And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Mark 15:33–34 (ESV)

“Jesus has been betrayed by one of his own, abandoned by all his disciples, and then violently arrested. He has been denied by his closest follower, falsely condemned of blasphemy, beaten, degraded, and handed over to the Romans by the leaders of his own people. Though innocent, he has been condemned to death by Pilate out of political expediency and severely beaten and deeply humiliated by Roman soldiers. At 9:00 a.m., he is nailed to the cross and begins to suffer the excruciating pain and unimaginable humiliation of crucifixion. From 9:00 a.m. until noon, he suffers the continual derision of passersby and of the chief priests and scribes, who gloat over their victory. He even sinks so low that he is ridiculed by those with whom he is crucified. He has been abandoned by every human being. However, all this pales before what Jesus endures between noon and 3:00 p.m. His suffering reaches a terrible climax as he experiences the deep darkness of divine judgment on the sin of the world and the unbearable abandonment by God himself that it entails. The weight of this judgment and the horror of abandonment are expressed in his agonizing cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and culminate in Jesus’s death. This, and nothing less, was the obedience of God’s beloved Son by which he gave his life as ‘a ransom for many.’ It is the greatest of paradoxes: The obedient beloved Son who cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ is the very Son in whom God is, at that moment, well pleased.”

From The Jesus Question: Discovering the Identity of Jesus in His First Biography (Hendrickson, forthcoming November, 2026).