In a recent article, Rikki Watts challenges the notion that Jesus’ “My God, my God” is a cry of despair, suggesting that it is instead an act of power: “given the . . . its immediate impact on the temple, that it too expresses Jesus’ power. Citing John’s use of the phrase “loud voice” in 11:43 at the grave of Lazarus, Watts argues that the phrase “in its most common NT use . . . expresses God’s sovereign authority over his creation (e.g., 1:10; 5:12; 7:2, 10; 8:13, etc.), echoing the Sinai theophany (Deut. 4:11; 5:22; cf. 1 Sam. 7:10) and God’s sudden moment of delivering judgment on the ungodly who gather against Zion (Isa. 29:5-6; cf. Ezek. 3:12; Sib. Or. 3.669; 5.61-63).”

The cry thus completes a theme begun in the first verses of Mark’s gospel, and kept alive by a thread of quotations from the Psalms (2, 22, 110, 118): “In Mark’s beginning, the voice through the rent heavens at Jesus’ baptism declared him to be God’s messianic son sent to purge and restore the temple. Here at the climactic moment on the cross, Jesus again reveals his divine authority. His ‘great cry’ rends the hostile temple’s curtain thereby both demonstrating and effecting the reality that it, not he, is the one ‘forsaken’ . . . . But Ps. 22:27, 30-31 also declares that all the families of the nations would worship before him. So also then, as the transfigured understanding of Psalm 2 comes to full expression, in fulfillment of Psalm 22’s hope and Isa. 56:7’s vision of a house of prayer for all nations (Mark 11: 17), a Roman centurion, no less, becomes the Gentile firstfruits of a newly reconstituted people-vaos . . . as he confesses before its messianic suffering chief stone that Jesus and not Caesar is ‘son of G/ god.’”