My God, My God

Today's Reading

Read Mark 15:33-37: "And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'... And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last."

Read the parallel in Matthew 27:45-50. Notice that Matthew preserves the Aramaic — "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani" — as if the Gospel writer wanted the reader to hear the actual sound of the words coming out of Jesus' mouth.

Read Psalm 22:1-21 — the section Jesus was quoting. Notice the verses that describe what is being done to him in real time as he prays it: "All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads"; "they have pierced my hands and feet"; "they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots." These are reported as fulfillments at the cross by all four Gospels.

Read Hebrews 5:7-9: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence."

Reflection

If lament were sub-Christian, Jesus would have been sub-Christian on the cross.

This is the load-bearing point of today's reading, and it should never be glossed past. At the worst moment of human history — the Son of God dying for the sins of the world — Christ did not pray an original prayer. He reached for the prayer book of Israel. He pulled down a lament psalm. He prayed Psalm 22:1. Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.

We have, with our usual instinct toward soft-pedaling, sometimes made these words less than they are. Some commentators have suggested Jesus was just quoting the first verse to point to the whole psalm, including its triumphant end, and so he was not really expressing dereliction at all. This is too clever. The text says he cried with a loud voice. The text says darkness covered the land for three hours. The text in Hebrews says he prayed "with loud cries and tears." Whatever else is happening at the cross, Jesus is praying a lament psalm and meaning it.

John Calvin would not let his readers domesticate this. In the Institutes, Calvin insisted that for our salvation Jesus had to suffer not merely the physical death of crucifixion but "the dread sense of being abandoned by God." Calvin's word for the cross's interior was dereliction — being forsaken. He believed that without this, the atonement would have been incomplete. Anyone can die. Only the eternal Son of God can take the wrath of God upon himself in the place where his own Father has, in some terrible way that the Trinity must work out from the inside, turned his face. That is what saves us. And the Son, in that moment, prays a psalm of lament.

Augustine had a phrase for what is happening here. He said that when Jesus prays Psalm 22 from the cross, he is praying as the head of his body — and we, the church, are the body. Christ is praying the psalm with us and for us. When we pray Psalm 22, our voices join his. When we cry out in lament, we are not praying out of step with our Lord; we are praying in step with him. He is the one who established this prayer for us. The whole Christ — head and members — laments together.

This is why lament is not embarrassing in the Christian life. It is not something we tolerate in immature believers until they grow up. It is something Jesus himself did, at the most decisive moment, in the hearing of every disciple and every soldier and every passerby and his own mother. The cross is wrapped in lament. There is no Christianity that does not pass through this language.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, sitting in a Nazi prison and writing letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, came to one of the most piercing sentences in twentieth-century theology: "Only the suffering God can help." Bonhoeffer did not mean that God was weak. He meant that the God of the Bible is not a God who watches our pain from a distance and sends instructions. He is a God who entered the pain. He took flesh. He took the cross. He took the dereliction. The first thing Jesus does for us is not solve our suffering from the outside but join us in it from the inside. The cry from Calvary is the proof. Bonhoeffer wrote that sentence less than a year before he was hanged.

Bonhoeffer also wrote, in his small book Prayerbook of the Bible, that the Psalter is "the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word." Jesus prayed these psalms in the synagogue as a boy. He prayed them on the road. He prayed Psalm 22 from the cross. And — Bonhoeffer says — when we pray them now, we pray them with him. The Psalms are not our prayers in some general human sense. They are his prayers, and we have been incorporated into him by the Holy Spirit, and so we get to pray with him. Lament becomes, of all things, a way of being in Christ.

Think about what this does to the question of whether your suffering disqualifies you.

You wonder: am I praying in too much pain? Is my complaint too sharp? Is my anger at God too direct? Am I taking too long to get to praise?

And the cross answers: Jesus prayed "why have you forsaken me?" loudly enough that bystanders heard it from a distance, and that prayer is now in your Bible, and your Father received it, and the world is saved by the man who prayed it. You are not too dark for God. You are not too angry for God. You are not too far gone for God. The Son has been further than you will ever go, and his prayer was a lament from the Psalter.

There is something else to notice. Psalm 22 does eventually turn. Jesus, dying, was almost certainly aware that the psalm he was quoting ends with: "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you... they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it." That he has done it. Some scholars have heard an echo of that final phrase in Jesus' last word from the cross in John: tetelestai, "It is finished." Whether or not the connection is intentional, the structure is unmistakable. Christ enters the lament fully — and Christ carries the lament through to its triumphant end. He prays the whole psalm. The dereliction is real. The vindication is also real. The Easter morning that followed three days later is the back half of Psalm 22 made history.

This is the secret the church has always known and the modern worship culture has nearly forgotten. The Christian does not bypass Psalm 22:1 to get to Psalm 22:31. The Christian goes through. With Jesus. He has been there first.

So when you pray your lament — when you cry your "how long" or your "why" — you are not on the wrong side of faith. You are exactly where your Savior was on the day he saved you.

Going Deeper

Read all of Psalm 22 aloud — slowly, in Jesus' voice. Notice when the speaker shifts from agony to vindication. Notice that you are praying the same prayer Christ prayed at his crucifixion. Then sit for a few minutes in silence. The body has been to the cross with the head. The head has been to the cross for the body. There is nowhere left for shame to hide.