Psalm 22:19-28 Commentary

Psalm 22 certainly appears to have one of the biggest turnarounds in the Hebrew Psalter.  After famously opening with a cry of divine abandonment and utter dereliction—followed by  increasingly graphic descriptions of suffering and ridicule by enemies—the psalm concludes with effusive praise.  The God who could not be located as the poem began returned, came through for the psalmist, delivered him from every peril and woe.  The psalmist’s gratitude for this is so great that not only does he cut loose with rejoicing and praise, he insists that everyone get in on the action.

The psalmist begins with those who already know and fear the Lord God of Israel.  Then he moves on to all the descendants of Jacob and all of Israel.  But he cannot stop just there—by the very end of the psalm all the ends of the entire earth are invited to sing along.  Every person from every people group are all-but ordered to join the choir and sing to the Almighty God of Israel.  It is by no means clear why the Lectionary cuts off this reading three verses shy of the actual conclusion of the psalm.  Verses 29-31 continue to widen the circle of praise for God.  The rich, those who die, all posterity and future generations are included, and the final line of the song has those future generations declaring one very simple thing about God: “He has done it!”

Again, for a psalm that began lamenting that God was apparently doing nothing for the psalmist in the extreme state of suffering he described, ending with the clarion declaration of all that God in the end accomplished is rather startling.

In the Year C Lectionary this is the psalm that begins Ordinary Time or the Sundays after Pentecost and between Trinity Sunday and the first Sunday in Advent.  Having passed through the seasons of Advent, Epiphany, Lent, and Eastertide, perhaps it was thought fitting to appoint a psalm that caps off all of that divine drama with this celebration of how God does indeed in the end come through for God’s people.  This might be all the more reason to include the end of verse 31 when preaching on this psalm.  As we look back on all that we remembered in the Church Year to date, concluding with “He has done it!” seems fitting indeed.

But of course we don’t want this focus of Psalm 22’s conclusion to eclipse how the poem began.  A former colleague once claimed that because Jesus knew how Psalm 22 ends, we don’t need to take his crying out the first verse of this song on the cross too literally or seriously.  It is as though Jesus was saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” but on the inside Jesus was thinking to himself, “What I’m really signaling here is that my God is not really forsaking me at all because I too will soon enough be saying, ‘He has done it!’”

But as another former colleague once said, that seems unlikely.  When you are nailed to a cross, you are not likely to be showing off your Bible memory work!  No, Jesus did feel abandoned in the moment and even if it is true that he knew in the long run he would be raised back to life soon—he himself predicted that often enough to the disciples after all—the suffering of that moment was real.  It was raw.  It was hell itself.  (John Calvin thought that the cry of dereliction was the moment we refer to in the Apostles’ Creed when we say “He descended into hell.”)  We cannot bracket out the significance of that.

The one thing Christians cannot do is ignore the horrible consequences of sin and evil.  The wages of sin is death.  Although we typically make Advent a season of delightful anticipation of the birth of the Savior, we need to remember that this child was born to die.  Churches like mine that celebrate the Lord’s Supper on Christmas morning are sending a much-needed theological message: chopped up flesh and hemorrhaged blood is where the birth in Bethlehem will end up.  We devote more time to Lent than we do to Advent to remember this as well.

Now as we enter Ordinary Time, we don’t have a singular focus for the season.  It is just the passing of, well, ordinary, regular time as we make our way back to the start of a new Church Year come November 30, 2025.  That’s a long ways off yet, about twenty-six weeks or precisely half of the entire calendar year.  So perhaps what we preachers can do throughout this long season without a singular focus is rehearse the great theological truths of Scripture, including both the fact that the Son of God had to suffer much for our sakes and there was no shortcut through that before Jesus could say with the psalmist that God has done it!  God has delivered God’s people.

We live in a difficult moment of history it seems.  Maybe there have never been easy seasons.  But right now with wars raging in Gaza and Ukraine, with ongoing trouble in Sudan and so many places, with chaotic times in the world economy and so much uncertainty, life feels downright perilous.  I recently heard someone refer to “The PBS Newshour” as “The PBS Blues Hour.”  And wherever you get your news from of late, that is how it feels many days.  The world is a mess.  The lives of innocent children are being taken daily.

Sin and evil and original sin are at the bottom of all that, of course.  With joy we Christians declare that for our God in Christ, “He has done it!”  But we make that declaration fully aware of what it all cost.  The Jesus who cried out “My God, my God, why?” ended his time on the cross saying “It is accomplished.”  But he also died the very next moment as part of that divine accomplishment.  These are the things we remember with reverence and awe in Ordinary Time and at all times.

Illustration Idea

In a sermon I heard many years ago by Thomas G. Long, Long said he once heard a prominent American TV preacher—he did not name the preacher but you can likely guess who it was—being interviewed by the BBC.  The BBC reporter was sharp.  “You preach a message of success, of prosperity, don’t you?”  “Yes I do” the preacher beamed, “I believe Jesus wants us to sail not fail.”  “But didn’t your Jesus die a terrible death on a cross?”  “Oh,” the preacher rejoined, “like all successful people, Jesus had his setbacks.  But on Easter he put all that behind him.”  But to that line of thinking we must say a very clear “No.”