What We Do
National Student Essay Contest
Psalm 22:
The "Bone of Contention" that
Might Just Prove a Source of Accord
by Natalie Henderson The opening line of Psalm 22, with its desperate accusa-tion, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" resonates with Jews and Christians alike (Ps. 22:1, NRSV). For Christians, it is the bleak final question that escaped a dying Jesus' lips at Calvary. For Jews, it is a cry that the persecuted Hebrews, whose history of oppression is as long as their history as a people, have often had cause to raise to YHWH. Yet, despite the universality of human suffering, this psalm has not unified Jews and Christians, but has instead been a "bone of contention between the synagogue and the church" (Vall 45).
This dissension over Psalm 22 is ironic because, in real-ity, the way the psalm has been interpreted illustrates the commonality in the way that Jews and Christians approach scripture, each reading passages from the Hebrew Bible in light of their tradition's one or two most fundamental experiences. If Christians and Jews inter-pret Psalm 22 differently, it is because we understand our histories differently. Judaism's bedrock experiences are the establishment of the covenant with Abraham and the exodus from Egypt, while Christianity is grounded in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As our different readings of Psalm 22 demonstrate, both our knowledge of suffering and our sources of comfort for this suffering have been rooted in our understanding of these fundamental religious experiences. By recognizing that our different understandings of the psalm are in actuality different ways of understanding a common human experience, Christians and Jews can move be-yond bickering over translations and blaming one another for past injuries and instead see Psalm 22 for what it is: a desperate plea by humanity that God not abandon us and a profuse praise of the Almighty when we realize that we have never been forsaken at all.
Jews understand their religion as the religion of G-d's chosen people and their history as the history of G-d's intervention in this world on behalf of G-d's people. From the time of Abram (later to become Abraham), G-d sets the Jewish people apart by entering into a covenant relationship with them. G-d tells Abram, "I will establish My covenant between Me and thee and thy seed after thee throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a G-d unto thee and to thy seed after thee" (Gen. 17:7, Jewish Virtual Library). This covenant is later renewed with Moses, when G-d confirms Israel's status as a chosen nation by affirming, "I will take you to Me for a people, and I will be to you a G-d; and ye shall know that I am HaShem your G-d, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians" (Ex. 6:7, JVL). By rescuing the Jews from bondage in Egypt, G-d acts on behalf of G-d's people in this world. The first of many such rescues by YHWH, the exodus is paramount in Jewish thought as proof of G-d's presence and inter-vention on earth. From the exodus forward, although the Hebrew Bible is in many ways the history of the oppres-sion of G-d's people, Jews find solace in the knowledge that their G-d is YHWH, who delivered their ancestors out of Egypt.
This inextricable link between Jewish history and the his-tory of suffering has caused Jews to read and interpret Psalm 22 in terms of their ancestral history. While some Jews maintain that the psalm refers specifically to the Babylonian exile, "forsee[ing] the exile of the Jewish people, bemoan[ing] their degradation, and pray[ing] for their restoration," most Jewish interpretations allow for a much broader understanding of the identity of the psalm's sufferer (torah.org). The sufferer is a man who, as many Jewish men and women, is persecuted for his devotion to G-d. He is an Egyptian slave. He is a dis-placed wanderer during the exile of 597 BCE. He is a torture victim of the Spanish Inquisition under Ferdinand and Isabella. He is a nameless man who perishes in the ghettos and concentration camps of 20th century Europe, only to find rest in a mass grave. Psalm 22 is the history of the Hebrew people; the sufferer in the poem can be understood as every Jewish man or woman, boy or girl, who has cried out to G-d at the injustice of life and prayed for intervention.
Paradoxically, it is the same history of oppression that allows the Jews to understand suffering which also gives them cause to celebrate and trust in G-d. Jews find comfort in the knowledge that they are in a covenant relationship with the Creator. This implies that their relationship with YHWH is give and take; G-d must live up to G-d's end of the bargain. In a way, the existence of the covenant gives Jews power in situations where they would otherwise be powerless. Dr. David Blumenthal writes that "a Jew ... has a right, even an obligation, to invoke the covenant and to protest [in the face of oppression]" (Blumenthal 26). Similarly, Rabbi A. James Rudin claims that "[t]he demand that God not forsake us is the highest, the ultimate form of chutzpah ... We expect more from God because we are in covenant with the Creator ... We will not let God turn away from us ... We could not escape from God even at the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and we cannot escape from God now. And God cannot escape from us" (Rudin 24-25). In this sense, the existence of the covenant guarantees that G-d will not forsake the Jewish sufferers: they will not allow G-d to do so.
If the existence of the covenant is the source of power for many Jews, the knowledge of G-d's past actions on their behalf is their source of hope. It was YHWH who delivered the slaves out of Egypt. It was YHWH who helped David to slay Goliath. It was YHWH who pro-tected Daniel in the lions' den, who led Deborah to victory on the battlefields, and who saw Joshua through the fighting at Jericho. This confidence in God's active intervention to help the Jewish ancestors is evident in Psalm 22. After his initial assertion of God's absence, our Jewish psalmist recants, stating, "In Thee did our fathers trust; they trusted, and Thou didst deliver them./Unto Thee they cried, and escaped" (Ps. 22:5-6, JVL). Again, towards the end of the passage, the psalmist proclaims, "stand in awe of Him, all ye the seed of Israel./For He hath not ... hid His face from him; but when he cried unto Him, He heard" (Ps. 22:24-25, JVL). Here, as in modern practice of Judaism, "comfort comes from cultic recollection of Yahweh's saving deeds" (Reumann 45). While the sufferer may feel as though he has been forsaken, his knowledge of Jewish history tells him other-wise. His solace lies in his knowledge of his ancestors.
Just as Jews interpret Psalm 22 in light of Judaism's bedrock experiences, so, too, do Christians interpret the psalm in relation to Christianity's most fundamental story: the story of Jesus dying on the cross. For Chris-tians, the sufferer of Psalm 22 is not an anonymous Everyman that is representative of many sufferers in many times and places. The sufferer is not associated with a man at all. Instead, Christians hold that the psalm tells the story of the incarnate God suffering and allow-ing himself to succumb to death for his devotion to all humankind. Unlike the rather broad Jewish interpretation, Christians assert that "the intent of the psalm [comes] to supreme expression in Jesus" (Reumann 39). This is the psalm of Good Friday, when Christians remember with solemnity Jesus' suffering on their behalf, and each year the first twenty-one verses of the psalm are read in churches across the world so that Christians might ponder the tremendous love that their Suffering Messiah showed them through his pain (Tostengard 169).
Because Christians read Psalm 22 in reference to Jesus, they maintain that the most significant verses in the psalm are ones which tie it to the crucifixion stories of the gospels. While Jews are busy citing parts of the psalm that reference God's past actions for the Israelites, Christians prefer to emphasize the fact that Jesus' last words are a quote of the psalm's opening phrase (cf. Mt. 27:46 and Mk. 15:34). Christians also point to other parallels between the scriptures of the New Testament and Psalm 22. For example, just as the psalmist is told by his persecutors in Psalm 22:8 to "let the LORD rescue him," so, too, is Jesus chided that "He trusts in God; let God deliver him now" (Mt. 27:43, NRSV). In another example, Christians claim that Psalm 22:18, "They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing," is a reference to the soldiers who cast lots for Jesus' robes in the gospels (cf. Mt. 27:35, Mk. 15:24). These remarkable similarities have led some Christians to conclude that David's psalm, written ap-proximately 1,000 years before Christ, is a prophecy of the Crucifixion (Vall 46). As with the Jewish interpreta-tion of the psalm in reference to the Babylonian exile, however, Psalm 22 is not universally recognized by Christians as prophecy. For many Christians, the words of Psalm 22 are the words employed by Jesus on the cross not because the psalm is prophetic but because Jesus, a devout Jew with extensive knowledge of all the Hebrew Scriptures, would naturally turn to the Hebrew Bible at his final hour. Ultimately, Jesus' reason for selecting the words of Psalm 22 in his final, anguished prayer is less important to the Christian understanding
of the psalm than the fact that he did select them.In the same way that the Jews use their fundamental religious experiences as a source of solace, the Cru-cifixion provides the means through which Christians alleviate their suffering. Christians, though, draw comfort from the belief that Jesus' death guarantees eventual relief from the suffering that results from sin. As Sheldon Tostengard claims, "by making the connection between the anguish of Psalm 22 and the words of the suffering Jesus, Christians increase their awareness of the ... length to which God has gone for the sake of our res-cue" (Tostengard 170). Jesus is "The good shepherd [who] lays down his life for the sheep/ ... [He] give[s] them eternal life, and they will never perish" (John 10:11, 27-28; NRSV). For Christians, then, relief from suffering is less about God's intervention in this life than about a belief in the Kingdom of Heaven. In some ways, earthly suffering may even be an asset. After all, Jesus tells his followers at the Sermon on the Mount that "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteous-ness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Mt. 5:10, NRSV).
Despite Jesus' de-emphasis on the concerns of this world, Christians do not view themselves as a people abandoned by God until the time of reunion with the Divine in Heaven. Neither do they receive comfort from their suffering only in the belief that God will eventually reward them for their current hardships. On the con-trary, Christians struggling with earthly problems often turn to God for help, relying on Jesus' promise that "the Father ... will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever" (John 14:16 NRSV). This Advocate, more commonly referred to as the Holy Spirit, serves the same function as the Jewish covenant. It is an assurance that God will not forsake God's people. God in Christianity, like G-d in Judaism, takes an active interest in Her creation. After all, what other explanation is there for God's will-ingness to sacrifice God's only son except "[f]or God so loved the world"? (John 3:16, NRSV)
Ironically, the common methods utilized by Jews and Christians when forming an understanding of Psalm 22 have made this psalm a source of conflict between the two groups. In using their knowledge of history to assign an identity to the psalm's sufferer, so, too, do Christians and Jews implicitly cast the roles of the psalmist's op-pressors. Christians blame the Jewish Sanhedrin and the mob of Jewish onlookers that tells Pontius Pilate to cru-cify Jesus for their Messiah's death, and Jews blame Christian regimes and anti-Semitic groups for centuries of slaughter. Undoubtedly, Jews and Christians have caused one another harm in the past. The danger, though, is not that we will remember past atrocities. On the contrary, suffering is human and an essential com-ponent of our histories and our faiths. If we ignore or forget the suffering of the past, we will forget some of God's most amazing achievements. We cannot fully appreciate Canaan without the forty years in the desert, nor does Communion have weight without the Cross. No, the danger is not that we remember suffering; the dan-ger is that we allow suffering to become the story. It is easy to get stuck in the Us/Them mindset of the psalm-ist. It is tempting to dwell on our past injuries, licking our wounds and pointing an angry finger at our perceived oppressors. It is even easy to read Psalm 22 as a psalm about suffering. To do any of these would be to err.
How, then, should Jews and Christians read Psalm 22? Above all, it is imperative that we not allow ourselves to get stuck in the first half of the psalm, reading only about suffering and never about God's triumph over pain. It is understandable that only the first twenty-two verses of the psalm be read on somber Good Friday, but we cannot neglect to finish the story on Easter Sunday. The power of the psalm is not that we suffer, but that, through our faith in God, we can transcend earthly suf-fering. We have the assurance, whether it stems from our belief in the covenant of Abraham or the covenant of Christ's blood, that God will never abandon us. When the psalmist comes to this realization, he changes his language and attitude towards both God and humanity. So, too, must we. We must stop seeing God as distant and aloof and instead see God as present and involved. Instead of accusing God of abandoning us, we should affirm that "he has done it" and delivered us (Ps. 22:31, NRSV). It is not enough, though, to simply change our perception of God. We must also change our perceptions of one another. Like the psalmist, we must reject the Us/Them language of sufferer/oppressor and opt instead for the inclusive discussion of God's dominion over "All the ends of the earth ... and all the families of the nations" (Ps. 22:27, NRSV). The God of the psalm is not the god of the Jews or of the Christians, but rather the God before whom "all they that go down to the dust shall kneel" (Ps. 22:30, JVL). Psalm 22 is not cyclical, and it is not included among the Scriptures so that we might read it and remain unchanged. We, like the psalm-ist, must cry, question, lament, reflect, and praise God for our histories in order to progress towards a future of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence under an omnipotent Creator who cares intimately about all His creations.
Words Cited
The Bible, New Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition). Online. 1995. http://www.devotions.net/bible/00bible.htm
Blumenthal, David R. "Responses to Rabbi A. James Rudin." Journal for Preachers, 18, no 2 (1995): 26-30.
The Holy Scriptures. Jewish Virtual Library: A Division
of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Online. 2004. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Bible/ bibletoc.html
Reumann, John H. P. "Psalm 22 at the Cross: Lament
and Thanksgiving for Jesus Christ." Interpretation, 28 January 1974, 39-58.
Rudin, James A. "A Rabbi Speaks at Good Friday Services." Journal for Preachers, 18, no 2 (1995):
22-25.
Tostengard, Sheldon. "Psalm 22." Interpretation, 26 April 1992, 167-170.
Vall, Gregory. "Psalm 22:17b: ‘The Old Guess.’" Journal of Biblical Literature, 116 (Spring 1997): 45-56.
"What is Psalm 22 Referring To?" Torah.org: The Judaism Site. Project Genesis, Inc. World Wide Web. 2004. http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=475
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