My God, My God: Psalm 22 and the Cross

On Easter Sunday 2014, the pastor preached from Psalm 22, taking the congregation through the thousand-year-old words of King David and showing how precisely they described the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Rather than going to the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, he stayed in the Old Testament to let the prophecy speak for itself. The sermon moved from the darkness of the psalm's opening verses toward the single turn that makes Easter what it is: "You have answered me."

What was said

David wrote Psalm 22 around 970 BC, roughly a thousand years before Jesus was condemned. The pastor pointed out that David was God's anointed king, writing from genuine personal danger while Saul was still hunting him, and that the depth of feeling in the psalm comes from a real man in a real crisis. At the same time, everyone, including Jewish readers today, recognizes it as a messianic psalm, pointing toward God's anointed one still to come.

The opening cry, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me," is not doubt. The pastor was careful on that point. In Hebrew, saying "my God" twice carries no uncertainty. It is the language of intimate belonging, "I know You are mine and I am Yours," followed immediately by a question the writer genuinely cannot answer. Jesus quoted this line from the cross, pointing back to the psalm and pointing to Himself as the one it described.

What follows in the psalm, the scorn of onlookers who mock a man for trusting God, the physical details of bones out of joint, extreme thirst, hands and feet pierced, garments divided by lot, reads like an eyewitness account of a crucifixion. The pastor noted that crucifixion was not even a known method of execution when David wrote those words. The specificity, right down to soldiers casting lots for clothing, is the reason he went to this passage on Easter morning rather than to the Gospels.

Running through all of that suffering is a pattern of alternation. The psalm swings back and forth between desperation and trust. "But You are holy." "But You are He who took me from the womb." The pastor said the Psalms work this way because they are the hymn book of people who are actually feeling something, and the honesty of that movement, from anguish to trust and back again, is exactly what makes them useful to anyone who has ever felt God had turned away.

The pivot of the whole sermon came at the end of verse 21. After every request, "deliver me, save me, hasten to help me," the text simply says, "You have answered me." The pastor described this as the Easter moment inside the psalm itself. God responded to a sincere cry of desperation. The answer to "why have You forsaken me" is that Christ bore the guilt of sin for everyone who would believe, and the credit for that is transferable.

The pastor closed by saying that God responds to anyone calling out in faith, whether that call comes from desperation, from honest doubt, or even from something as cool and calculated as Pascal's wager. The hard path through suffering that the psalm describes does not get avoided, but the answer at the end of it is real. He noted that the second half of the psalm, verse 21 onward, would be carried by the choir in the later service, because what follows "You have answered me" is the good news that spreads from that answer outward to all who come after.