Wednesday Part 2

And here's today's reflection. . .

The beginning of Psalm 22 is probably very familiar to you. Verses from this psalm are quoted throughout the Passion story.

It's not really a psalm full of pretty language. Actually, it's gritty. It really gets to the guts of a situation--the author spreads out his complaint before God like a dinner table. Every gripe, every concern, every pain, every bit of desperation is exposed. This psalm really plumbs the depths of human suffering, articulating each pain and wound.

Yet it also reaches to the very heights of personal faith. While expressing pain and devastation in one breath, the psalmist praises God to the heavens and invites others to join with him. And it ends up seeming a little moody, a little schizophrenic in character, wildly swinging from one extreme emotion to another.

I certainly don't identify well with going from doubt to faith in such a rapid swing. My faith is more of a slow serious of peaks and troughs, not a frantic zig-zag like the psalmist's faith seems to be. Which makes me ask the question, how can someone possibly go from one kind of agony that Jesus suffered to extolling God's virtue within one, little psalm?

So, I turned to one of my trusty commentaries (a pastor's best friend!) and did a little digging. The New Interpreter's Bible Commentary suggests that, instead of thinking the psalmist's imagination has run away with him, this psalm has an eschatological character--and by that, I mean "it portrays what God intends for the world." It affirms God's reign in all times and all places, even when it seems like He doesn't. Does that make sense? The psalmist's passion for God isn't misguided; rather, it's a challenge for us, a call to us to enter the reign of God.

When Jesus uses this psalm from the cross, we see the fulfillment of Israel's history and the arrival of the Messiah. So it makes perfect sense to use Psalm 22 in the midst of the Passion. Psalm 22 "interprets Jesus' passion and resurrection as a summons to the world. . . to believe in the reign of the Lord."

So, it would seem Psalm 22 is to be a model for us, an example of what our faith should be like--what our faith could really be like. The kind of faith which doesn't falter when it meets a challenge or a question; the kind of faith which continually trusts in God and encourages others to do so too, even when life is the pits, even when you're hanging on the cross or when it just feels like it.

Allison