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how might publicly naming profound abandonment reshape expectations for those listening?

Adds the setting and its conversation across both testaments.

Psalm 22:1-2

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don’t answer; in the night season, and am not silent.”

This Psalm is attributed to David, a king of ancient Israel known for his psalms of both praise and deep lament. It captures an intense experience of feeling utterly abandoned by God and humanity, expressing profound suffering through vivid poetry.

When we hear another's profound lament, how might it shift our own assumptions about divine presence or human resilience?

Then — the setting

Psalm 22, likely from the Israelite monarchy period (c. 10th-6th centuries BCE), voices a solitary cry of despair from an individual who feels abandoned by God and subjected to public scorn. The psalm's structure, moving from intense lament to eventual praise, reflects a pattern often found in Israelite worship where individuals would bring their deepest struggles into communal prayer. Publicly voicing such profound abandonment, especially by a king like David, would have been striking in a culture that often linked divine favor with prosperity and public affirmation, challenging simplistic understandings of God's presence.

Across the Testaments

This passage is in the Old Testament, a raw expression of human suffering and perceived divine absence. The New Testament significantly engages with Psalm 22 when Jesus quotes its opening line from the cross (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34). This New Testament usage casts the psalm not only as a personal lament but also as a prophetic utterance describing the ultimate abandonment experienced by Christ, thus reinterpreting the depth of suffering and its redemptive potential within a larger theological narrative. While the Old Testament author laments his personal experience, the New Testament applies it to Jesus' experience, suggesting a continuity of suffering and a new lens through which to understand it.

Keep thinking

Read alongside it

Job 3:1-3
Job's raw cries of suffering and desire for an end to his pain after losing everything challenge assumptions about righteousness and suffering.
Lamentations 3:19-24
The prophet Jeremiah expresses the depth of Jerusalem's destruction, yet finds a glimmer of hope in God's steadfast love amidst despair.
Mark 15:33-34
Jesus quotes this Psalm from the cross, highlighting a moment of profound abandonment even in his final agony.

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