Matthew 27:46:“My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”
The Bible has some very difficult statements, and this is one of them. I dare not say that I completely understand what Jesus meant when he said, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”
Check in your Bible’s reference column or footnote and you’ll see that Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22:1. That fact is both important and significant—more yet than what William Barclay says—that people dying on a cross don’t just quote poetry to themselves. Yes, something much more significant was going on here (The Gospel of Luke in Barclay’s The Daily Study Bible series). Psalms 22, verse one “is an urgent appeal for God to intervene on behalf of the righteous sufferer” (William L. Lane, Commentary on the Gospel of Mark in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series, p. 572). Barclay and some other Bible scholars miss it, I’m confident, but many scholars are on track when they say that Jesus’ cry “expresses the profound horror of separation from God. The sinless Son of God died the sinner’s death and experienced the bitterness of desolation… the cost of providing ‘a ransom for the many’ (Mk 10:45)” (Lane, p. 573). As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” At that moment, Jesus bore all the sins of the world on his body—including your sins and mine. Since God is holy and can neither touch nor be touched by sin, he had to withdraw himself from Jesus during that moment when “Jesus himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and so at this time of estrangement from his Father, at this time of inconceivable and incomprehensible split in the Godhead, Jesus says to God, the Son says to the Father, indeed God says to himself, “Why have you forsaken me?” (cf. Phillip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, p. 201).