Message passing is much more general than method call. If you look at Erlang/Elixir (making the assumption that Erlang processes are akin to objects): messages can be sent to any process running on any node on the network, the answer (if required) can come from a third process, messages can be stored for future processing. And since processes may be created or die dynamically, and messages sent over the network may timeout, there are built-in tools to handle all the failure modes.

Method calls in C++ or Java are rather primitive, in comparison. Though of course you can build/emulate all of that on top of either. After all, the Erlang VM (BEAM) is written in C...