Psalm 22
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? 2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. 3 Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. 4 In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. 5 To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame. 6 But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. 7 All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads; 8 "Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver— let him rescue the one in whom he delights!" 9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother's breast. 10 On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.
It was Blaise Pascal who said, “One dies alone.” However, if he were alive today, I think Pascal would be more apt to say, “One lives alone.” Yes it seems that in an ever-shrinking world brought on by the ever-expanding network of connectivity, we as human beings still feel alone. The great irony of it all is that today individuals have public arenas in which to display and confess their loneliness; MySpace, YouTube, facebook, and any number of blog websites disclose to the entire world the inner loneliness of all who wish it exposed. Even in a completely connected world, there are those who still feel alone, perhaps you still feel alone.
We are listening (this morning) to the words of one who feels the brutal reality of loneliness. Psalm 22 is a desperate cry for deliverance from suffering, deliverance from the very real suffering of abandonment and loneliness. These are the words of one who is afflicted with illness, one who is afflicted with such an illness that he is brought to the threshold of death’s door, and in his greatest hour of need… he is helpless—he feels abandoned by God, by those he loves, and he is completely alone.
In that desperate loneliness, the psalmist cries out to God. In the midst of the congregation, in the midst of worship, he cries aloud that God would not be far from him in his most desperate hour. It is an hour John of the Cross calls “the Dark Night of the Soul.” It is a time when God seems most distant and the darkness of despair seems most imminent. The psalmist does not cry out for healing; he is not crying out for a full recovery and restoration to perfect health. Rather, he is crying out to God that he not be left alone in this most desperate hour.
Right away, the words of this psalm ought to sound familiar to you. The introductory plea of the psalmist in verse one, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” comes calling to us from another context, another dark hour in which the whole scope of human history held its breath. These are the words of Christ from the cross in Matthew 27:46 “Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani?” (Matthew records them in the Hebrew/Aramaic to echo this psalm). It is a most desperate hour. One who knew no sin, One who selflessly left the glory of an eternal heaven to walk, talk, eat, laugh, and love with those who were born to die, One who (John tells us) was there in the beginning with God, feels abandoned. Christ on the cross feels as if God, his Father, has left him alone in his most desperate hour, so he cries out in the words of this psalm. Is it any wonder that Psalm 22 is often referred to as “the fifth gospel account of the crucifixion?”
The psalmist cries out to God in spite of his apparent absence. He cries out of the loneliness to be rescued. Christ, hanging with the weight of humanity’s sins sending shocks of pain through his body from his pierced hands, cries out to his Father in spite of his apparent absence. And in the dark days of life, when the dark shadows of depression, doubt, and despair press upon you, you cry out to God to deliver you, even though it seems as if He is not there! Yes my brothers and sisters, there are times when the journey of faith is lonely, and there are times when God seems absent. Yet you still cry out to Him, asking “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Yet there are those times when God feels as close as the air you breathe. There are those times when God seems to vibrate in the very matter of your existence, yet you still feel the cold grip of loneliness. Yes, even when God is close, you still feel lonely because on this journey of faith, even those closest to you may abandon you; they may turn on you and use your faith to tear a relationship in two. The psalmist experiences this withdrawal as those around him turn on him and leave him to be rescued by the God who has also seemingly abandoned him. In verses six and seven, he tells of how he has been “scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me…” and they mockingly challenge him in verse eight to “Commit your cause to the Lord let him deliver—let him rescue the one in whom he delights.” They abandon him in his greatest hour of need, leaving him to his faith and a seemingly silent God.
There are places along the journey of faith where those that you love most, those that are closest to you, fall away from you. There are places where your faith outruns the resistance of an unchanging relationship. It is in those places where the journey of faith seems lonely. It is in those places where you feel as if you are in this entire thing called Christianity all by yourself. While others around you cling to what is familiar and what brings them assured comfort in this world, you press on, obeying the direction of God, following Him on the journey.
There should be no better example than our Lord Jesus Christ. This sort of abandonment runs throughout the gospels, and it is all summed up in Mark’s account of Jesus’ arrest in chapter fourteen. All of the disciples have been following him, great crowds have pressed in on him to hear the Good News, and it is in the garden of Gethsemane, at his arrest, when Mark writes those haunting words that ought to serve as a chilling reminder to those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ, “All of them deserted and fled (14:50).” Only the women were left to follow Jesus on his journey to the cross. In fact, the very crowds that cheered at his arrival on Palm Sunday were calling for his blood on Good Friday. Yes Jesus knew what it meant to be deserted by those who were closest to him—he still knows.
Should we not take comfort in this? Should you not find comfort in knowing that no matter how lonely your journey of faith seems to be, Christ is there with you because he has been there before you?! He was abandoned by his friends, his family, and his disciples—he was left to die! He cried out from the depths of eternal despair to question God’s presence! Yes, no matter how lonely it may feel along the journey, know the Jesus Christ has felt that very same loneliness. No matter how abandoned you feel, know that even the Son of God himself felt abandoned by his Father!
And in all of this take heart! For God is not a God who abandons you in your greatest time of need; God is not a God who disappears when all of those close to you turn away to leave you to life’s dark shadows. God is a God who is with you in all of life’s loneliness because He has felt the ultimate loneliness! It is this knowledge of God’s love that you can truly declare with the voice of the psalmist in verse eleven, “Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.”
I want you to know (this morning) that God is not far from you. In that moment of despair and overwhelming loneliness on the cross, Christ put to death the loneliness that separates you from God. In that moment, when Christ had been abandoned by all of those close to him, he secured a place for you and your journey of faith. In that moment, Christ made a way for you to overcome the controlling grip of loneliness and live in the fullness of a true relationship with a God who will never leave you nor forsake you.
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