JESUS AND PSALM 22 (4)
Here’s the thing, if Jesus always did what pleased his Holy Father and if he never pleased him more than when he wholeheartedly went to the cross for the world’s salvation; if he knew his Father would never leave him even though his closest friends would; if he knew that God was reconciling the world to himself at the cross, if Gethsemane was the defining moment when all emotional debate ended, if his rebuke of Peter’s swordplay and his refusal of a legion of angels to keep him from the cross—if all that’s true—and more—what’s he doing with Psalm 22:1 on his lips as he chooses to do what he’s doing?
[I confess I can make nothing of the view that says Jesus agreed to save the world by being forsaken by God and then has him groaning and asking why God has forsaken him.]
We might conclude that for all his commitment, all his assurance that God was right there with him (Acts 2:25) and despite his unwavering trust (Acts 2:25) that the agony of the experience dragged the words from his mouth. That he choked with the pain of it can be true no matter how we explain his “why?” It isn’t hard to understand that people gladly do self-sacrificing things while screaming in agony—we’ve come across that in life in countless stories or personal experiences.
The cry, then, would not be a question though it has the interrogative form. It would not even be a plea or a prayer so much as it would be a way of bringing God into the intensity of the experience. It need not be a search for understanding—it might well be a way to give verbal vent to the pain.
Some among us (God bless them) who have undergone sore years without a moment’s doubt or recrimination against God have still said the equivalent of “why?” Their “Why me?” or “Why her?” are not accusations or even a plea for specific explanation—they’re a way of telling God how heart-wrenching the experience is!
That might be the complete explanation! All that I said in the earlier pieces about the psalmist’s thinking might be incorrect—it might be making more of it than was there. It might be no more than what I’ve often done at a trivial level when a dressing I’d worked hard and long at to treat one of Ethel’s awkward pressure sores wouldn’t work and I’d snarl at it: “Arrrgh; why won’t you stay in place?” There is nothing logical or “rational” in that—it’s the verbal venting of frustration at the situation.
That explanation appeals to me because I know we do so much of that ourselves—but it isn’t enough.
The Bible doesn’t do a lot of psychological profiling or probing; we are the ones that fill in the blanks. We tell each other how Abraham must have felt as he made the trip to Moriah with Isaac or how Hannah must have felt when she took her little boy to the temple to live there rather than at home. This is no crime, of course, but it isn’t something the Bible does much of. The events around the cross are rehearsed to us with full theological intent and they’re not simply a rehearsal of “what happened”. I say all that to say that I don’t think either the psalmist or Jesus is merely expressing the depths of his pain.
The Gospel records call on numerous Psalms as well as other texts in the events that gathered round the cross. Psalms 22, 31, 34, 69 and others are involved.
My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
Father into your hands I commit my spirit.
Father forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.
Today you will be with me in Paradise .
I thirst.
It is finished!
Woman, behold your son; son behold your mother.
Each of these recorded sayings is more than the “personal feelings” of Jesus. They are words of defiant trust in the face of awful realities; they are words that express Jesus’ work as the Saviour of his people Israel (and others); they are the words of one who knows he is coming into his kingdom; they are the words of one who knows even in this awful hour that his God is able to perfect praise even in the dying ones; they are words that express his goodbye to his mother as he enters a new phase of service to God and the world (a topic for another time perhaps) and words that underline Sin’s spiteful opposition to the Righteous One.
He expresses his agonized trust and assurance in the words of righteous sufferers before him and gives the multitude a chance to see the presence of the Redeeming God in the midst of all this wreckage. In quoting Psalm 31:5, in connecting with Psalm 69:21 and giving the opening line of Psalm 22 he shows he is sharing the trouble of the righteous and he’s offering these people a way of interpreting what they’re seeing from an old and new perspective. To dismiss Jesus because he is in this situation would be to dismiss the righteous sufferers of their own history who spoke their trust and defiance in the face of similar treatment. [If Jesus was a fraud, so was David and what Jew would think that much less say it?
What they were seeing was part of the truth of God and about God but there was more truth in it than what they were seeing. When Jesus quotes and alludes to specific verses we’re not to isolate the verses from their setting. The NT never does that—it always calls us to the soil out of which these specific verses rise. In quoting Psalm 22:1 Jesus is expressing his anguish (expressed every bit as dramatically in Gethsemane) but he’s telling his watchers—those that sobbed and those that jeered, those that wondered and those that despaired—he was telling his watchers: “As you look at all this, think Psalm 22!”
Did Jesus think he was the object of God’s wrath? Impossible! Was he God’s way of reconciling the world to himself? Absolutely! Did God cease to fellowship Jesus who was now fulfilling the Holy Father’s will? Never! Was he even as he dies the sinless, spotless, self-sacrificing Son declaring his ceaseless trust in and devotion to his Holy Father? Yessss! Was he the spotless Lamb of God that God himself provided? Yes; that’s what made his dying significant and made him the perfect sacrifice that dealt with sin.
Did God turn his face from Jesus in holy recoil, unable to look on him because he was somehow (in a certain kind of theology) polluted by sin or polluted by his connection with it? No! No!
God had no trouble with looking at sin-offerings without blemish and he had no trouble looking at this one that he himself provided! There was no sin here—there was only a sinless Lamb of God as a sin-offering which takes away the sin of the world.
What he quoted was the anguished opening sentence of an entire Psalm that his experience illustrates and alludes to again and again at Golgotha . If David thought God had abandoned him he didn’t reflect Jesus’ thinking—Jesus knew better! But Jesus felt his agony, felt his rejection, felt his loneliness, felt his thirst, felt the mockery, felt the nearness of death and the fact that no one else could deliver him out of all this and death as well. He felt all that but he was persuaded beyond debate that God was at his right hand so he could not be shaken (Psalm 16:7-11 and Acts 2:25-28).
Some have set up an atonement theory that requires God to be judicially hostile to Jesus and to turn from him because his eyes are too pure to look on sin (as if Habakkuk 1:13 had anything like that in view). Without the theory we don’t need to imagine God withdrawing his holy and loving fellowship and peace from Jesus.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
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