"Why Have You Forsaken Me?"
Finding God in the Darkness of Abandonment
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46 & Mark 15:34)
It was about the ninth hour. Three hours of darkness had covered the land—a darkness more than natural, a darkness that seemed to seep into the very soul of the world. And then, from the central cross, came a cry unlike any other. Not whispered, but shouted with the last reserves of strength from a dying man:
"Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?"
The Gospel writers translate this Aramaic for us: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
This is the fourth word from the cross, and it is the most shocking, the most theologically challenging, and perhaps the most relevant to our world in 2025.
Let's examine what's happening in this text. First, Jesus is quoting Psalm 22, a psalm of lament that begins in despair but ends in triumph. Jesus, even in his agony, is praying scripture—something he would have memorized from childhood. But this is not merely an academic quotation. This is a raw, visceral cry of anguish.
The Greek word used for "forsaken" carries the sense of abandonment, of being left behind, of being utterly deserted. It's the word you might use for someone left on a battlefield, or a child abandoned by parents. It describes complete isolation.
And the question "why?" is not merely rhetorical. It's a genuine interrogation, a demand for explanation. Jesus is not just expressing feeling; he's questioning the very purpose behind his abandonment.
This cry reveals something profound: on the cross, Jesus experienced a rupture in the eternal communion he had always known with the Father. The Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who had existed in perfect relationship from eternity, now experienced the unthinkable: separation. As Jesus bore the sin of the world, he experienced the ultimate consequence of sin—separation from God.
Theologians have wrestled with this moment for centuries. How could God abandon God? How could the indivisible be divided? We cannot fully comprehend this mystery, but we can recognize its significance: Jesus experienced the full horror of godforsakenness so that we would never have to.
As I look at our world in 2025, I see a society experiencing a profound sense of abandonment on multiple levels.
First, there's institutional abandonment. The institutions that once provided structure, meaning, and security have failed us spectacularly. Government, regardless of which party holds power, seems incapable of addressing our most pressing problems. Corporations prioritize quarterly profits over human flourishing. Educational systems leave students with crushing debt and inadequate preparation for a rapidly changing world. Even religious institutions have been exposed for corruption, abuse, and hypocrisy.
We have never had more information about our institutions and never trusted them less.
Second, there's social abandonment. Our communities have fragmented, leaving many feeling isolated and forgotten. The digital promise of connection has delivered instead a paradoxical loneliness—we're more "connected" than ever, yet increasingly alone. Algorithmic bubbles ensure we rarely encounter those different from ourselves, except as caricatures to fear or despise.
The statistics here are equally alarming: 64% of Americans report feeling "abandoned by society." The number of people who say they have no close friends has tripled in the past decade. As artificial intelligence increasingly mediates our interactions, many wonder if authentic human connection is becoming obsolete.
Third, there's spiritual abandonment. Faith communities that once provided moral grounding and transcendent purpose have declined precipitously. Many who leave cite not disbelief in God but disillusionment with religious institutions. Meanwhile, the "spiritual but not religious" population grows, cobbling together personalized belief systems that offer little in the way of community or accountability.
The result is a widespread sense that we're on our own in a hostile or indifferent universe—that if there is a God, he has abandoned us to our own devices.
Even within the church, many believers experience a profound sense of divine absence. They pray fervently for healing, reconciliation, or guidance, only to be met with what feels like cosmic silence. They witness injustice, suffering, and evil triumphing with apparent impunity, and wonder: where is God?
In short, we live in an age defined by a profound sense of abandonment—institutional, social, and spiritual. And in this context, the fourth word from the cross speaks with particular power.
The revolutionary truth of Christianity is this: we worship a God who knows what abandonment feels like from the inside.
This distinguishes our faith from every other religious system. We don't worship a distant deity observing human suffering from a safe remove. We worship a God who entered fully into the human experience, including its darkest aspect—the sense of being utterly forsaken.
When Jesus cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he was not only quoting scripture; he was giving voice to humanity's most fundamental fear: that we are ultimately alone in a universe indifferent to our suffering.
Jesus didn't just sympathize with human abandonment—he experienced it to its fullest extent so that it would never have the final word in our lives.
This means that when you cry out in your own darkness—when the diagnosis comes, when the relationship ends, when the addiction reclaims you, when the depression descends, when the child walks away, when the prayer seems to bounce off the ceiling—your cry is not met by a God who says, "I don't understand." It's met by a God who says, "I know exactly how this feels."
But there's more. Jesus's cry of abandonment was not the end of the story. It was followed by "It is finished" and "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." The abandonment—real as it was—was temporary. The separation gave way to reunion, the darkness to dawn, the godforsakenness to restored communion.
And this is the hope we cling to in our own experiences of abandonment: that they are real, but they are not final.
So how do we live faithfully in this age of abandonment? What does Jesus's fourth word from the cross teach us about navigating our own experiences of institutional, social, and spiritual abandonment?
First, it legitimizes honest lament. Jesus didn't spiritualize his suffering or cover it with religious platitudes. He named it for what it was—abandonment—and he questioned it directly. "Why have you forsaken me?" The Bible's wisdom literature, particularly the Psalms and Lamentations, is filled with such raw expressions of grief, doubt, and questioning. True faith doesn't require pretending that everything is fine when it isn't.
When was the last time you were truly honest with God about your feelings of abandonment? Or have you been offering sanitized prayers that you think God wants to hear rather than the messy reality of your actual experience?
Second, it reminds us that feelings of abandonment don't negate God's presence. Even in his cry of dereliction, Jesus addressed God as "my God." Despite the sense of abandonment, he maintained his claim on relationship. The absence he felt was real, but it didn't erase the underlying bond.
This is crucial for our spiritual lives. The feeling that God is absent doesn't mean that God is actually absent. Throughout Christian history, many saints have testified to going through "dark nights of the soul"—periods of spiritual dryness where God seemed distant or silent. Yet these same saints often discovered, in retrospect, that God was working most powerfully during these apparent absences.
The question is not whether you feel God's presence, but whether you will continue to claim God as "my God" even when every feeling suggests you've been forsaken.
Third, it points us to community as the context for enduring abandonment. Jesus wasn't physically alone on the cross—his mother, the disciple John, and several women who had followed him were present. Similarly, while we may feel spiritually abandoned at times, we need not be relationally abandoned.
This is why the church—for all its flaws—remains essential. It is where we carry one another's burdens, where we speak truth when others can only see darkness, where we hold hope for those who have temporarily lost it. In a culture of institutional abandonment, the church is called to be an institution that doesn't abandon—that stays present especially with the suffering, the doubting, and the despairing.
Fourth, it teaches us to look for resurrection on the other side of abandonment. Jesus's cry of dereliction came near the end of his suffering, but it wasn't the final word. The godforsakenness he experienced was the darkest hour before the dawn of resurrection.
This doesn't mean we should rush to "resurrection language" prematurely, skipping over the reality of suffering. But it does mean that in Christ, abandonment never has the final word. There is always—always—something on the other side, even if we can't see it from within the darkness.
I want to speak directly to those of you experiencing your own sense of abandonment right now.
Maybe it's relational—a partner who left, a friend who betrayed you, a family that rejected you. Maybe it's institutional—a church that failed you, a government that ignored you, a workplace that discarded you. Maybe it's spiritual—prayers that seem to go unanswered, a God who feels distant, a faith that no longer provides the certainty it once did.
I won't offer you easy answers or shallow comfort. I won't tell you that your feelings of abandonment aren't real or valid. Jesus's cry from the cross affirms the reality of such experiences.
But I will offer you this truth: your cry of abandonment can become the very point where you encounter God most profoundly. Not a distant God offering platitudes, but the crucified God who knows abandonment from the inside.
The invitation today is not to move quickly past your sense of abandonment, but to recognize that Christ is present within it—that he has been there before you and is there with you now.
Will you bring your honest lament to God today? Will you cry out, as Jesus did, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"—not as an act of unbelief but as an act of raw, authentic faith? Will you trust that this cry doesn't drive God away but invites him into your darkest places?
And will you allow others to stand with you at the foot of your cross—to bear witness to your suffering, to hold hope when you cannot, to remind you that abandonment is real but not final?
In a world where abandonment has become the defining experience for so many, the church has a unique opportunity to embody the God who neither abandons us nor is intimidated by our honest cries of godforsakenness.
We serve a Savior who didn't just endure abandonment but transformed it—who entered into godforsakenness to ensure that it would never have the final word in our lives or in our world.
When Jesus cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he wasn't expressing the absence of God; he was revealing the astonishing lengths to which God will go to reach us in our abandonment.
This is the paradox at the heart of our faith: that in the very moment when Jesus felt most forsaken, God was doing his most important work. And the same may be true in your life today.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
May this cry—uttered in faith rather than despair—become the doorway through which you encounter the God who knows what it means to be forsaken, and who promises that abandonment will never be the end of your story.
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