Mark 15:34

‘And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The words, here almost certainly cited in Aramaic, were quoted from Psalms 22:1. But while that may be, something extra was required to draw them from the lips of Jesus. He truly shared with the Psalmist that sense of total desolation, that awareness of being devastatingly alone. But for Jesus, Who had never known what it was to be separated from the Father by sin, it signalled that most dreadful of experiences as undergone by One Who knew no sin, by One Whose very being was torn apart as He experienced in His humanity the blackness of darkness in the sensing of total separation from He Who is the light.

That He was not actually separated from the Father comes out in the sequel. Even as He suffered His Father watched over Him, and He ended by calling on His Father. And it even comes out in the prayer, for ‘My God' is personal, and the whole idea of prayer is that the person who prays is not forsaken. But the sense of separation went to the very depths of His being, and the citation put His feelings into words.

Matthew puts the first two words, ‘Eli, Eli', in Hebrew (although the same word is used in the Targums and could thus be Aramaic), and Jesus may well have spoken in Hebrew as He cited the Psalm. The Hebrew was more likely to be mistaken for a call to Elijah.