The ninth hour was 3:00 PM. Jesus had been on the cross since the third hour (9 AM). He shouts in Aramaic the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm David wrote as a lament in a moment of utter abandonment. Israel would have recognized the psalm immediately; it ends in vindication and praise. But in the moment, it is the fullest expression of dereliction in all of Scripture: the Son of God, in the darkness, crying out to a Father he cannot see or feel. He is not quoting theology. He is praying his actual experience.

From the writers we read together

Clay Jones

professor of apologetics, author of Why Does God Allow Evil?

Jones teaches and writes about theodicy — the question of why a good God allows evil and suffering. His answer to that question always passes through the cross. The person who asks “where was God when I suffered?” is, on Jones's reading, asking a question the cross answers with a counterclaim: God was in the suffering. Not watching it from a comfortable distance but inside it, feeling it, bearing it at the level of his own body and soul. The cry of dereliction is not God abandoning his Son; it is God, in his Son, going into the place where God-forsakenness is felt so that no human being ever has to go there alone.

Psalm 22 does not end with abandonment. By verse 24 David writes: “For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” Jesus prays the opening of the psalm on the cross. The resurrection is the psalm's ending. Jones would say this is how God answers the problem of suffering: not by explaining it from the outside, but by entering it from the inside and walking out the other end.