Psalm 22: When it feels like God has forsaken us

By Tyler Tankersley

Most people are at least somewhat familiar with Psalm 23. Its pastoral and tranquil images of God as our shepherd easily captures our attention. Psalm 23 brings us comfort and assurance. The psalm placed directly before Psalm 23 is vastly different.

Psalm 22 is a song of complaint and petition. The psalmist feels forsaken, abandoned and ignored by God. The writer feels mocked by their enemies and is physically in turmoil: "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint" (Psalm 22:14).

Some people are surprised to find such raw and honest expressions of pain in the Bible. Churches are sometimes guilty of betraying the Bible as a collection of moral maxims and cutesy stories about wisdom. The Bible, and specifically the Book of Psalms, expresses the full gamut of human emotions: from songs expressing wonder at the created world (Psalm 145) to songs that call for violence towards an enemy's children (Psalm 137), from songs that point people towards wisdom (Psalm 14) to songs expressing deep, personal lament (Psalm 35).

Some of the more negative psalms, such as Psalm 22, may not be suitable for wall-hangings like you might find at Lifeway, but there is power in their raw vulnerability and expressions of pain. Each of us at some point in our lives will find ourselves in seasons of pain, of torment, of lament and of complaint. When we find ourselves in those moments of darkness, we do not need cliche quotations about goodness; we need to know that our pain and suffering is heard. Psalm 22 gives voice to the dark seasons we are all susceptible to experience.

Christians mostly know Psalm 22 because Jesus Christ utters its first verse while hanging on the cross: "At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which means, 'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?'" (Mark 15:34, cf. Psalm 22:1a). What is clear is that Jesus himself felt the utter abandonment and raw divine loneliness at the time of his death.

For Christian theology, this provides interesting hermeneutical issues regarding issues related to the Trinity. The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann has written extensively about this in his seminal volume called The Crucified God:

"The only way past protest atheism is through a theology of the cross which understands God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and which cries out with the forsaken God, 'My God, why have you forsaken me?' For this theology, God and suffering are no longer contradictions, as in theism and atheism, but God's being is in suffering and the suffering is in God's being itself, because God is love" (227).

While Psalm 22 expresses pain, there is a shift in verse 21 as the writer begins to realize that God has heard their cries for pain and will respond: "He did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him" (Psalm 22:24b).

God heard the cries of the psalmist. God heard the cries of Jesus Christ. God hears our cries. And God responds in mighty ways. Like a resurrection.