Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Written by Peter Casey
As someone who has often struggled with repressing his feelings, I’ve wrestled with this Psalm and used to listen to it begrudgingly. Frankly, I hated the fact that it evoked strong feelings within me and articulated how I felt about my relationship with God for much of my life. The way the Psalmist contrasts his present feelings of abandonment with the fact that God previously came to his aid in the past didn’t bring me consolation. Rather, it reinforced my own notion that my favor with God had run out.
My reading of this Psalm has changed, though. Not only did I realize that I rarely read—or listened to—the entirety of this Psalm, but I also had to acknowledge the ways it made me feel such strong emotions. Over the last year, I’ve had to come to terms with many of my own buried feelings of abandonment and the unearthing of the pain associated with some life experiences. For example, I didn’t want to acknowledge the ways I felt Christ had abandoned his Church in light of a situation that deeply affected our family and shook our faith, all while the COVID-19 pandemic was starting. Since it may feel like a lifetime ago, we may be quick to forget that the spring of 2020 was a time of abandonment and loneliness. As churches closed, many felt deep isolation from God. In his Palm Sunday homily from April 2020, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend seems to acknowledge this in light of Psalm 22:
“In praying those words of Psalm 22, Jesus is not praying in a solitary way. He is praying as Head of His Body, the Church. Remember that on the cross Jesus was carrying upon Himself all the sufferings of humanity. In His sacrifice, Jesus is in full solidarity with sinful humanity. That solidarity includes the experience of abandonment by God, the most difficult suffering we can experience. So many of the saints, like Mother Teresa, experienced this abandonment. Yet, like Jesus, they also trusted and persevered in the midst of pain and suffering. In suffering, we can pray Psalm 22 with Jesus.”
After reflecting on this and re-reading Psalm 22, I realized that my “whys” weren’t questions - they were accusations. However, these accusations didn’t line up with how Bishop Rhoades explains Christ’s experience of abandonment and the way the Psalm concludes as a foreshadowing of His resurrection. Switching from an accusation (why have you abandoned me?) to a question (have you abandoned me?) fundamentally changed the way I read this Psalm, and this model has been an integral part of my recent faith journey.
As we enter Holy Week, are there areas in your life where you might say “my God my God, why have you abandoned me?” I encourage you to change your own whys to have and do the hard work of wrestling with the ways you feel far from God so as to more fully experience the joy of His resurrection next Sunday.
Peter Casey and his wife, Ginny, have 5 children and are settled in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex after sojourning through New Orleans, Houston, and College Station.
Pray with today’s psalm.