I’m going to break tack today and
do something a bit unorthodox for holy week and preach not on the Gospel but on
Psalm 31, and I’m going to do this for a couple of reasons. 1. Because the
narrative lectionary is great and it gives us everything in order and helps the
story make sense, but there is no Last Supper in the Gospel of John and I think
Maundy Thursday works best when we stand on the precipice before the
crucifixion rather than diving in straightaway, and 2. because I never get to
preach on Psalms except at funerals and the Psalms deserve more attention than
that.
So
here we are.
As
it turns out, this psalm does allow us to talk about the timely subject of the
crucifixion, because some of Jesus’ last words come directly from Psalm 31,
verse 5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit...” In fact, in ancient times
quotations from a source were often meant to indicate that the entire source
was read, so it is very possible that Jesus actually prayed not just one line
but the entirety of Psalm 31 while hanging from the cross. Either way, we have
this odd but beautiful contrast between a psalm written by one who has been
rescued and Jesus, hanging on the cross, nearing death with no hope of rescue
whatsoever.
So, why would
Jesus pray this Psalm? At the heart
of the 31st Psalm is fear of the unknown and lament in the face of
uncertain terrors; both things we don’t associate with Jesus, especially the
Jesus we find in John’s Gospel. Maybe, in fact, that’s why these words are
absent from John’s gospel. They paint a human Jesus that makes us unnerved no
matter how many times we confess that Jesus was fully divine and fully human. We’re OK with Jesus
being in complete control, because that’s kind of the point: we are out of
control, so we need a Savior who is in control, but a Jesus capable of lament
and seemingly uncertain? That’s disconcerting. And, yet, even Jesus found
himself in need of lament on the cross; even Jesus prayed when faced with death;
even Jesus voiced the words of the Psalm and left them hanging out in space
without offering an answer.
I don’t say any of
this to minimize the divinity of Jesus—in fact, quite the opposite. Instead I
want to suggest that if Jesus allowed himself space to lament, how dare we not!
How dare we think that we just need to tough it out on our roughest days! Not
only is it OK to mourn and grieve and speak frustrations to God, even when you
have no hope of an answer, but for the follower of Christ these things are frankly
necessary. To the people crucifying Jesus, everything he did looked like
weakness: he didn’t fight back, he asked for water, he prayed a prayer of lament;
it was stereotypical of a person whose spirit was crushed. There was no pride
in him. But what the chief priests and the Roman authorities did not
realize—what all of us who fall back on the vanity of pride do not realize—is
that that weakness—the weakness of
humility and grief and despair—is more powerful than pride or strength of arms
will ever be.
This Jesus on the cross
is difficult to relate to because he is still bucking our expectations for what
a king should be. Even two thousand years later we are forever tidying up the
cross and divinizing all the dirtiest places. The better Jesus looks, the
easier it is for Christians for save face and suggest that our religion really
isn’t so different from the way the world normally works. Of course, that’s all
a lie. Jesus entered into all the messiest situations—eating with the
authorities nobody liked, curing the sick that everyone considered unclean,
meeting the women and the children and the least attractive people in society
openly and in public. We imagine ourselves doing these things but even our
self-sacrifice is done with a hint of arrogance. Even when we imagine ourselves
being self-sacrificial we do it in such a way that it is all about us. I could
ask you whether you would die for the things that really matter to you—things
like your loved ones or even your faith—and most likely you would probably say,
“Yes, absolutely,” but if I asked you to imagine how that would happen I dare
say most of us would envision a very public death that would be held in deep
regard by those who went after us. Few of us would imagine an anonymous death
that nobody knows about—left rejected by those we love—even though this is
where Jesus leaves us. Even our ideas of self-sacrifice are just ways of
showing the world how great we are. Jesus meanwhile is praying a lament psalm
and dying in the most pathetic of fashions. This is not the Lord we hoped for.
We still want the Palm Sunday Jesus who we can make a king; even long after he has
shown us that that’s not the kind of king he is. In spite of the cross, we run
from lament, and we try to escape by whatever means necessary from our grief.
Jesus prays Psalm
31 from the cross, changing the way the words fall off our lips. This is still
a psalm asking for rescue, but in light of the cross it can’t be rescue from merely
trivial things; it can’t be a psalm about God’s material blessing or even God’s
protection from the horrors of life. On the cross, this Psalm is lain bare—this
is a salvation Psalm, a psalm that promises us that God is our rock and our
fortress, that God will comfort us in our distress—but that comfort will come
not by way of Lazy Boys, that foundation will not come by way of military
might; all of it will come by way of the cross. And the cross looks pathetic.
It looks like a man dying, asking for the most basic of things, and praying to
God that this cup would be removed from his lips, because the cross is not
about power as we understand it. It is not the right-handed power to rule over
this world, and it’s not even the power to lift ourselves up vicariously
through our Lord; instead, it is the power of doubt and fear and despair—things
the world runs from, and will continue to run from until we all meet our end.
Jesus could never have died magnificently because most of us don’t. We need a
God who we can find in the most pathetic of places—in the muck where all our
lives end.
That’s the God we
find in Jesus, dying on that cross. We sing about it as if it were some
marvelous thing, and it was, but not I think for the reasons we are singing.
The cross was glorious precisely because of how pathetic it looked to those who
could not understand. We fool ourselves with words like glory and honor when
the cross looks more like terror and despair. This was an unthinkable way for a
king to die; so much so that, to all those present, the irony of the words inscribed
overhead, “The king of the Jews,” was self-evident. This man could be no king.
No king died like this. And so it was, and so it would be, if the story ended
there.
But in light of
what we know—in light of what happens next—the cross itself bids us to
reconsider whenever we try to save face. Jesus didn’t. In fact, Jesus humbled
himself again and again and again. On the cross he didn’t lift up words of certainty,
instead choosing to speak out of lament. It’s funny that we don’t much consider
that Jesus, because, irony of
ironies, that is the Jesus was can all relate to. Maybe it hits too close to
home; maybe we don’t much care for thinking about our mortality or the pathetic
things we do. Maybe we can’t imagine a God who is actually like us, because we
know how terrible we can be. But that’s unfortunate if it’s the case, because
we have a God who has been there, done that, and been crucified for it.
It may be a
wondrous cross; it may be a place where the “king of glory” died; but for those
of us on this side of the veil of death it is a beautiful—but terrible—reminder
that our lives are not our own; that we will despair and grieve; and that, in
the end, what matters is not how we appear to the world but how desperately we
need a God who has been there and will be there with us. Thankfully, we have
that God. Thankfully, the cross looms ahead. It’s beautiful and terrible and
full of mourning and lament; just as it has to be.
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