Though this sermon is supposed to be about Psalm 22, I would like to tell you about an experience I had with Psalm 42 (and 43). It’s the “As the Deer” Psalm, the thirsting for God Psalm. It is a Psalm of Lament wherein the Psalmist is experiencing the profound emotions that come with unjust loss. He is longing for God and feels cut off from God, forgotten by God. Someone or somebodies have deceitfully and unjustly wronged him and, moreover, are taunting him for having faith in a God that seems to have abdicated. “Where is your God?” they mock. The Psalmist wants vindication, justice, but all he’s got to hold on to is a whisp of the sense of the steadfast love of God and remembering how God was good to him in the past, and also how good it was to gather with God’s people to go to worship. But he’s not entirely hopeless. For one, he still knows that God is his only reliable help and to crying out to God is not in vain and so he does.
Now interestingly, there several times in those two Psalms where the psalmist speaks to his self, to his soul, to his inner being because sometimes you just got to tell yourself like it is because you are the only one who can do that because you’re the one who’s got to accept reality. He says to his self, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me. Hope in God for I shall yet again praise him, my help and my God.” He had to stop and tell himself to have hope because God will indeed act for him. Some might call that still festering in denial or deluded thinking…but God loves us, hears us, and will vindicate his faithful ones when we are treated unjustly. Feathers may hit the fan in unbelievably horrible ways sometimes but God will be with us and will in time bring us beyond the brutal, discordant tones of the tears of lament to where we can worship joyfully again because God has answered us.
Now let me tell you about my experience with those two Psalms. My first marriage ended in divorce. A couple of weeks after we parted, I was having my morning devotional which involved Psalm 42 that day and that verse in which the Psalmist spoke to his self just stuck out to me. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me. Hope in God for I shall yet again praise him, my help and my God.” It caught my eye so I memorized it so that I could recite it to myself throughout the day. Then, I had a bite to eat and went for run all the while reciting that verse to myself. About a mile in something happened. It just really struck me – “I will yet again praise God, my help and my God.” “I will yet again praise God.” “I will.” Yes, I was hurting. Yes, I had reason to be worried and scared. But…God was going to make sure that I came to joy again. Something happened.
Psychologists, therapists might call that “something” the pivotal point of acceptance and the starting of moving forward. I see it as more than that. Something happened not only in me but to me that changed things. God spoke it into me with the words of that Psalmist. What I would call it is hope, real hope, the sure faith that God was going to see me through. I would praise God for it. Something happened. God spoke something new.
Now let’s look at Psalm 22. In a very uncanny way and though this Psalm predates the event by nearly 1,000 years, it could easily be a foreseeing of Jesus dying on the cross from Jesus’ own eyes. Jesus certainly felt an affinity for this Psalm since he quoted it as he was dying. “My God. My God. Why hast Thou forsaken me?” We cannot comprehend how Jesus, “God with us”, could feel God-forsaken, but apparently Jesus did feel that way and he expressed it by quoting this Psalm. But I’m not willing to leave it at that.
Just a lesson on Bible reading…whenever a verse is quoted somewhere else in the Bible, it’s a prompt telling you to go back and read the verse in its context. Quoting one verse usually means go read the whole paragraph or chapter it came from. If you do that with Psalm 22, you find yourself in the midst of an experience of someone who is dying wrongfully on public display and being mocked for it. You find description of bodily suffering of the kind that many medical professionals say somebody being crucified would have experienced. There’s even description of people dividing up the person’s clothes the way the soldiers did with Jesus’ cloths. There’s also more going on with Psalm 22 emotionally and theologically than God-forsakenness. Yes, it starts that way but if you pay close attention the next host of verses, you find that whoever wrote it was a person of profound faith who was calling out to the God he knew would come and save him, the God whom he had known to be with him and who had acted on his behalf time and time and time again to save him. This person felt God-forsaken because God was not acting the way he wanted God to act right then and there in the midst of the horrible. God was doing what God so often seems to do, hold off until everything that needs to happen for the good and the healing of the many to the all happens.
Now, if you keep reading along in Psalm 22 something happens around verse 21 and just so you know there is considerable debate as to how to translate it. I would do it like this:
“Save me from the mouth of the lion and from the horns of the wild oxen.
(Long dramatic pause.)
You have utterly answered me.
I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters;
In the midst of the congregation I will praise you.”
Something happened. God did something and the rest of the Psalm is no longer lament but rather praising God for an act of salvation that seems to encompass everything. Something happened. God saved. God delivered and the effect of it wasn’t just for the person in the Psalm. It was for the whole people of God, indeed for all people. All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord. Every family will worship before him. Many scholars will say it really sounds like the death and resurrection of Jesus.
This is Good Friday and we are here to remember Jesus’ death and try to make some sense of it. I’ll say up front that Good Friday doesn’t make sense without Easter. Jesus’ death is pointless without his resurrection. Without Easter he is just a good and faithful man who though very innocent died a horrible death on public display all the while being mocked for his faith. Yes, for all shapes and purposes he appeared God-forsaken. But, if Psalm 22 is our script, we know that behind the scenes we know there’s more to the picture than meets the eye. If we are familiar with the Scriptures we know that in Jesus’ death an innocent man was suffering the penalty of death for every human for we all are guilty of sin and deserve condemnation, deserve death. And it just so happens that this innocent man is God the Son, God himself paying that penalty for us. Moreover, this is God himself taking Sin and Death into himself to destroy them with His Self. In another sense, Jesus dying on the cross is humanity’s judgement upon God for letting so much senseless suffering and death happen in his Creation. In Jesus’ death God put man to death and man put God to death and that is the end of it…the end of death. “It is finished” (Jn. 19:31).
Something happened. Something happened with this man Jesus who was “God with us” and his death and resurrection. I shy away from calling it the pivotal moment of acceptance and the point at which things began to move forward, but I don’t quite know how else to put it other than to say it is real hope coming alive. A new Creation began with his death and resurrection. Those who follow Jesus and who have received his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, are part of that New Creation that is indwelt by the presence of God that will be raised from the dead when the Day of Resurrection comes, but who, for now, are being made alive in him by his Spirit and empowered to live the Jesus way of unconditional love which he modeled supremely by living a faithful life of giving hope and healing to others and then dying on a cross for us and in our stead.
Let’s go back to Psalm 22:21 for just a moment. The Psalmist is pleading with God to save him from the mouth of the lion and the horns of wild oxen. That is a hopeless situation in which one is certain to die. Such is life as we know it. We die. But something happened with the Psalmist and I like for there to be a dramatic pause in the reading of the Psalm much like the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. He then says, “You have utterly answered me.” And he goes on to praise God. Something happened.
The Hebrew language has a way of doing verbs that says the action of the verb is completely completed even if it hasn’t happened yet. It’s the voice of certain promise (Qatal). We don’t have this way of doing verbs in English. We will just say “Consider it done” and do it and when it’s done it’s utterly done so consider it utterly done right now. Get my drift. The Psalmist says, “You have utterly answered me.” He was dead and now he is alive again to praise God and because he lives all peoples will praise God. The God who was ever faithful to him had to let him undeservedly go through what felt and looked like God-forsakenness, being mocked for his faith, and even a horrible death because what lays on the other side was and will be new life for all.
So, in closing on a personal note, when we feel God-forsaken and wish God would act and get us or the people we love out of a living Hell, well, that’s only the first verse of the Psalm and God-forsaken really isn’t the case. The rest of the Psalm, the behind the scenes if you may, is that God who has been with us and faithful to us our whole lives is still with us and will utterly answer us in new, hope-filled, healing, joyful, praise-filled life. Hold on to faith, hold on to hope, hold on to love even if and though we must die. Our God is the God who raises the dead. Amen.
