A Verse A Day (Day 12)

For the last five days, the daily psalm reading for Lent has been the latter part of Psalm 22. The beginning of Psalm 22 is the most familiar part, the painful lament that Jesus utters from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? … Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.” “I am ... scorned by others, and despised by the people.” Those who scorn say, “Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver – let him rescue the one in whom he delights!” It’s easy to see how the gospel writers found the 22^nd Psalm in the crucifixion. 

 

By the time we get to the end of it, this Psalm has traveled a long way. The psalmist has moved from lamenting God’s absence in a time of distress to giving God praise for not ignoring the afflictions of the afflicted; from “Why have you forsaken me?” to a God who “did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” 

 

The change of tone is curious. Did the psalmist lose nerve? Was the psalm written in retrospect, capturing both the angst of the moment and the composed reassurance of the aftermath? I have known folks whose perspectives have changed dramatically – sometimes as a result of a conscious or religious experience, and sometimes finding what Karl Rahner called “consolation without a cause.” Is that what’s happening here? Or, maybe this psalm is just a snapshot of life. 

 

Sometimes we live at the beginning of the psalm, when the most faithful thing one can do is to express doubts, anxieties, and questions. The rawness of the lament psalm is the liberty to howl that Western theology and culture have refined out of us. At other times we look back and see how far we have come, how many things we have been able to do, despite ourselves, and how patiently God has been at work among us. Perhaps then we need the liberty to rejoice without caution, without having to account for our earlier words. Maybe it is simply the case that sometimes we live in the hope of new life and sometimes we tremble with the prospect of death. What startles me about this psalm is how both are simply sewn together without hesitation or apology.