Psalm 22 (NRSV)
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
3 Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
4 In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.
6 But I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others, and despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock at me;
they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
8 ‘Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver—
let him rescue the one in whom he delights!’
9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
10 On you I was cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help. . . .
17 I can count all my bones.
They stare and gloat over me;
18 they divide my clothes among themselves,
and for my clothing they cast lots.
19 But you, O Lord, do not be far away!
O my help, come quickly to my aid! . . . .
23 You who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
24 For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.
25 From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord.
May your hearts live for ever!
27 All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him.
28 For dominion belongs to the Lord,
and he rules over the nations.
29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him.
30 Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord,
31 and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.
Devotion
Many of us are familiar with Psalm 22 because both Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34) tell us that Jesus uttered its first line while dying on the cross. Thanks to this connection, we often read Psalm 22 during Holy Week. Like many psalms, it alternates between despair – the speaker’s sense of being utterly alone, without help even from God – and the speaker’s trust that, with God’s help, what seems like a hopeless situation will somehow become better. In quoting from the psalm on the cross, Jesus may have been trying to evoke that sense of trust, confidence, and even optimism, both for himself and for despairing loved ones nearby. At the same time, he used it to express his feelings of utter abandonment in that awful moment.
Reading through the psalm again, in the context of Lewinsville’s joint study with our Shiloh Baptist neighbors of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, I was struck by what seems like another echo of Psalm 22 much earlier in Jesus’ earthly story, in the Magnificat, spoken by Mary soon after she learned that she was carrying the Messiah (Luke 1:46-55). Mary describes a vision of God’s kingdom in which the proud and powerful are humbled, the lowly are exalted, and “the hungry” are “filled with good things.” Similarly, in Psalm 22, the speaker looks forward to a day when “the poor” – or possibly, the translators tell us, “the afflicted” – “shall eat and be satisfied.” This promise, like the one in the Magnificat, seems to offer satisfaction not only for material hungers (which it recognizes as crucial), but also for other forms of affliction, including the very worst forms of physical and psychological suffering evoked by the psalm, and experienced by Jesus in his final hours of earthly life.
Prayer
Lord, we thank you that you are Emmanuel, God with us, willing to share with us the full spectrum of human experience, including the depths of despair that came with your painful, humiliating, death on the cross. Help us to see you in those who are afflicted, in body, mind, or spirit, and to respond as we would to you. In your name we pray, amen.
Cathy Saunders