MY GOD, WHY DO I FORSAKE YOU?

When our Lord Jesus Christ hung upon the Cross, He cried:

“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46)

These words are among the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith.

The Lord was not crying out in despair, nor was He doubting the Father. Neither was the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity broken. The Father never ceased to love the Son, and the Son never ceased to be one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity is indivisible, eternal, and immutable.

Christ uttered the opening words of Psalm 22, a psalm that begins with the anguish of apparent abandonment but ends in victory, vindication, and the proclamation that God has accomplished His salvation. Every Jew standing beneath the Cross would have recognized this psalm. By beginning it, Christ pointed not only to His suffering but also to its fulfillment.

Yet His suffering was entirely real.

The eternal Son of God truly became man. He assumed our human nature completely, except for sin. 

Therefore, He experienced everything proper to our humanity: hunger, thirst, weariness, sorrow, betrayal, pain, and death. On the Cross, Christ entered into the deepest consequences of the Fall.

Although He Himself was without sin, He willingly accepted the burden of our fallen condition. As Saint Paul writes:

“For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

This does not mean that Christ became sinful.

Nor does it mean that the Father rejected the Son.

Rather, the Sinless One voluntarily entered into the full tragedy of humanity’s separation from God, not because He deserved it, but because He desired to heal it from within.

Only Christ can truly say,

“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

For He alone never forsook God.

The question that belongs to us is different:

“My God, my God, why have I forsaken You?”

Every sin is our turning away from the Source of Life.

Every act of pride, hatred, lust, greed, envy, or selfishness is our refusal of communion with God.

Christ never committed such a turning away.

He remained perfectly obedient to the Father, even unto death on the Cross.

Therefore, His cry cannot be understood as the confession of a guilty conscience or the complaint of a sinner. It is the voice of the utterly innocent One who has entered voluntarily into the suffering caused by the guilty.

The Fathers teach that Christ descended to the deepest abyss of human existence so that no darkness would remain untouched by His saving presence.

He entered our death to destroy death.

He entered our suffering to sanctify suffering.

He entered Hades to overthrow Hades.

He accepted everything that belongs to fallen humanity except sin itself.

To the infinitely holy Son of God, sin is utterly foreign.

Imagine every lie ever spoken.

Every murder.

Every act of hatred.

Every betrayal.

Every blasphemy.

Every impurity.

Every injustice.

Every hidden darkness of the human heart.

All the corruption introduced by the Fall, all the misery of humanity’s rebellion, all the horror of death itself – Christ freely accepted the burden of healing it.

Not because He became corrupt.

But because Love willingly descended into corruption to destroy it.

This is why the Cross is not merely the place of suffering.

It is the place of victory.

As the Orthodox Church sings at Pascha:

“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

The Cross cannot be separated from the Resurrection.

The apparent defeat becomes the victory of God.

Death becomes the path to Life.

The tomb becomes the birthplace of the new creation.

Christ’s cry from the Cross is therefore not the cry of hopelessness.

It is the cry of the suffering Messiah foretold by the prophets.

It is the prayer of Psalm 22.

It is the voice of the New Adam entering the deepest wound of the old Adam in order to heal it completely.

He was never separated from the Father according to His divinity.

Yet according to His true humanity He experienced the full horror of death, abandonment, suffering, and the consequences of our fallen condition, so that nothing in human existence would remain outside His saving work.

The Cross reveals not a division within God, but the immeasurable humility of God.

The Creator entered His creation.

The Immortal accepted death.

The Sinless One bore the burden of sinners.

The Physician entered the hospital of humanity, taking upon Himself our mortal condition in order to heal it from within.

Therefore, when we stand before the Cross, we do not hear the despair of One who has lost God.

We hear the voice of God Himself entering the deepest darkness of our condition so that no one who seeks Him will ever have to remain there forever.

For “God is with us”- even in suffering, even in death, and even in the silence of the tomb.

And because He entered that darkness, darkness itself could no longer overcome the Light.

With Love in the Lord,
Stella Kamenova