Mark 15:34

This cry came at the ninth hour, namely, 3:00 p.m. Jesus’ cry expressed what the darkness visualized. Jesus cried out loudly, not weakly with His last available energy. His great agony of soul was responsible for this cry. Mark recorded Jesus’ words in Aramaic. Probably Jesus spoke in Aramaic in view of the crowd’s reaction (cf. Matthew 27:46-47).

"The depths of the saying are too deep to be plumbed, but the least inadequate interpretations are those which find in it a sense of desolation in which Jesus felt the horror of sin so deeply that for a time the closeness of His communion with the Father was obscured." [Note: Taylor, p. 549.]

Jesus quoted Psalms 22:1. That is why He expressed His agony of separation as a question. Jesus was not asking God for an answer; the question was rhetorical. As Jesus used this verse, it expressed an affirmation of His relationship to God as His Father and an acknowledgment that the Father had abandoned Him. God abandoned Jesus in the judicial sense that He focused His wrath on the Son (cf. Mark 14:36). Jesus bore God’s curse and His judgment for sin (cf. Deuteronomy 21:22-23; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13). God, who cannot look on sin (Habakkuk 1:13), turned His back, so to speak, on Jesus who bore that sin in His own body on the cross. Jesus experienced separation from God when He took the place of sinners (Mark 10:45; Romans 5:8; 1 Peter 2:24; 1 Peter 3:18).

Even though the physical sufferings that Jesus experienced were great, the spiritual agony that He underwent as the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world was infinitely greater. We need to remember this when we meditate on Jesus’ death, for example at the Lord’s Supper.