The afternoon sky has been dark for three hours, daylight overpowered by the strangeness of night. At the worst of his pain, alone in the darkness, Jesus groans, using the only prayer that remains: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” With these words, Jesus begins to pray Psalm 22, joining his voice to the psalmist’s witness, joining his voice to the anguished voices of all who feel abandoned, forsaken, and vulnerable.
Pain
pulls us in on ourselves, doesn’t it? It isolates us from others, from God,
from beauty, even from love. Poet Christian Wiman, a bone-cancer survivor, says
that “pain islands you.”[1] Yes, it can be the
bone-crushing pain of cancer or the dry burning of fever. It can be the
emotional pain of grief and loss, or of a depression so deep that we can only
curl our bodies around our own despair. It can be the pain we absorb from our radically
suffering world—from war, from natural disasters, from injustice, from
genocide. Deep pain takes up all of our attention and makes us feel, oh so
alone.
Pain
and suffering also rip us away from any sense of meaning. Jesus’ “WHY” isn’t an
intellectual “why.” It’s a why that pleads from deep down in the gut. It’s the
Psalmist’s “WHY” of agonized wonder, the cry of “how can this horror even be?” How
can “my God,” the trustworthy God of my ancestors, seem to have disappeared in
my time of need? How can all the narratives on which I’ve relied suddenly crumble
to dust? On the Cross, even Jesus, who knows an unconditional intimacy with his
Abba—even Jesus enters the empty pit of meaninglessness that comes with
suffering.
I
wonder how much of the Psalm Jesus is able to utter before his death. Is it
just this first agonized line, given to us by the Gospel writers? Psalm 22 isn’t
just a testimony to pain and meaninglessness. It’s a testimony that shifts rather
awkwardly to end in praise—in praise of a triumphant, saving God. As the
psalmist dangles from the horns of wild oxen, God suddenly appears to him, like
sunlight through the clouds. It turns out that God was never absent, after all.
I
like to think that Jesus, in his dying, finishes the whole psalm, embodying both
agony and grace, witnessing to God’s faithful presence, even when we can’t feel
it. It can sound puny and clichéd when we say to someone in pain, “Oh, God is
with you in your suffering.” But in Jesus’ own anguished cry, I can feel and
hear and see that place where God’s unfailing, ever-present love runs smack
into unjust, isolating, meaningless suffering. And that meeting of love and
pain--that’s where the power of compassion--the divine power of “suffering with”—can
grow and spread. And it’s this power of compassion that brings life out of
death.[2]
