My God, My God

Today's Scripture

Mark 15:33-34 — "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?'"

Hebrews 5:7 — "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."

The Big Idea

At the darkest moment in the history of the world, Jesus did not invent a new prayer. He reached for a lament psalm he had known since childhood and prayed it at the top of his voice. If complaint to God were unfaithful, the most faithful man who ever lived would never have died with one on his lips. The cross settles the question this plan has been asking all week.

Reflection

He borrowed a psalm

When small children wake from a nightmare, they do not compose speeches. They cry out the words they already have: Mom. Dad. When the pain is bigger than our vocabulary, all of us reach for words we stored away long ago.

Look at what Jesus reached for. Three hours of darkness at midday. The sins of the world pressing down. And out of that blackness comes a quotation — the first line of Psalm 22, in his own Galilean Aramaic: Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani (Mark 15:34). The Son of God, at the worst moment of his life, prayed from memory. He pulled down a lament he had sung in the synagogue as a boy.

Notice a small, strange detail: Mark does not just translate the prayer. He preserves the actual syllables, the sound of the words as they left Jesus' mouth. It is as if the eyewitnesses could never unhear it, and wanted the church in every century to hear it too. The loudest recorded prayer of the Son of God is a lament — and the Spirit made sure we got it with the original accent.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the little book on the Psalms he wrote before the Nazis banned him from publishing, drew the conclusion:

"The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible

These were Jesus' prayers before they were ours. He prayed the happy ones and the howling ones. And Hebrews 5:7 tells us how he prayed them: "with loud cries and tears." Not composed. Not quiet. The sinless Son prayed louder and wept harder than most of us have ever let ourselves pray. Whatever picture of "mature faith" we carry that excludes loud cries and tears, the book of Hebrews does not share it.

Charles Spurgeon stood before Psalm 22 the way a man stands before a battlefield where his rescuer fell:

"This is beyond all others the Psalm of the Cross... it is the photograph of our Lord's saddest hours, the record of his dying words, the lachrymatory of his last tears, the memorial of his expiring joys." — Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of David

A lachrymatory is an old word for a small bottle used to keep tears. Spurgeon's point: this psalm is where the church stores the tears of its Lord.

Written a thousand years early

Now read further into the psalm Jesus chose, and feel the chill of recognition. It was written roughly a thousand years before Calvary — centuries before crucifixion was invented — yet it reads like an eyewitness report from the foot of the cross.

Psalm 22:7-8 — "All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; 'He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!'" Compare the religious leaders at Golgotha, taunting him in almost those exact words.

Psalm 22:16-18 — "A company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet — I can count all my bones — they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots." Pierced hands and feet. Soldiers gambling for his clothes. All four Gospels report it happening line by line.

So when Jesus prays the first verse of this psalm, he is not grabbing a random sad poem. He is announcing his location. I am the man this psalm has been waiting for. And what was happening inside that cry? Here our words get small, but the church has always insisted we not shrink the mystery. John Calvin argued that the physical pain was not the deepest part of the atonement:

"If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual... He paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

The old word for this is dereliction — being abandoned, left behind. 2 Corinthians 5:21 states the trade at the heart of it: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." On the cross, Jesus stood in the place of sinners and tasted the God-forsakenness our sin deserves — so that we never have to.

This is what makes Christianity different from every other answer to suffering. John Stott, after surveying the world's religions and their serene, untouched gods, wrote:

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross... In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

Our God is not immune. He has a lament psalm in his own mouth. Whatever your suffering finally means, it cannot mean that God keeps a safe distance from sufferers.

The cry the Father heard

Here is the verse almost nobody quotes, sitting later in the very psalm of forsakenness. Psalm 22:24 — "For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him."

Hold the two truths side by side. Jesus felt utterly forsaken — the feeling was real, and the judgment he bore was real. And the Father heard him the whole time — Hebrews says exactly that: "he was heard because of his reverence" (Hebrews 5:7). Forsaken in experience; heard in fact. Three days later, the empty tomb proved which word God intended to have last.

That pairing is for you. There will be nights when God feels gone — when prayer seems to hit the ceiling. Psalm 22 teaches you that feeling forsaken and being forsaken are not the same thing. The Son felt the silence at full strength, prayed into it anyway, and was answered with resurrection. Because he passed through real abandonment in our place, our darkest feelings of abandonment are now only feelings. The door that slammed shut on him stands permanently open for us.

Some teachers have tried to soften the cry — to say Jesus was merely quoting a psalm he knew ended well, and felt no real dereliction at all. But the text will not allow it. The darkness, the loud voice, the loud cries and tears of Hebrews 5 — Jesus prayed this lament and meant it. The comfort is not that his agony was fake. The comfort is that it was real, and it was for you, and it was heard.

And the psalm keeps widening. Psalm 22:27 — "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you." The prayer that begins with one forsaken man ends with the whole planet coming home. Jesus knew how the psalm ended when he prayed its first line. Many readers have heard an echo of its final phrase — "he has done it" — in his last word from the cross: "It is finished" (John 19:30). He prayed the psalm from verse 1 all the way through, and finished it.

Praying with Jesus from now on

So what happens now, when you pray a lament? Augustine, preaching through the Psalms, gave the church its answer — Christ and his people are so united that our prayers travel together:

"He prays for us as our priest, prays in us as our head, and is prayed to by us as our God. Therefore let us acknowledge our voice in him and his in us." — Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms

When you cry "how long?" or "why?", you are not praying out of step with Jesus. You are praying in his company, in words he made holy by using them himself. Bonhoeffer drew the practical rule for reading every psalm:

"If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible, and especially the Psalms, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible

Ask that question of Psalm 22 and the gospel opens up: he prayed the forsaken verses so we could inherit the answered ones. Romans 8:32 presses the logic home — "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" If God has already given you his Son at the cost of that cry in the dark, he is not going to abandon you over your honest prayers now.

You wondered, maybe, whether your complaint is too sharp for God, your anger too direct, your darkness too dark. Look once more at the cross. The Son has been further down than you will ever go, and the prayer he prayed there is printed in your Bible. You are not too much for God. He has heard worse — from his own Son — and answered it with Easter.

So this is what you are doing, from now on, every time you lament: you are praying borrowed words that were first borrowed by Jesus. He took Israel's prayer book into death and carried it out the other side. The "why" you whisper at the ceiling tonight has already been shouted from a cross, heard by the Father, and answered with an empty tomb. Pray it without fear.

Going Deeper

Read all of Psalm 22 aloud today, slowly, in one sitting — and read it twice. The first time, hear it in Jesus' voice: this is what it cost him. The second time, read it as someone praying with him: this is what he won for you. Note the verse where the psalm turns from agony toward praise, and put a small cross in the margin there. From now on, every lament you pray has that turn waiting inside it, because he has done it.