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My God, my God…

Years ago, when I was the catechetical coordinator at Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, the parent of a child in year 5 called me with a question from her son.  They had been to mass on Palm Sunday, and hearing in the Gosepl the same words used during the the responsorial psalm – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – the child asked, ‘Since Jesus is the Son of God, and knows everything, why would he say that when he knows God had not abandoned him?’  All those years ago, it struck me as a fairly weighty question for a 10 year old to ask, and frankly, I still think it is.  At the time I had to seek a response from someone else because that was a question I had never considered before.  And the answer I received, despite thinking it somewhat trite, was the one I passed along to the mom: ‘Jesus was quoting Psalm22 which begins in despair, but ends on a high note.’  Take a look at the Psalm, and you will see what I mean.

Many years later, at a workshop on the Psalms facilitated by Dr. Fiona Black and Rev. Dr. Hugh Farquahar I received a much better explanation: to fully understand what Jesus meant with those words, we need to live Good Friday as Good Friday, attempting to not yet focus our eyes on Easter. We need to live the events of Holy Week trying to forget the advantage we already have of knowing the end of the story. This will help us to clearly see the humanity of Jesus, who as a good Jew was indeed quoting Scripture as he hung dying on the cross. If we can live Palm Sunday as the day Jesus was celebrated upon entry into Jerusalem; Holy Thursday as the day Jesus shared a final meal with his followers, and later faced betrayal and arrest; Good Friday as the day Jesus was crucified and died, those haunting words will resonate with us in a profound way. 

How many times in their history must the Jewish people have prayed that Psalm?  How many times have we prayed it, or, worse still, felt it?  The Psalms are filled with realism and human emotions. They are passionate expressions that arise from the heart and soul of the people of ancient Israel, giving their remarkable sense of spiritual journey in poetry and music. As it is today, so it was when these words were written – poetry and music express our deepest insights and this is what we hear in the Psalms. Poetry allows us to articulate the questions that are important to us, like suffering and death. They work because they are good poetry, and they have something significant to say.

While it is true that all the Psalms are praise regardless of the words used, they also allow us to express anguish and pain, despair and anger, struggle, and remorse. The Psalms were central to the worship of the Hebrew people, and frequently they have not been given the attention they should be by us. Pope Benedict believed that the Psalms could teach us how to pray. Athanasius, a fourth century theologian said of the Psalms, “whereas most Scripture speaks to us; the Psalms speak for us.”  They provide a human response to God’s presence in our midst. They are the way we seek answers to our deepest questions.

When words fail us in our communication with God, the Psalms allow our feelings to be expressed in poignant ways. We feel the words wash over us, as a cleansing. With eyes and hearts of faith, we know that God will never forsake us. Yet our tradition allows a space for despair, for protest, for complaint. And those beautiful words give us the means to express that.

-Ellen Bennett