Psalm 22: My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Matthew and Mark both record it, in the Aramaic Jesus spoke:

About the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lima sabachthani?” That is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

Mark 15:34 gives it as “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” Some of the bystanders did not recognize the psalm and thought he was “calling Elijah” (Matthew 27:47).

Two things are true at once, and the Church holds both. The first is that the cry is real. Jesus is not reciting a text to make a point; he is praying from inside the abandonment the psalm describes. The Catechism says that in his redeeming love he “assumed us in the state of our waywardness of sin, to the point that he could say in our name from the cross” the first line of this psalm (CCC 603). He speaks our dereliction as his own.

The second is that it is a prayer, not despair. To quote the first line of a psalm was the ordinary way to name the whole of it, and Psalm 22 does not end in abandonment. It turns to praise and ends in victory. The Catechism places the cry among the last words from the cross “where prayer and the gift of self are but one” (CCC 2605). Even forsaken, he says “my God.”

Psalm 22 is quoted or echoed in the Passion more than any other psalm. The parallels are specific enough that the first Christians read the psalm as prophecy, and the Church has read it so ever since. Verse numbers here are the World English Bible’s.

• The mockery (verses 7–8). “They shake their heads” and “He trusts in the LORD. Let him deliver him.” Matthew: “Those who passed by blasphemed him, wagging their heads” (27:39), and the chief priests say, “He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now” (27:43).
• The garments (verse 18). “They divide my garments among them. They cast lots for my clothing.” John quotes it outright: the soldiers cast lots for the seamless tunic “that the Scripture might be fulfilled” (John 19:24).
• The thirst (verse 15). “My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.” John records “I am thirsty!” so “that the Scripture might be fulfilled” (John 19:28); he does not say which Scripture, and Psalm 69 is the other candidate.
• The hands and feet (verse 16). “They have pierced my hands and feet.” The Gospels do not quote this line, but Thomas later speaks of “the print of the nails” in his hands (John 20:25). See the note below on how this verse is translated.
• The praise (verse 22). “I will declare your name to my brothers.” The Letter to the Hebrews puts these words in the mouth of the risen Christ (Hebrews 2:12).

Stopping at the first line reverses the psalm’s meaning. Read whole, it has a clear shape.

Verses 1–11: forsaken, and still “my God.” The complaint and the trust alternate. “My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don’t answer.” Then: “But you are holy.” The mockers’ taunt. Then: “But you brought me out of the womb.” Every “but” is faith refusing to let go.

Verses 12–21: surrounded. Bulls, lions and dogs close in; the body is “poured out like water.” The plea shrinks to three words: “Hurry to help me!” Then, in the middle of verse 21, the turn: “Yes, you have rescued me from the horns of the wild oxen.” The Hebrew verb there can also mean “you have answered me.” The God who did not answer in verse 2 has answered.

Verses 22–31: praise in widening circles. First “my brothers” and the assembly; then all the descendants of Jacob; then “All the ends of the earth” and the nations; then even “All those who go down to the dust”; and finally “a people that shall be born.” The last words are “for he has done it.” Many Christian readers have heard in them an echo of Jesus’ last word in John’s Gospel, “It is finished!” (John 19:30).

This is the most debated line of the psalm, and it is fair to say why. In the standard Hebrew text (the Masoretic Text) the phrase reads, literally, “like a lion my hands and my feet,” which lacks a verb. The Septuagint, the Greek translation made before Christ and used by the early Church, reads “they dug my hands and feet.” Saint Jerome kept that reading in the Latin psalter the Church sang for centuries, and the Douay-Rheims follows it. A fragment of the psalm found in the Judean desert at Nahal Hever, older than any surviving Masoretic manuscript, appears to have a verb in that place, which supports the Greek.

The World English Bible, like most Christian translations, reads “They have pierced my hands and feet.” Jewish translations follow the Masoretic “like a lion.” Neither reading changes the rest of the psalm, which describes a body stretched, exposed and poured out in terms the Gospels plainly recognized.

Psalm 22 gives a place inside faith to the feeling that God has gone silent. It lets you say “Why are you so far from helping me” to God, which is itself an act of faith: you only say it to someone you still believe is there. If the silence has become despair, or thoughts of ending your life, please tell someone you trust today.

Psalm 22 is the psalm Jesus prayed while dying, and knowing that changes how the opening line reads.

He says the first verse aloud from the cross: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Heard on its own it sounds like the end of faith. But a Jewish listener in that crowd would have known what quoting a psalm's first line does. It names the whole psalm. He is not abandoning Scripture at the last moment; he is praying it, and the psalm he chose does not end where he stopped speaking.

What comes between is uncomfortably specific. The psalm describes mockery from onlookers who wag their heads, a body poured out like water, bones out of joint, a mouth dried up, hands and feet marked, and clothing divided by lot. It was written centuries before crucifixion existed as a Roman practice. The Church has read it as prophecy from the beginning, and the Gospel writers quote it directly in their accounts of the crucifixion.

Then, without warning, the psalm turns. From verse twenty-two it is praise, and it widens until it takes in all the families of the nations and generations not yet born. It ends with the declaration that he has done it.

That is what Christ was pointing at. The cry was the opening of a psalm that finishes in victory.

Psalm 22 is the responsorial psalm of Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord, sung before the Passion is read, with the refrain "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" On Good Friday the psalm is Psalm 31, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." The psalm's closing verses of praise return as the responsorial psalm of the Fifth Sunday of Easter in Year B. In the Liturgy of the Hours it is prayed at Daytime Prayer on Friday of Week III, the weekday of the Passion. It is one of the psalms most directly tied to the events of Holy Week.

Read it in one sitting rather than stopping at the famous line, because stopping there reverses its meaning. If you are in a period where prayer feels like shouting at nothing, this is the psalm that gives that experience a place inside faith rather than outside it. Pray it on Good Friday if you pray no other psalm in the year.