Day 12, Sunday, 25th Feb. Psalm 22;23-31

Psalm 22 is one of quite a number in the psalter whose mood seems to change midstream. It begins dramatically: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" These are some of the words Jesus uttered on the cross, which raises immediately the question of why Jesus quoted scripture in His extremity. After all, this was not a play or a music put on by the local dramatic society. It was the most excruciating form of torture and execution the Romans could devise. The very word "excruciating" is built on "crux", the Latin word meaning "cross".

One must assume both that Jesusknew His scriptures very well, and that He did feel that He had been abandoned by God; that the relationship that had sustained him through His years of public ministry, right up to this point, had been breached. Some wonder how a loving God could allow His Son to suffer, then abandon him. Richard Dawkins, for example, has made this point cogently. If this is so then this god Christians believe in must be a child abuser, he and others argue.

But I think that to argue that way is to misunderstand two things. One is the Christian belief that there was no other way to help humankind out of the predicament we were in. That Jesus, hanging on the cross, could experience such despair gives us some indication of the desperate severity of that predicament.

The second thing is that not only Jesus, the Messiah, the Lord, God the Son, but the whole trinitarian Godhead underwent this willingly. It was not just the man Jesus who was executed excruciatingly while God the Father abandoned him and God the Spirit floated around somewhere. The whole Godhead was intimately involved.

I've now broached two of the most difficult areas in Christian theology: "substitutionary atonement", aka "Why did He die?" and Trinitarian doctrine, aka 1 + 1 + 1 = 1. At the heart of our thinking about God as trinity is the term "perichoresis". At this point if you are interested, I'll point you to Danielle Shroyer's blog, and her post on perichoresis: http://danielleshroyer.com/the-word-perichoresis/.



The Trinitarian Dance

Lastly, to return to my first point: the Psalm's mood swing. Peter Walker says that this psalm was a well-known  cry of despair, but it moves towards hope. From v. 23 the tone changes dramatically. Trust the choosers of the lectionary readings to pick only the 'nice' bit!

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