Matthew 27:45-46: Why Was Jesus Forsaken on the Cross?
Short answer: Matthew 27:45-46 reports darkness over the land from the sixth hour to the ninth hour, and then Jesus crying out in the words of Psalm 22:1, asking why God had forsaken him. The cry is real anguish, not a lapse of faith. It points to the cross as the place where sin and its curse were borne by the sinless Son, so that a holy God could justly accept those who trust Christ. It does not mean the Father stopped loving the Son or that the eternal fellowship of the Trinity was broken. It means that in the work of redemption, Jesus entered the abandonment our sins deserved.
Two Verses That Stop the Reader Cold
Matthew's account of the crucifixion comes to a sudden halt in verse 45. After mockery, nails, and the taunts of passersby, the Gospel simply states, in Matthew 27:45, that from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. That is noon to three in the afternoon. The Gospels are generally restrained about physical description, so this note is meant to be noticed. The darkness is not a passing cloud; it covers the whole land for three hours, framing everything that follows.
Then, at the end of that darkness, comes the cry. Matthew 27:46 records Jesus calling out with a loud voice, asking why God had forsaken him. The wording is drawn directly from Psalm 22:1, where the psalm opens with the same question. Matthew gives the cry in Aramaic and then translates it, which means he wants his readers to feel the weight of the words, not just record a fact. This is the fourth of the so-called sayings from the cross in the Gospels, and it is the darkest.
Mark's account is almost identical. Mark 15:33-34 also places darkness over the whole land from the sixth hour to the ninth, and then gives the same cry. Two independent Gospel writers preserve the same detail and the same words. That double attestation matters. Whatever we conclude about the cry's meaning, we cannot treat it as an incidental detail or a later embellishment. The earliest Christian memory held on to this moment with reverent care.
It is worth pausing over the setting. Crucifixion was a public, shameful death, and Jesus had already endured scourging, mockery, and the slow work of suffocation. Yet the Gospel writers do not linger on the physical mechanics. They point to the darkness and the cry. The real drama of the cross, as the New Testament tells it, is not merely that a good man suffered but that something was happening between the Son and the Father that no one at the foot of the cross could see.
The Darkness Is Part of the Message
The darkness is not background colour; it interprets the cry. In the Old Testament, thick darkness is associated with the presence of God in judgment and in awe. At Sinai, Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. The prophets speak of the day of the Lord as a day of darkness, not light. When the land goes dark at noon, Matthew is signalling that this is no ordinary execution. This is a moment of divine gravity, a day of reckoning.
Amos warned Israel that the day of the Lord would be darkness and not light, and that warning is fulfilled in a paradoxical way here. The judgment that should have fallen on sinners falls on the sinless one instead. The darkness over the land is a visible sign that the curse is being executed. It belongs to the same theological world as Galatians 3:13, where Paul writes that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, since it is written that everyone who hangs on a tree is cursed.
Light and darkness also carry moral weight throughout Scripture. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Sin is described as deeds of darkness. For three hours, creation itself seems to wear the colour of judgment. The sun's light fails, as though the ordinary world has no category for what is happening. Matthew does not explain the darkness; he lets it stand as a wordless commentary on the cry that follows it.
Some readers have tried to explain the darkness as a natural eclipse or a dust storm. Those explanations miss the point. The Gospels are not writing meteorology; they are writing theology in narrative form. Whether or not God used a natural mechanism, the timing and placement of the detail in the text is deliberate. The darkness prepares the reader to hear the forsakenness of the Son as the central event of the cross, not a side note to it.
Why Psalm 22 Is on Jesus' Lips
Jesus does not invent a new complaint; he prays the Psalms. Psalm 22:1-2 begins, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? By taking up this psalm, Jesus identifies himself with the suffering righteous one of Israel's worship. He is not merely quoting a text; he is fulfilling one. The psalm gives voice to the anguish of a believer who feels abandoned even while continuing to address God as my God.
That last point is crucial. The psalm does not say, O God, why have you forsaken me? It says, my God. Even in the depths, the psalmist holds on to covenant relationship. Jesus' cry is not the cry of a man who has lost faith. It is the cry of a man who is holding on to God precisely while experiencing abandonment. The address itself is an act of trust, spoken from the darkness rather than from the light.
Psalm 22 also does not end in despair. It moves through lament toward praise, and it ends with the nations worshipping the Lord. So when Jesus takes the opening line on his lips, he is not simply expressing a feeling; he is pointing to a whole psalm that will be fulfilled in his death and vindication. The forsaken sufferer of Psalm 22 becomes the reason the ends of the earth turn to the Lord. The cry of dereliction is the doorway into salvation for the nations.
This is why the cry cannot be isolated from the rest of the psalm or from the rest of the Gospel. It is a real cry of real anguish, and it is also a scriptural cry that anticipates vindication. Jesus enters the darkest place a human being can enter, and he enters it with the words of Scripture on his lips. That pattern is itself a model for suffering believers, who are invited to bring their groaning to God even when they cannot see his hand.
What the Forsakenness Actually Means
The New Testament does not leave us to guess what happened in the darkness. It gives us categories. Second Corinthians 5:21 says, For him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf; so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. The sinless one is made sin, and the guilty are made righteous. That exchange is the heart of the atonement. The forsakenness of Jesus is the experiential side of that exchange: he is treated as sin, though he never sinned.
Galatians 3:13 adds the language of curse. Christ became a curse for us. In the law, hanging on a tree was a sign of divine rejection. Jesus did not merely die; he died the death of the accursed. The cry of abandonment is the voice of the one who bore that curse. The darkness is the atmosphere of that curse. The cross is the place where the curse fell, and it fell on him rather than on us.
What this does not mean is that the Father stopped loving the Son, or that the divine nature was divided, or that the Trinity was dissolved for three hours. Those ideas go beyond the text and have troubled the church whenever they have been asserted. Jesus remains the beloved Son, as the Father's voice had declared at his baptism and transfiguration. The abandonment is real in the realm of judgment and experience, but it does not cancel the eternal love of the Father for the Son.
It also does not mean Jesus sinned or despaired. He was without sin, and his cry was a genuine prayer. The forsakenness is penal and representative: he stood in the place of those who deserved to be forsaken, so that they might never be. That is why the cry is so central to Christian hope. If we understand it rightly, it does not shake our confidence in God; it anchors it. The abandonment of the Son is the guarantee of the acceptance of all who come to God through him.
The Cry That Answers Our Deepest Fear
Every human being has some version of the fear of being forsaken. It may be the fear of dying alone, of being forgotten, of a spouse walking away, of being rejected by a community, or of facing the future with no one to lean on. The Bible takes that fear seriously; it is not a minor complaint. The psalms of lament give it words, and the promise of God's presence addresses it directly. The cross is where the fear is met head-on, not denied.
Hebrews 13:5 says, Be free from the love of money, content with such things as you have, for he has said, I will in no way leave you, neither will I in any way forsake you. The promise of God's abiding presence is given to believers with the strongest possible language. The word order in the original is emphatic: God will not, under any circumstances, let his people go. The author of Hebrews grounds contentment in that promise, because the presence of God is a greater treasure than money.
There is a deep connection between that promise and the cry of Jesus. He was forsaken so that we might never be. He entered the darkness so that we might be brought into the light. He stood outside the camp as the accursed one so that we could be welcomed inside as children. When a believer feels abandoned, the cross is the place to look, not because feelings are false, but because they are not the whole truth. The forsaken Son is the reason the promise to us stands.
This is not a promise of ease. Christians still experience grief, loneliness, and the silence of God in hard seasons. The psalms themselves are full of such experience, and they teach us to keep praying through it. But the cross tells us that the deepest abandonment has already been borne by someone else. We may feel far off; we are not far off. We may feel forgotten; we are not forgotten. The cry of dereliction is the ground on which the promise of never being forsaken rests.
Misreading the Cry in Popular Teaching
Popular teaching sometimes says that at the cross the Father turned his back on the Son because he could not look on sin, and that the Trinity was severed. The first half of that statement has a biblical instinct behind it: sin does separate, and God is holy. But the way it is often stated goes further than Scripture. The text says Jesus cried out that he was forsaken; it does not say the Father ceased to love the Son or that the divine nature was divided. We should let the cry remain as stark as it is without adding to it.
Others go to the opposite extreme and soften the cry into a mere quotation of Psalm 22, as though Jesus were merely identifying himself as the fulfilment of prophecy and felt nothing. That reading is tidy but thin. The Gospels record a loud voice and a real question. The darkness is real, the anguish is real, and the forsakenness is real. To reduce the cry to a citation is to lose the pastoral power of the passage and to make the cross less than the New Testament makes it.
A third misreading treats the cry as evidence that Jesus doubted his own identity or lost his faith. But the cry addresses God as my God. That is not the language of unbelief; it is the language of trust under pressure. Jesus is not abandoning God; he is holding on to God in the dark. The difference matters enormously for suffering believers. If even Jesus could cry out like this and remain faithful, then our own lament need not be a sign that our faith has failed.
Faithful Christians have differed over how exactly to describe the inner workings of the atonement at this point. Some emphasise penal substitution; others stress Christ's victory over the powers or his representative obedience. These are not always rivals, and mature believers can hold several biblical images together. What we should not do is deny the reality of the cry, empty it of meaning, or use it to drive a wedge between the Father and the Son. The text calls for reverence, not cleverness.
How to Pray This Passage in Suffering
One of the most practical gifts of Matthew 27:45-46 is that it gives permission to lament. Many believers have been taught that strong faith never complains. But the Bible gives complaint a place inside prayer. Psalm 22 is in the hymnbook. Jesus prays it from the cross. If the sinless Son could bring his anguish to God with the words why have you forsaken me, then believers do not need to pretend when they are in the dark.
Lament is not the same as unbelief. Lament addresses God. It assumes he is there, even when he seems silent. It speaks honestly about pain and confusion and then leaves room for God to answer in his own time. Much of the psalter is exactly this, and much of the Christian life is learning to pray this way. The cry from the cross teaches us that honest grief and genuine faith can live in the same sentence.
At the same time, the passage calls us to look beyond our feelings to the finished work of Christ. The forsakenness he endured was not in vain. It accomplished redemption. When we are tempted to despair, we can return to the cross and remember that the darkest hour in history became the hour of our salvation. The blood that was shed there speaks forgiveness; the cry that was uttered there speaks solidarity with all who suffer; the darkness that covered the land speaks the seriousness of sin.
So the passage invites a double movement. We bring our grief to God without pretence, and we rest our hope on Christ's work without wavering. We do not have to choose between honesty about pain and confidence in the gospel. The cross holds them together. The Son who cried out in the darkness is the same Son who finished the work and rose again. Because he was forsaken, we are not, and that is the comfort this text offers to every generation.
Biblical fidelity check
Matthew 27:45-46 establishes that darkness covered the land from the sixth hour to the ninth, and that Jesus cried out asking why God had forsaken him. It establishes that the cry is real, that it belongs to the crucifixion, and that it echoes Psalm 22:1. It also stands alongside passages like 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13, which interpret the cross in terms of sin-bearing and curse-bearing. Together, these texts teach that the forsakenness of Jesus is bound up with the salvation of sinners. The passage does not, however, explain the inner mechanics of the atonement, nor does it tell us exactly what the Father was experiencing or how the divine persons related to one another in that hour. It reports the cry; it does not define how to systematise it.
A common misreading is to conclude either that Jesus only quoted a psalm and felt nothing, or that the Father's love for the Son was suspended and the Trinity was broken. The first drains the cry of its anguish and makes the cross a mere fulfilment of prophecy without genuine suffering. The second adds to the text and creates a division in God that Scripture elsewhere denies, since the Son remains the beloved Son. The text is honest about forsakenness and honest about the Son's continued address to my God. We should preach it with both realities intact, and where believers differ on the finer points of atonement theory, we can do so with charity while refusing to empty the cry of its biblical weight.
Other passages that speak to Matthew 27:45-46
Several related studies help fill out this theme. The cry from the cross echoes the whole of Psalm 22, which moves from abandonment to the worship of the nations, so see Psalm 22:1-31 Prophecy: The Forsaken Sufferer and Nations Worshiping. The New Testament letters repeatedly apply the cross to the church's life and unity, as in What Does 1 Corinthians 1:10 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application and What Does 1 Corinthians 1:9 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. For a wider survey of how the cross shapes a whole letter, see 1 Corinthians 1: Called, United, and Boasting in the Lord. Each of these studies helps connect the cry of dereliction to the daily life of the church.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Father actually abandon Jesus on the cross?
Jesus genuinely cried out that he was forsaken, and the darkness confirms the seriousness of that hour. He bore the judgment our sins deserved, and being forsaken belongs to that bearing. But we should not conclude that the Father stopped loving the Son or that the divine nature was divided. The cry is real anguish within the unbroken love of the Trinity. Scripture asserts both realities, and faithful teachers explain them in different ways without denying either passage.
Why did Jesus quote Psalm 22 instead of saying something original?
By taking Psalm 22:1-2 on his lips, Jesus identified himself with the suffering righteous one of the psalms and showed that his death fulfilled Scripture. The psalm begins in anguish but ends with the nations worshipping the Lord, so the quotation points beyond the darkness to vindication and salvation. It also shows that Jesus prayed Scripture in his hardest moment, leaving an example for believers who lament.
Does the forsakenness of Jesus mean God will forsake me too?
No. The New Testament treats the forsakenness of Christ as the reason believers will not be forsaken. Hebrews 13:5 promises that God will in no way leave or forsake his people, and that promise rests on the finished work of the cross. Christians still pass through grief and seasons of felt distance from God, but those experiences are not the same as the judgment Christ bore. He was forsaken so that we might be welcomed.
