My God, My God: A Lenten Meditation on Psalm 22

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

why art thou so far from helping me, 

and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; 

and in the night season, and am not silent.

But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

They cried unto thee, and were delivered: 

they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

Our appointed Psalm for this Sunday is particularly fitted to the season of Lent.  The Church takes this time between Epiphany and Easter to remember the necessity of suffering and sacrifice as we move through this fallen world, seeing the consequences of sin, death, hell, and the devil manifest all around us.  We hear of wars and rumors of wars, of persecutions and martyrdoms and oppression that come as the powerful savage the weak and helpless.  There are people young and old, college students, professors, anarchists, and activists, screaming profanities into every mobile camera they can find, destroying their own neighborhoods, relationships, and bodies, even as their insane ramblings fill the internet with their destructive bafoonery.  Inside ourselves we feel the war of the Spirit against the flesh, the pull of the world’s seductive pleasures toward the same hellish insanity while the Word of God calls us to life, peace, and joy.  In all the suffering of the Christian as an individual or of all Christians bound together into the one indivisible Church, where do they go to find meaning in their pain?

They look to Jesus.  After the betrayal of his friends, His unjust conviction in a corrupt court, His flogging and crucifixion at the hands of pagan Romans through the urging of His own people’s religious leaders— hanging upon the Cross, nearing His own death, and seeing His blessed mother Mary with St. John and some of the other women surrounded by the mocking, murderous, perverse crowds, He quoted to them Psalm 22.  Even as Jesus was succumbing to the greatest suffering and injustice ever to be perpetrated on this planet, He taught His people to keep their faith in their saving God, to hear and believe His saving Word, and to trust in His saving grace.

It might be easy to miss, reading the crucifixion narrative from a western 21st century perspective.  The numbers and divisions of chapters and verses in our modern Bibles are novelties from the Middle Ages, and certainly unknown to the ancient Hebrews.  When Jesus said in His agony, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me,” it was the first line from Psalm 22.  Like many old hymnals in the Christian tradition, we name songs for their first line or stanza, such as “Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Beautiful Savior,” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”  When quoting the Psalms— the inspired hymn book of the Hebrew people— Jesus used this common convention and spoke the first line.  Jesus knew the confusion, despair, and horror which was creeping into His disciples’ hearts as they watched the Savior of the Word being murdered on a Roman cross, and in that moment, Jesus pointed His people back to the Eternal Word of God.  

Psalm 22 isn’t about God abandoning His people, and even less His only begotten Son.  It is a testament to God’s faithfulness in every generation, to everyone who will put their trust in Him and His living Word.  It is both prophetic, with David describing 1000 years before Jesus’ Incarnation how the Messiah would would be treated (down to the details of pierced hands and feet, casting lots for His clothes, etc.) and retrospective, remembering the salvation of God to His people for thousands of years before King David was born.  It is a perfect harmony of Law and Gospel, dealing unflinchingly with the real wages of sin and death which surround all people, but comforting those same people in the midst of even the most terrific suffering.  It is an assurance from the Creator of the universe that He is also its Savior, that His Word endures from eternity to eternity even as this world grows old and fades like an over worn garment.  It is a portrait of God enduring with His people, abiding with His people, and never abandoning His people.  It is the truth that God so loves this fallen world, that He is willing to move heaven and earth to rescue it.  It is a divinely inspired revelation of Jesus.

If your suffering and sorrow surround you, and you think you have nowhere to go; if you are encircled by the malevolence of your enemies, and death’s dark portal looms large before your eyes; if you feel the darkness of a wicked world pressing upon your soul, and the demonic insanity of perverse people weighing upon your mind; if you cannot fathom how things came to be the way they are, and how the love of so many has grown cold; hear the Word of the Lord come to you this day.  From the Cross of Jesus, hear Him teach you of the love of God even in the midst of your suffering.  Hear Him as He tells you of His love which created the world, which saves the world from the evil of men and demons, and rescues the world from death, hell, and the devil.  Hear Him as He speaks to you of the unfailing promises He gives to you by His Word, and see His Word nailed to a Cross to save even you.  Our God is not absent from us in our suffering, but enduring it with us, carrying us through it, giving to us His strength and victory in place of our own weakness and defeat.  If you have not done so recently, go back and read Psalm 22, and hear it come to you from the parched and bloody lips of Jesus as He endures all things to rescue you.  Hear Him, repent, believe, and live.  Amen.