From the Cry to the Congregation

The opening cry of this Psalm has only ever fit in one mouth. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" David never used these words; we have no account of his lips speaking them in his lifetime. The Psalm was written for a King David could not yet see — a King who would say these very syllables in His own native tongue from a hill outside Jerusalem, with the sky dark over Him at noon. Every detail of the Psalm presses toward Him: they pierce my hands and my feet... they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots. The Psalter set this prayer down in ink a thousand years before there was a Roman cross to fit it. The forsakenness was not a passing mood. It was the wage of our sin, drunk to the dregs by the only One who could bear it, in the only hour when our God turned His face away.

But the Psalm does not end there, and this is the wonder. Halfway through verse twenty-two the voice turns. "I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you." The forsaken One stands up among His brothers and starts to sing. Hebrews will later quote this exact line and tell us whose mouth it is — the risen Christ, gathering His people into His own praise of the Father. The cry of verse one and the song of verse twenty-two are spoken by the same Lord, and the road between them runs through the tomb. So when we open our mouths now in His congregation, the song we are singing is His. He has taken His own forsakenness and given us, in exchange, His own praise. The end of Psalm 22 is not a memorial of a death; it is the opening anthem of a risen King among His brothers.