This is a cry, not a request for information. After hours of mockery and three hours of darkness, Jesus cried out "with a loud voice" (Mark 15:34). He used the opening words of Psalm 22, a psalm whose speaker cries that God is "so far from helping me" and does not hear (Psalm 22:1-2), yet keeps calling Him "my God." The question gives voice to real anguish. Matthew Henry observes, "He did not complain that his disciples forsook him, but that his Father forsook him." Yet even this cry is spoken to God, in faith: Jesus still calls Him "my God," twice.

Mark records no spoken answer from heaven. Some of the bystanders said, "Behold, he calleth Elias" (Mark 15:35). One ran and filled a sponge with vinegar and gave Him to drink, saying, "let us see whether Elias will come to take him down" (Mark 15:36). Then "Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost" (Mark 15:37). Mark goes on to record that the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom, and that the centurion said, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (Mark 15:38-39).

Mark gives Jesus' words as He spoke them and then translates them for his readers: "which is, being interpreted" (Mark 15:34). Mark has "Eloi, Eloi," while Matthew has "Eli, Eli" (Matthew 27:46). Gill says both are Hebrew words that "signify the same," and that the whole cry is taken from Psalm 22:1. Some who stood by heard the cry and said, "Behold, he calleth Elias" (Mark 15:35), Elias being the New Testament form of the prophet Elijah's name.

Mark marks the hours carefully. Jesus was crucified at the third hour (Mark 15:25). Darkness covered the land from the sixth hour to the ninth (Mark 15:33). Matthew Henry gives the darkness as "from noon until three in the afternoon." The cry came at the end of the darkness, at the ninth hour (Mark 15:34).

Here the Son of God speaks the words of a psalm of lament. Psalm 22 begins in abandonment, but it does not end there: the same psalm later says God "hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard" (Psalm 22:24). Gill, on the parallel in Matthew 27:46, says of this psalm that "many things in it were fulfilled with respect to Jesus."

Mark does not explain the cry; he shows what follows. Jesus gives up His spirit, the veil of the temple is torn "from the top to the bottom" (Mark 15:38), and the centurion confesses Him as "the Son of God" (Mark 15:39). The moment that looked like utter abandonment is where Mark places the clearest confession of who Jesus is. Matthew Henry says the torn veil "signified the laying open a new and living way into the holiest by the blood of Jesus." Of the forsaking itself, Matthew Henry writes, "In this especially he was made sin for us," words that echo Paul: God "hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21).