What is lost when Psalm 22 is butchered

Will try to keep this short. I wrote a rather long post about the “Bible study” series on the Psalms which remains my worst experience in twenty six years of pastoral ministry.

This was the week in which the focus of the Bible study was Psalm 22 which is one of the most poignant and significant chapters in the psalter. And plays also a crucial role in how the gospels of Matthew and Mark narrate the story of the crucifixion and death of Christ. I was leading the small group through the movement of the Psalm – what one might call the drama thereof. And was pointing out the remarkable shift that occurs that happens after verse 24. From the first part of the psalm which is lament. To the last part of the psalm which is praise and some sort of thanksgiving meal. Offered because God had delivered the one who earlier cried out “my God my God why have you abandoned me”. (Ed – See comments below. The psalmist anticipates offering thanksgiving to God.)

One of those present asked “is the person speaking in the first part of the psalm the same as in the last part”. I was caught off guard by the question. And to be honest wondered why anyone would even ask. Why would anyone take a psalm which has come to us as one text and chop it in half in order to distance the first part (with its lament and its cry to God for help) from the second part (with its praise for how God will answer). Oh I knew why. This person for years had been trying to convince other members of the church that God does not act in the world. And we were discussing a psalm in which the psalmist both cries to God for help and anticipates offering thanksgiving to God who will have acted to deliver.

Granted that same question applies better to psalms of thanksgiving. Which consistently include brief testimony of when the psalmist was in trouble and cried out for help. “I thank you God because you saved me. This was my situation. You heard and answered. You turned my mourning into dancing. Oh Lord my God I gave you thanks forever”.

Psalm 22 does not challenge this person’s view as much as psalms of thanksgiving in which the psalmist thanks God for what God did to deliver the person from his/her distress.

Some interpreters find Psalm 22 difficult to categorize. The first part is clearly a psalm of individual lament. The last part in some ways resembles a psalm of thanksgiving but is more likely the promise to offer thanksgiving to God for anticipated deliverance. Which is what we find in many psalms of lament.

I had trouble knowing quite how to answer. To me it was like going into space and seeing the curvature of the earth and then asking “how do we explain this without admitting the world might be round?” What on earth would possess someone to cut in half such a song because it challenges her/his perspective. S/he could not allow the psalm to speak on its own terms.

The reason I bring all that up is because I have been reading through a remarkable book Introduction to Christianity by then Cardinal Ratzinger. In which among other things he slowly and methodically walks the reader through the Apostles’ Creed. Toward the end of the book he discusses the rather peculiar line that Christ “descended into hell”. As he does elsewhere in the book he pushes back against efforts to demythologize a statement in the Creed that especially offends the modern attitude toward reality. The article “reminds us that not only God’s speech but also his silence is part of the Christian revelation. God is also the silent, inaccessible, uncomprehended, and incomprehensible ground that eludes us” (idem, Introduction to Christianity, 296-297).

But that is not the whole significance.

Christology reaches out beyond the Cross, the moment when the divine love is tangible, into the death, the silence and the eclipse of God. Can we wonder that the Church and the life of the individual are led again and again into this hour of silence, into the forgotten and almost discarded article, “Descended into hell?” When one ponders this, the question of the “scriptural evidence” solves itself; at an rate in Jesus’ death cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), the mystery of Jesus’ descent into hell is illuminated as if in a glaring flash of lightning on a dark night.

Handful of dear readers forgive me for again quoting Ratzinger at length. He continues in that paragraph to explain the importance of Christ uttering the opening line of Psalm 22,

Which summarizes in a shattering way the needs and hopes of this people chosen by God and apparently at the moment so utterly abandoned by him. This prayer that rises from the sheer misery of God’s seeming eclipse ends in praises of God’s greatness. This element, too, is present in Jesus’ death cry, which has been recently described by Ernest Käsemann as a prayer sent up from hell, as the raising of a standard, the first commandment, in the wilderness of God’s apparent absence: “The Son still holds on to faith when faith seems to have become meaningless and the earthly reality proclaims absent the God of whom the first thief and the mocking crowd speak – not for nothing. His cry is not for life and survival, not for himself, but for the Father. His cry stands against the reality of the whole world”. After this, do we still need to ask what worship must be in our hour of darkness.? Can it be anything else but the cry from the depths in company with the Lord who “has descended into hell” and who has established the nearness of God in the midst of abandonment by God? (idem, Introduction to Christianity, 297; emphasis added)

Although Ratzinger focuses primarily on the sense of God’s absence he touches on the other face or side of Psalm 22. The cry and the trust go hand in hand. By severing the expectation of deliverance from the lament the result is an incomplete understanding of the psalm. Indeed a distorted picture of the crucified one who cries from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And for the record the picture is distorted if we focus solely on the anticipated deliverance (which is expressed in the Eucharist and anticipated in the Last Supper) and skip over the cry of lament. This crucial dynamic is lost when Psalm 22 is dissected.