“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
These words are not polite, tidy, or restrained. They are raw, exposed, painfully honest. And they are Scripture.
Psalm 22 gives us permission to say what we often try to hide. We can speak the truth of our pain without filtering or softening it. No need to pretend everything is alright when it is not.
On this day, as we stand at the foot of the cross, these words take on even greater weight. This is because they are not only the cry of the psalmist; they are also the cry of Jesus.
In his final moments, Jesus does not reach for a triumphant declaration. He reaches for a lament.
He prays. And what he prays is not certainty, but anguish.
There is something important in that. It reminds us that faith doesn’t require the absence of doubt, pain, or feelings of abandonment. Faith is simply the willingness to bring all of that to God—even anger, confusion, and silence.
Psalm 22 begins in desolation: “Why are you so far from helping me?” It names the experience so many of us have had. We sense our prayers go unanswered, God is distant, and we are left alone in our suffering.
And yet, the psalm does not end there. It moves, slowly and reluctantly, toward something else. The shift occurs not because the circumstances change, but because something changes in the remembering. “Yet you are holy… in you our ancestors trusted…”
Amid despair, there is turning—not away from pain, but through it. There is reaching back into memory, story, and the deep well of faith: “Even if I do not feel it now, God has been present before.”
This is not denial. This is persistence.
Even as suffering is rendered in vivid, almost unbearable detail—”they divide my clothes among themselves… they stare and gloat over me”—a thread, fragile yet unbroken, remains.
“You who fear the Lord, praise him… for he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted.”
Did you hear that? In the middle of this psalm, which opens with abandonment, comes a quiet, defiant claim: God has not turned away. Even when it feels like it. Even when everything suggests otherwise.
Good Friday lives in that tension: between what we feel and what we dare believe, between God’s silence and the memory of God’s faithfulness, between the cross before us and the hope we cannot yet see.
And perhaps that is where we find ourselves today.
We bring our own Psalm 22 moments—our cries of “why?” We bring experiences of loss, grief, injustice, and fear. We live in a world that echoes the psalm’s early verses—full of suffering and unanswered questions.
But we are also invited to hold onto the latter verses—not as easy answers, nor as forced optimism, but as a quiet, stubborn trust: that God is still present, that suffering is not ignored, and that the story is not over.
When Jesus prays Psalm 22 from the cross, he is not only naming the pain. He is invoking the whole of it, from the opening cry to the final trust, from abandonment to hope.
And so today, we do not rush past the lament. We stay with it. We pray it. We allow it to give voice to what is heavy in our hearts.
We also remember that even in the darkest prayer, there is a thread of hope woven in. This hope does not erase the suffering. It refuses to let suffering have the final word.
And that, perhaps, is the quiet grace of this day. That even here… even now… God is listening. God is present. God is holding the story together until the moment when it will be made whole.
Amen.
