07/08/2026
This really articulates what I’ve come to believe about Jesus’ cry on the cross
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CREU9TfqX/?mibextid=wwXIfr
I no longer believe the cross is the Father turning against the Son.
Meditation, June 12, 2026
For most of my life, I understood the crucifixion through a very specific framework. Humanity had sinned, God was angry, and Jesus stepped into the place where that anger had to fall. In fact, I was trained early in life to carry tracts called The Four Spiritual Laws, which told this story vividly.
I wouldn't have described it as coldly as that at the time, but that is often how it functioned in me. The cross was a transaction. Sin created a debt. Justice required payment. Jesus paid what God required before God could forgive. That gave me answers, but it also left me with a God I struggled to trust.
I am not interested in turning this into a fight about theories of the atonement. I am simply naming that the way I understand the cross has changed. The older framework may have given me a structure, but it also left me with questions about the character of God and the nature of love. There are several ways the Church has historically understood the cross. They have value, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It took me a while to learn there were other ways to see it beyond the one I have described.
One of the places where that change matters most is Jesus’ cry from the cross.
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?”
For a long time, I heard those words as proof that the Father had turned away from the Son. I thought they meant that the communion between Father and Son was somehow broken, and that Jesus was left alone beneath the wrath of God.
I no longer hear them that way. Jesus was praying the opening words of Psalm 22. That is important because in the Jewish world of Jesus and the New Testament writers, quoting the first line of a psalm did not isolate that line from the rest of the prayer. It called the whole psalm to mind.
Psalm 22 begins in anguish. The speaker feels abandoned, mocked, exposed, surrounded, and poured out. It is not a calm prayer. It gives language to the deepest place of human suffering. Jesus enters that place fully. He is not pretending to suffer. He is not standing above human pain as an observer. He is praying from inside it.
But Psalm 22 does not end where it begins. The psalm moves from abandonment to trust, from humiliation to vindication, from isolation to worship among the congregation. It ends with the nations turning to the Lord and future generations being told what God has done.
That does not erase the suffering at the beginning of the psalm. But it refuses to let suffering have the final word.
That changes how I hear Jesus on the cross. His cry is not the collapse of the Trinity. It is not the Father ceasing to love the Son. It is the Son entering the full human experience of abandonment while still praying within Israel’s own language of lament and hope. Jesus enters the feeling of abandonment without the love of God ever ceasing to hold Him.
I no longer believe the cross is the Father abandoning the Son. I no longer believe the Father poured wrath upon Jesus as though the communion of the Trinity broke apart at Calvary. If God is eternally Father, Son, and Spirit in self giving love, then the cross cannot be the moment when that love turns against itself.
The Father is not against the Son. The Son is not saving us from the Father. The Spirit is not absent from the suffering of Jesus. The Triune God is acting in love for the healing of the world.
That does not make sin less serious. If anything, it makes sin more serious because the cross shows what violence, shame, accusation, fear, and human rejection do. They do not simply break rules. They wound relationships. They destroy communion. They turn us against God, one another, and ourselves.
But the answer of God is not divine violence redirected onto Jesus. The answer of God is self giving love entering the full weight of our violence and breaking its power from within.
The cross no longer tells me that God needed someone to suffer before He could love us. It tells me that God has gone into the deepest place of human suffering and revealed that love is still there.
Psalm 22 helps me see that more clearly. The cry is real. The anguish is real. The wounds are real. But the story does not end in abandonment.
The cross is not the breakdown of relationship inside God. It is the revelation that God’s love reaches even into the places where relationship seems most broken.
That is becoming more than doctrine to me. It is becoming a way of seeing God, myself, and the wounds I carry.
God does not meet me by stepping away from pain. God meets me by entering it.
Barton Breen
The Wounded Theologian
