Reflections on Psalm 22

Someone has said that the one who sings, prays twice. The psalms are ancient Israel’s hymnal, a collection of poems that are very often sung, even to this day. They are prayers meant to express various aspects of the faith journey, used both for private mediation and for the gathered community, both Christians and Jews. The psalm appointed for The Second Sunday in Lent is Psalm 22:22-30.

You who fear the LORD, praise him! 
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
Stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
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.
From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
My vows I will pay before those who fear him.

The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
Those who seek him shall praise the LORD.
May your hearts live forever!

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.
For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.
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.
Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord,
And proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.

One of T.S. Eliot's great poems, "East Coker," begins with the phrase, "In my beginning is my end." And then the last line of the poem is inverted: “in my end is my beginning.” (I love that poem!)

It comes to mind as I ponder the twenty-second psalm, which is not nearly as well known as the one that follows it, save for that opening line that Matthew and Mark remember as Jesus’ last words from the cross: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” On Good Friday, at the very end of Lent, the psalm for the day will be the beginning of psalm twenty-two. Yet here, now, still at the beginning of Lent, the lectionary committee gives us the end of the psalm. It’s all very post-modern, don’t you think? In our beginning is our end and in our end is our beginning...

The thing is that liturgical decisions about poetry are eclectic at best, so I want to remember the poem apart from idiosyncratic liturgical practices, and at least initially apart even from Jesus praying this psalm. Because after all, the psalm was around for hundreds of years before Jesus uttered these words from the cross, and long before Lent existed. Taken in its original context, we can see a movement of a person who was in great trouble and feeling forsaken move toward praise. 

“My God why have you forsaken me?” the poet asks. The truth is that God is never far away, especially when we are in trouble. In another psalm at another time in the life the poet insists, even, that God is a very present help in trouble. (Psalm 46) But when we are in trouble our senses very often fail us. We cannot see what is right before our eyes. We feel alone and abandoned and those feelings are real, even if that isn’t reality. This poet is in trouble. Yet the great lie of despair is that it isolates us from both God and neighbor. When the world doesn’t make sense to us, it seems as if God must be gone. We feel abandoned. And so the poet cries out in the daytime but isn’t getting any answers. And the poet cries out at nighttime as well, in the midst of sleepless nights. Still, no response. (22:2) Only silence.

Then the poet remembers something very important, however. In the act of remembering the poet senses he is part of a community of faith. He (or she) remembers what they learned in "Sunday School" about how others put their trust in God and how God delivered them. The poet yearns for that kind of faith, yet feels like he is “a worm and no man” and that given this reality, trust in God would be foolish.

And yet...

There are a lot of “and yets” in this poem, as there are in our lives when we are in that place of fear and isolation. We want to believe…and yet. We feel despair...and yet. There is this memory the poet has…a distant one to be sure…but a memory of innocence, of childhood, of trusting God…all the way back to his mother’s womb. And then comes this profoundly simple prayer for all the ages, addressed to this God of Abraham and Sarah, this God who was present at the poet’s birth:

              Be not far from me, for trouble is near, 
                And there is none to help. (22:11)

And yet…

Finally the poem takes a turn toward proclamation as it comes to an end and that is where we pick it up in our worship for the Second Sunday in this pandemic Lent. “Praise the Lord,” the poet says. Because maybe at the end of our rope, when there is no one else and maybe in the midst of our feelings of Godforsakeness, maybe then is when we finally have a chance to encounter God again, when everything else is stripped away. The God of Israel, the God of Jacob, is not far away from this poet’s cry at all, as it turns out. “He does not hide his face; and when they cry, he hears them.”

The now retired bishop of my diocese, Gordon Scruton, was fond of saying that evangelism is “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” It’s the core truth upon which twelve-step programs are built as well: someone finds the gift of sobriety and part of the gratitude for that gift is to help others find the same gift. This poet has been to hell and back. Yet he (or she) knows that God was indeed there all along, and so now it must be sung out to the assembly so that everyone knows that the one who cried out, "my God, why have your forsaken me" also knows that God's saving deeds must be told even to generations yet to be born. How can we possibly keep from singing? 

This is the core truth of the Paschal mystery we proclaim week in and week out: that Good Friday isn’t the last word about Jesus and that death is not the last word about him, or about us, or about this world. In his end there is a new beginning. So, too, with us. It’s the core story of an Easter people, the story that binds us together even when we are apart. Lent keeps calling us back to that reality, as we prepare for Easter morning.  

This poem begins with an experience of forsakenness, but ends with proclamation. The experience of God’s absence, as it turns out is not an end at all but a new beginning.