FRIDAY, JULY 24 · VERSE OF THE DAY
About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" (which means "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?").
— Matthew 27:46
Context
Matthew records Jesus shouting Psalm 22:1 in Aramaic — 'Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?' — around 3pm on Friday. This isn't random anguish. Psalm 22 is a structured lament that moves from abandonment to vindication, and any first-century Jew hearing the opening line would know the whole arc. Jesus is praying Scripture at the moment of maximum suffering. Mark records a slightly different Aramaic dialect ('Eloi'), suggesting Matthew and Mark preserved different eyewitness traditions. Some bystanders mishear 'Eli' as 'Elijah,' which tells us the crowd is losing the thread. But Jesus isn't. He's locating himself inside Israel's ancient script of the suffering righteous one who gets rescued — except this time, the rescue looks like death.
What it's actually saying
The Greek preserves the Aramaic, which preserves the Hebrew: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' The word 'forsaken' (sabachthani / azab in Hebrew) means to leave, abandon, desert — the same word used when God promises never to abandon Israel. Psalm 22 continues: 'Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?' Then it catalogs physical agony — bones out of joint, heart melting like wax, pierced hands and feet, people gambling for clothes. All of which is happening as Jesus prays it. The psalm ends with future generations declaring God's deliverance. Jesus is simultaneously experiencing God-forsakenness and embedding that experience in a psalm about not being ultimately forsaken. He's doing theology in real time under torture. The question 'why' gets no answer in the psalm. It's left hanging.
How to apply it today
If God incarnate prayed a lament of abandonment, lament is not a failure of faith. You don't have to pretty up your prayers. The Bible gives you language for 'this feels unbearable and I don't know why you're letting it happen.' Jesus didn't pivot to 'but I know you have a plan.' He stayed in the question. That's not doubt — it's intimacy that can hold pain without needing to resolve it in the same breath. If you're in a place where God feels absent, you're in the center of Christian experience, not the edge. The edge is where we pretend everything's fine.
Sit with this
Write down one thing you've been afraid to say to God because it sounds too angry or too despairing. Then say it. Out loud if you can. Notice whether the sky falls. Notice what it feels like to stop managing your prayers.
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