Jesus and Psalm 22 (1)
Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46 and Psalm 22:1.
What is it that troubles us about Jesus’ “Eli, Eli lama sabachthani”?
It’s more than one thing; in fact it’s a great number of things.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” sounds like an accusation. It sounds as though the speaker is accusing God of faithlessness.
On the face of it the speaker is bewildered that he should be experiencing what he is going through.
In the mouth of a sinner or in a righteous person who didn’t know the will of God as profoundly as Jesus did we could understand it. But Jesus uttered these words not long after the Gethsemane experience when he had gladly surrendered himself to the Holy Father’s will and a little while after that he had rebuked Peter for trying to keep him from the cross with a sword. Did he forget all this? Was his hurt so great that it drove all that from his mind? And yet, he seemed sufficiently aware of what was happening when he prayed for forgiveness for his enemies and assured a penitent thief that no matter how things looked that the future lay with him (Jesus). Click here
In echoing the words of the troubled psalmist did he not know that the last half of the psalm was a victorious thanksgiving for deliverance that would bless coming generations? If Jesus knew right from the start what the psalmist did not know until Psalm 22:22-31 what was the point of echoing the troubled words of 22:1?
Was he only pretending that he was suffering some profound trouble? The record of his crucifixion experience won’t allow for that and even less will the record of his Gethsemane pleading allow it. Something was gutting Jesus and when he came to his sleepy disciples and said, “I'm so deeply troubled that I feel like I’m going to die” we can’t think that was pretence. No, he wasn’t pretending; whatever he felt he felt truly all the way down into his soul.
Yes, we can understand him being in agony even if we can’t really grasp it but why would he speak to the Father of “forsakenness” when he knew exactly what was happening?
Peter spoke of the sore trouble of Jesus in Acts 2:24-28 and insisted that death couldn’t possibly hold Jesus. He said more than that. He said that Jesus even in that very hour knew that God was not faithless, that he would not abandon him, that he would find even more of what the Holy Father had already shown and given him—more life, more gladness and joy. Peter said that Jesus always saw God right there before him, at his right hand and because that was so he said “I will not be shaken.”
There would come a day, he said, when his nation would reject him and his own friends would desert him but that his Father never would because he always did what pleased his Father (John 8:29 with 16:32). How could he say that and say and mean Psalm 22:1?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
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