Catholic Sensibility

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” As the Lutheran exegete Esther Menn reminds us, Psalm 22, with its language of affliction and restoration, was probably “written in pre-Exilic times explicitly for performance in the context of rituals that centered on the well-being of seriously ill individuals” – thus, the initial references to a “leader,” the mode or melody of “The deer of the dawn,” and the Davidic classification (22:1). But both Jewish and Christian exegesis would come to identify the “I” of the Psalm with a particular individual. In later rabbinic exegesis, the Psalm is read in light of the Esther story; “Do not stay far from me, for trouble is near, and there is no one to help” (Ps 22:12) is Esther’s prayer as she approaches Ahasuerus. And, for us, Psalm 22 is most resonant when spoken by Jesus in Aramaic from the cross: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” (Mk 15:34; Mt 27:46). Besides Mark and Matthew, we also hear allusions to Psalm 22 in the Gospels of John and Luke - "They divided my garments among them, and for my vesture they cast lots" (19:24, see also Lk 23:34; Ps 22:19), and the Letter to the Hebrews - "I will proclaim your name to my brothers, in the midst of the assembly I will praise you" (Heb 2:12; Ps 22:23). More generally, the Gospels remind us of the derision directed toward Jesus using the same vocabulary as the Septuagint’s rendition of Psalm 22 – for instance, the “contempt” of Herod and his soldiers (Lk 23:11, Ps 22:7) and the crowds’ “looking on” and “shaking of their heads” (Mk 15:29, Mat 27:39, Ps: 22:8). In Matthew, this crowd shouts, “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now if he wants him” (27:43), paraphrasing Psalm 22:9. The Church Fathers will see even more parallels between the Passion and Psalm 22 – the initial Greek, Syriac, and Latin translations of the Bible would render Psalm 22:17, “They have pierced my hands and my feet.” And so St Augustine, when preaching on Good Friday, makes reference to the annual recitation of the Psalm, in which “Christ’s Passion is set forth as clearly as in the Gospel.” Dr. Menn concludes, “The prominent allusions to Psalm 22 and other individual laments within the context of the Passion narratives suggest a pre-Markan understanding of Jesus as the innocent sufferer of a humiliating and excruciating death, whom God rescued and vindicated by raising from the dead, thereby accomplishing an inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven.” But it is difficult to meditate on the part of this emphasized by the Gospels - the innocence of Jesus and the humiliation of his death. These aspects of the Passion bring us to the question that a child shocks the nuns by asking in Thomas Klise’s novel, The Last Western: “Why did God kill Jesus?” The Benedictine monk Sebastian Moore has tried to reflect on this. To Dom Moore, Jesus’ consciousness of being divine was nothing less than “a knowledge able to question the very manner in which we learn to perceive the world, to come to understand, to reflect, to make judgments, and, on the basis of judgments of value, decisions.” Dom Moore continues, “Desire, for him, is not trapped in the outlines of survival and exclusion.” But even though we ourselves desire this freedom from our own “survival and exclusion,” we also dread its possibilities; we kill Jesus as if he were a “rival lover who is thought to have it so much better than [we] do.” Jesus goes to his cross freely – he had represented a new humanity in his earthly ministry, and in his death as our victim he inaugurates the new humanity, which will eventually remember the dangers of “survival and exclusion” in continually “proclaiming the death of the Lord until his comes.” Jesus was innocent, but still the “target and victim of an unfree, Godless world” which mocked him – “they curl their lips and jeer; they shake their heads at me” (22:8). But when, having risen from the dead, he confronts his killers, they, “thus freed from the universal bondage, can spread in the world the end of the cycle of victimage, or, in New Testament terms, allow the reign of God to displace the reign of death, the Church to break down the gates of the underworld.” So, then, “Why did God kill Jesus?” Dom Moore answers (in a way) with two profound sentences. “Jesus only becomes himself for us when we understand him as the man whom divine intimacy frees from the closing-in ring of death so that, free of the endless cycle of victimage, he is victimized because he is free, killed because he is free, so that his execution is the perfecting of his freedom, the drama of his freedom in an unfree world.” And, “Jesus, freely attracting victimization and, thus perfected in freedom by it, gives peace where we could only expect vengeance, a peace in which we are free of the cycle of victimage, free to be victims Jesus-style.” After being confronted by the risen victim and discarding victimage by sharing in his death and resurrection, we realize the patristic dictim, “God becomes man so that man can become God” – we can become “loving like God, forgiving like God, enjoying life like God, being large-minded like God.” And we might then become martyrs, “witnesses, the first receivers of the new divine way of becoming human” who tend to become victims themselves. But we will have gotten there by first confronting the innocence of the victim we ourselves humiliated – by remembering Psalm 22 during this Holy Week.