Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-152 Sunday 24 Aug 2003

Psalms on Sundays Reading: Psalm 22 – WHEN GOD SEEMS ABSENT

Thank God! He is big enough to take all the angry words and complaints we throw at him, and go on loving us.

In the gospel account of Jesus’ death, there are five quotations from, or allusions to, Psalm 22. The best known is Jesus’ use of its opening words, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?'(Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34) Two other psalms are also quoted or alluded to on the cross.(Ps 31:5 – see Luke 23:46; Ps 69:21 – Matt 27:34) All three psalms are examples of ‘the lament of an individual’. About one third of the psalms are ‘laments’ and one third are ‘praises’. If the book of Psalms reflects the nature of the worship in the Jerusalem Temple, then it was rather different from much modern worship. It contained opportunity for people to express their perplexity, hurt, and even anger, at what God was allowing to happen to them and to the world. The language is often strong and vivid as it is in this psalm.

Jesus’ use of this language in his own prayer on the cross gives us permission to express feelings of abandonment and despair honestly and openly to God. Worship is unbalanced if it does not allow – indeed enable – this to happen. It runs the risk of encouraging a dangerously triumphalist view of Christian experience, dangerous because life isn’t like that. Life wasn’t like that for Jesus or the apostle Paul. To suggest that following the Christian faith solves all problems can be pastorally disastrous, as people facing bad times are made to feel failures, or else they may feel that it is God who is the ‘failure’ – that he doesn’t exist.

Those who are honest in their complaints to God will, like this psalmist, eventually break through to the joy that comes with knowing God’s presence and deliverance. The way of the cross is the road to resurrection.

One way of enabling ‘lament’ in public worship is to make more regular use of the book of Psalms. Could you encourage this in your church, if it isn’t done already?

– Ernest Lucas

Copyright Scripture Union, 2003, Encounter with God

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