Jesus' cry 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' invokes the whole of Psalm 22, which ends in vindication, not a confession of defeat

Jesus' cry and the whole of Psalm 22

The argument deserves to be stated in its strongest form. In Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46, Jesus cries from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Mark preserves the Aramaic form, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani"; Matthew has "Eli, Eli," closer to the Hebrew opening of Psalm 22. The line is not an isolated outburst, proponents argue, but the first verse of a known psalm. Psalm 22 begins in desolation, moves through mockery, bodily torment, and surrounding enemies, and then turns to divine hearing, praise in the congregation, and the worship of the nations. On this reading, Jesus deliberately invokes the whole psalm. His cry is not a confession that his mission has failed, but a scriptural declaration that the suffering righteous one is being vindicated by God.

This reading has serious Christian defenders. R. T. France, Craig Keener, D. A. Carson, N. T. Wright, and others have argued in different ways that the evangelists want readers to hear Psalm 22 behind the crucifixion scene. Raymond Brown, while more cautious about reducing the cry to triumph, also treats Psalm 22 as central to the passion tradition. The argument is not a modern evasion invented to soften a difficult saying. The Gospels themselves encourage the connection.

Why the reading is strong

Several features make the Psalm 22 reading persuasive.

First, the cry is an exact or near-exact citation of Psalm 22:1. This is not a vague allusion. Mark and Matthew both present Jesus as praying Scripture at the moment of death. The wording matters: "My God, my God" is still an address to God. Even in abandonment, the sufferer speaks to God as "my God." Psalm 22 is a lament, but it is not atheism, rebellion, or despair in the sense of renouncing God.

Second, the surrounding passion narratives contain multiple echoes of Psalm 22. The mockers say, "He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him" in Matthew 27:43, strikingly close to Psalm 22:8: "He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him." The division of garments is even clearer. Psalm 22:18 says, "They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots." Mark 15:24, Matthew 27:35, Luke 23:34, and especially John 19:23-24 all connect the soldiers' actions with this line. John explicitly says this happened "to fulfill the Scripture."

Third, Psalm 22 does not end where it begins. The psalmist moves from complaint to testimony:

"You have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen! I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you."

The psalm then expands outward: "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you" (Psalm 22:27). Christian readers naturally hear this in light of resurrection proclamation and the mission to the nations. Hebrews 2:12 also quotes Psalm 22:22 and applies it to Jesus speaking among his "brothers," showing that at least one New Testament writer read Psalm 22 christologically beyond its opening lament.

Fourth, it is plausible that a first line could evoke a larger scriptural unit. Ancient texts did not use modern chapter-and-verse references. Quoting a memorable opening line could bring the whole passage to mind, especially when the rest of the scene is already saturated with the same psalm. A Christian interpreter is therefore not inventing a connection by saying that Jesus' cry invokes more than one verse.

What about "pierced hands and feet"?

The claim that Psalm 22 directly foretells pierced hands and feet needs more care. Many Christian Bibles render Psalm 22:16 as "they have pierced my hands and feet." That reading has ancient support, especially in the Greek Septuagint tradition, which uses a verb commonly understood as "dug" or "pierced." Some Hebrew manuscript evidence also points in that direction.

However, the Masoretic Text, the standard medieval Hebrew text, reads something like "like a lion my hands and my feet," a difficult phrase but not straightforwardly "they pierced." Modern Christian scholars disagree on the best reconstruction. Some defend "pierced" as the earlier reading; others think the Hebrew text is corrupt or that the original cannot be recovered with certainty. This is not a sectarian objection but a normal textual-critical issue discussed within Christian scholarship.

Therefore, the "pierced hands and feet" argument may be suggestive, but it should not carry more weight than the evidence permits. The divided garments text is much clearer. The mockery texts are also strong. Psalm 22 as a whole is plainly relevant to the passion narratives, even if Psalm 22:16 is textually disputed.

The strongest reply: the cry still means what it says

The strongest reply to the argument is not to deny that Psalm 22 is being invoked. It almost certainly is. The stronger point is that invoking the whole psalm does not cancel the meaning of the opening line. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" remains a cry of abandonment. It is not transformed into the opposite simply because the psalm later ends in vindication.

In the psalm itself, the movement from anguish to praise depends on the anguish being real. The sufferer is not pretending to feel forsaken. He says, "I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest" (Psalm 22:2). He describes public shame, physical weakness, enemies surrounding him, and the nearness of death. The eventual turn to praise has force precisely because the distress was genuine.

The same is true in Mark and Matthew. The narrative setting intensifies, rather than softens, the darkness of the cry. In Mark, Jesus is mocked, abandoned by disciples, silent before accusers, crucified between criminals, and surrounded by darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour. Then he cries Psalm 22:1 and dies soon afterward. Mark does not immediately narrate a resurrection appearance; his original ending, at least as many textual scholars judge Mark 16:8 to be the earliest recoverable ending, leaves the women trembling at the empty tomb. That does not deny resurrection, but it shows that Mark is willing to let the terror of the cross stand with real weight.

Matthew adds apocalyptic signs at Jesus' death, but he too preserves the cry. Luke and John do not. Luke has Jesus say, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46), from Psalm 31:5. John has, "It is finished" (John 19:30). These are not contradictions in the crude sense; ancient biography often selected and arranged material theologically. But the differences show that the evangelists shaped the passion scene in distinct ways. Mark and Matthew choose to place Psalm 22:1 at the center. That choice should not be domesticated too quickly.

Vindication, not failure

Still, the reply has limits. To say the cry expresses real abandonment is not to say it expresses final defeat. Psalm 22 itself prevents that conclusion. The lament belongs to a scriptural pattern in which the righteous sufferer is humiliated and then vindicated by God. If Jesus intentionally prays this psalm, the words are both agony and faith. He speaks from within the darkness, but he speaks to God, using the language of Israel's prayer book.

This is why the common Christian reading is partly right. The cry does not mean Jesus has concluded that God is false, that his mission has collapsed, or that evil has triumphed. Within the narrative world of the Gospels, the resurrection answers the cry. The one mocked as abandoned is vindicated. The one whose garments are divided becomes the one proclaimed among the nations. Psalm 22 gives the evangelists a scriptural grammar for that reversal.

At the same time, the language should not be flattened into a coded victory slogan. Some apologetic treatments give the impression that Jesus was simply saying, "Read Psalm 22; everything is going according to plan." That is too thin. Biblical lament is not make-believe. If the evangelists wanted only serenity and triumph, they had other scriptural lines available, as Luke and John show. Mark and Matthew preserve the more disturbing prayer because the cross, for them, includes real dereliction.

What this does and does not establish

What does the Psalm 22 argument establish?

• It strongly establishes that Mark and Matthew frame Jesus' death through Israel's Scriptures. The crucifixion is not presented as an embarrassment outside God's purposes, but as an event interpretable through the righteous sufferer's lament.
• It strongly establishes that Psalm 22 shaped early Christian understanding of the passion. The mockery, garment division, and final cry are too closely connected to be accidental.
• It supports the claim that the cross is followed by vindication. Psalm 22's movement from abandonment to praise coheres naturally with the resurrection proclamation.
• It does not prove, by itself, every later christological claim. A suffering righteous figure vindicated by God is not automatically a statement of Nicene metaphysics. Other New Testament texts are used for those arguments, some of them much stronger for high Christology than Psalm 22.
• It does not erase the plain force of "why have you forsaken me?" The line remains a lament of real abandonment, even if it is not a confession of final failure.

This distinction matters. Christian theology often says that Jesus truly shares human suffering. Mark and Matthew's cry is one of the strongest textual bases for that claim. If the cry is made only into triumph, its human depth is weakened. If it is made only into despair, its scriptural setting is ignored. The text holds both together: abandonment and trust, humiliation and vindication, lament and fulfilment.

A balanced conclusion

The best reading is therefore a both-and reading. Jesus' cry invokes Psalm 22, and the whole psalm matters. The evangelists want readers to see Jesus as the righteous sufferer whose humiliation has been anticipated in Scripture and whose vindication will lead to praise among the nations. That is a strong and textually grounded Christian argument.

But the opening line is not a mere reference label. It is a prayer from the abyss. Psalm 22 ends in deliverance, but it begins with God-forsakenness, and Mark and Matthew place those words on Jesus' lips at the moment of death. The cry confirms neither simple defeat nor simple triumphalism. It presents the crucifixion as the place where the righteous sufferer enters real abandonment while still addressing God as "my God," and where the later Christian claim of resurrection functions as God's answer to that lament.