My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
This is a very familiar bit of psalms. In my tradition we read the entire psalm 22 during the stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday, or the Thursday before Easter. This line is also read during the retelling of the Passion, both on Palm Sunday, and Good Friday, because this is the prayer Jesus recites at from the cross. It’s powerful to me to think that God-incarnate read these God-inspired words as we mortals were executing him.
The reflection for this morning’s readings is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who reflects that the psalms are powerful precisely because God-incarnate prayed the psalter. As a good rabbi, Jesus would have prayed the psalter repeatedly. And by his use of this specific line at his execution, it’s clear that the psalms became for him a deep and resonant part of his outlook. It is because we see God-made-man pray with the psalter that we have a model of how to get more out of the psalter ourselves.
I am grateful for this slow and persistent walk through the psalms. I don’t always love the poetry, but I do appreciate that this book of scripture contains probably every human emotion. These emotions were originally captured as David wrote the psalms. But through Jesus’ use of the psalms, God was able to understand these human emotions in very practical, mundane, human ways through Jesus’ experience as a human.
When David originally wrote, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, it was a human petition to an invisible God. When Jesus prayed the same words, it was God-made-man realizing just what those words meant for us. Jesus cries on behalf of all humanity, acknowledging the sense of abandonment we feel sometimes. And Jesus cries out as the one to whom the prayer is offered, to God-immortal. It’s a perfect example of absolute empathy, of God being able to fully understand our human trials and joys, through Jesus’ life, prayers, and death.
This morning, I’m thinking about who’s recited the psalms through the millennia, about their trials and joys, and about a God who intimately knows what it’s like for us, because of Jesus’ praying the psalms.
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