Jesus references this psalm when he is on the Cross.
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’
It is possible to read this utterance of the psalm as an act of despair.
Certainly we might know of Jesus’ agony as he was crucified.
We can only wonder at Jesus’ agony on the Cross. There are so many possible layers of the meaning here. At once, this utterance might seem to us an action of despair, or perhaps better of nullity, and at the same time an action of triumph, as the psalm moves to reaffirm and reinforces faith in God.
The psalmist is abject. In a sense, he complains against God. He speaks of trust, and yet says that God does not answer.
The psalmist considers his state – as a worm, scorned by men, mocked by men – the cause of God seems broken and lost.
There is a deep and prolonged itemization of the physical poverty of the psalmist. Truly, this is a person at the most abject. Starving, dogs are set to prey on him.
This is truth: the affirmation thereby of God-fear and God-love.
This is Jesus.
Jesus speaks to teach us how to pray through the psalms.
This is a most important text – chosen by Jesus upon the Cross.
We cannot assume irony. We cannot say that Jesus on the Cross recited this psalm as if having given up on his mission. We can only say that Jesus’s recitation of this psalm was perfect and that it was intended to express perfection.
This is Christian prayer at the utmost. So much is fused. Jesus calls upon the Father – on the Cross. SO much of Jewish history is included and resolved. Jesus took so much upon himself. Jesus became the subject of these psalms. That is scary and that is triumph.
There is a sense in which this should be Christian prayer.
One of the leading Pharisees has invited Jesus to his house to share a meal. There are several occasions in the Gospels when Jesus is invited by Pharisees to share a meal. Perhaps they are curious, as now we are told, ‘they watched him,’ perhaps through malice. We are not told how a man with dropsy could enter the house of a leader of the Pharisees. Here he is, though, waiting to be cured. Once more, the question of healing on the Sabbath is raised, and with it the issue of the Pharisees’ hypocrisy and the absolutely critical fact of the divinity of Jesus, granting him authority to reinterpret the Sabbath and so drawing him ever closer to the cross [ .. ]
As they travel on the way to Jerusalem, Jesus throws his disciples into confusion by telling them about the suffering and death he must undergo. The disciples simply do not understand. For centuries, the Jews have awaited the coming of the Messiah, whom they envisaged as a glorious warrior king, not as one who would suffer and die the most ignominious of deaths, on a cross, of all things. A person condemned to die on a cross could not be the Messiah; rather, according to the Old Law, he had to be “cursed by God” (Deuteronomy 21: 22-23). The disciples cannot see the divine plan for our salvation, while the command for all who would be saved to ‘take up his cross and follow me’ must have seemed both strange and terrifying. To reassure his disciples, Jesus allows them to witness his glorious body through the transfiguration [ … ]
Herbert’s ‘Avarice’ critiques humanity’s obsession with wealth by tracing money’s journey from its origins to its corrupting influence on human values. The poem is structured as a meditation, moving from the origins of money to its transformation and eventual dominance over human life [ … ]
