakenness apart from divine displeasure

According to a third family of interpretations, often associated with John Calvin and Reformed scholastic trajectories (e.g., Francis Turretin), Jesus genuinely experiences something like forsakenness at the level of human consciousness, an experience tied to his identification with sinners. Yet in these accounts, no actual break in the Trinity—or hostility of the Father toward the Son—occurs.

Kirk mentions Calvin, for instance, who maintains that Christ did indeed feel the weight of divine vengeance, what we might call the horrors of eternal death, and in this sense the abandonment of God.

Nothing had been done if Christ had only endured corporeal death. In order to interpose between us and God’s anger, and satisfy his righteous judgment, it was necessary that he should feel the weight of divine vengeance. Whence also it was necessary that he should engage, as it were, at close quarters with the powers of hell and the horrors of eternal death. … And certainly no abyss can be imagined more dreadful than to feel that you are abandoned and forsaken of God, and not heard when you invoke him, just as if he had conspired your destruction. To such a degree was Christ dejected. … And certainly had not his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been a Redeemer of bodies only.³

But Calvin is careful to clarify that this in no way implies an ontological rupture in God or something like personal hatred or anger of the Father towards the Son.

We do not, however, insinuate that God was ever hostile to him or angry with him. How could he be angry with the beloved Son, with whom his soul was well pleased? Or how could he have appeased the Father by his intercession for others if He were hostile to himself? But this we say, that he bore the weight of the divine anger, that, smitten and afflicted, he experienced all the signs of an angry and avenging God.⁴

An interpretive key: Psalm 22

Jesus’s cry does not consist of words invented on the spot. Rather, he is quoting Psalm 22. According to Tom, this is crucial for how we ought to interpret Jesus’s cry. We are meant to hear in it a reflection of the Psalm.

Observe, for instance, how the passion narratives are saturated with allusions to Psalm 22. As Craig Blomberg notes, Psalm 22

contains an astonishing number of close parallels to the events of Jesus’ crucifixion: a cry of abandonment (22:1–2), despising and mocking (22:6–7), the taunt that the Lord should deliver the one who trusts in him (22:8), a near-death experience described as being poured out like water with all his bones out of joint, his heart melted like wax, and his strength dissipated (22:14–15). Furthermore, he is surrounded by wicked onlookers (22:16a) who pierce his hands and feet (22:16b) and divide his garments by lot (22:18).⁵

For the Gospel writers, then, the use of Psalm 22 is not an incidental footnote. It’s the interpretive framework they’re weaving into the story.

The trajectory of Psalm 22 becomes our guide to interpreting Matthew 27:46. Psalm 22 begins with anguish but moves toward vindication and confident trust. In fact, the psalm later affirms that God “did not hide his face” from the afflicted, but listened to his cry for help. That doesn’t erase the lament, but it does reframe it. The cry of forsakenness exists in a larger sequence leading to deliverance.

Use the Important Passages section in Logos’s Guides to locate
key quotations and cross references.

Christ’s solidarity with us

How then should we read the cry of dereliction? Tom offers a theological reading shaped by three lenses:

1. Context. Interpret the cry according to its specific use in Matthew and Mark, and in light of the original phrase in Psalm 22.
2. Canon. Read the cry alongside Jesus’s other passion sayings, such as his expression of trust, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46), and victory: “It is finished” (John 19:30). Such sayings would be difficult to reconcile with an idea of total despair or metaphysical rupture within God.
3. Creed. Interpret it in accord with and within the bounds of creedal trinitarianism and orthodox Christology.

Using these three lenses, Tom concludes that the cry expresses Christ’s solidarity with humanity. Jesus is not forsaken from being the Son. He is forsaken in the sense that he has entered the human condition, and in that moment takes up our cries and prays them as our representative (John of Damascus).

In no way does this involve an ontological separation within God. The Father does not hate the Son. He does not turn his face away. The Trinity is not broken. There is no interruption in the communion of love between Father and Son. The divine relationship is not abandoned.

Atonement without “God against God”

How, if at all, does the cry of dereliction relate to the atonement?

• Tom wants to affirm that Christ’s sufferings accomplish substitutionary atonement, which includes a penal dimension: Believers no longer bear the just penalty for their sins because of Christ.
• He also wants to affirm christus victor themes: Christ triumphs over sin, death, and the devil, bringing believers victory.
• He wants room for moral-exemplar dynamics: Christ’s faithful suffering is meaningful as a pattern for discipleship.

What Tom wants to resist are problematic articulations of atonement that pits the Father against the Son, as though one divine person could act against another. On the contrary, the divine will is unified. Father and Son are not in competition.

Applying carefully, but with hope

Tom counsels preachers and teachers to explain the text in its full narrative and canonical context, without speculative exaggeration. Don’t go beyond what Scripture teaches by claiming God’s inner life is fractured or that the Father is hostile to the Son.

Additionally, faithful believers can feel abandoned. Jesus himself gives voice to that anguish here. But we must remember, Psalm 22 does not end in abandonment, nor do the Gospels end at the cross. Matthew culminates with the risen Christ’s declaration of cosmic authority—“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt 28:18)—which reframes the cross’s apparent defeat as the paradoxical path to victory. Thus, Jesus does not join us to “wallow in our grief.” Rather, he enters our darkness to bring us through it: God-with-us not only in suffering, but into redemption and triumph.

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Logos values thoughtful and engaging discussions on important biblical topics. However, the views and interpretations presented in this episode are those of the individuals speaking and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Logos. We recognize that Christians may hold different perspectives on this passage, and we welcome diverse engagement and respectful dialogue.

Let us know what you think

How do you understand Jesus’s cry of dereliction? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Pertinent resources from Thomas H. McCall

• Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters.
• “Christology and the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus” in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Christology

Additional resources for further exploration

1. Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (InterVarsity, 2012), 13–14.
2. Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith, Beholding the Triune God: The Inseparable Work of Father, Son, and Spirit (Crossway, 2024), 66–67.
3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Hendrickson, 2008), II.xvi.10–12.
4. Calvin, Institutes, II.xvi.11.
5. Craig L. Blomberg, “Matthew,” in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2007), 99.