אֵלִי אֵלִי לָמָה עֲזַבְתָּנִי

/azavtani/(ah-zav-TAH-nee)

to leave, forsake, loose, let go, abandon

Notice what the psalmist does not drop. He says azavtani – forsaken me – but he says it to Eli, my God. The complaint is addressed, not abandoned. Even the accusation is a kind of clinging.

When Jesus cries out from the cross He does not say it in David’s Hebrew but in the Aramaic of His own street: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ (Mark 15:34). Sabachthani carries azav’s exact sense – to be left, abandoned, given over. The dying King prays the dying psalmist’s word in His mother tongue.

A Prayer Honest Enough to Sound Like Despair

The Patient Who Could Not Pray Nicely

Psalm 22 gives words to the believer whose pain has outrun their vocabulary – and shows that such words belong inside worship, not outside it.

The Psalm Jesus Was Praying While He Died

Here is the center of the day, the place everything else turns on. When Jesus hangs on the cross, at the ninth hour, He cries out: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” – “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34). He is not making up new words in His agony. He is praying Psalm 22, line one. And once you hear the first line, the whole psalm rises up around the cross like a photograph developing. The crowd that gathers at Golgotha mocks Him in almost the psalm’s exact words: let God rescue him, if God delights in him (compare verse 8 with Matthew 27:43). His hands and feet are pierced by nails (verse 16). The soldiers, John tells us, divide His outer garments and then gamble for the seamless tunic rather than tear it – and John says plainly this happened “to fulfill the Scripture” of verse 18 (John 19:23-24). The thirst, the staring crowd, the body wrenched out of joint – the psalm written a thousand years early reads like an eyewitness account. This is what the early church saw and could not get over. The most God-forsaken-sounding words in Scripture turn out to be the words of the Son of God Himself – not a sign that He had stopped trusting the Father, but the opening line of a prayer He prayed to the very end.

BRIDGE TO CHRIST

HONEST-EXAMINATION

What is the prayer you have been afraid to pray because it sounds more like an accusation than worship?

1. Where in your life right now does it feel like God has gone far away and is not answering ‘by day’ or ‘by night’? Can you say that to Him, in those words?
2. Psalm 22 holds the felt absence (‘You have forsaken me’) and the remembered faithfulness (‘in You our fathers trusted’) in the same breath. Which of those two is easier for you to say honestly today, and why?
3. Jesus prayed this psalm to the very end, not just its first line. What would it look like for you to keep praying past the ‘why’ and toward the ‘I will praise You in the assembly’?

TAKEAWAY

Today, pray Psalm 22 out loud, slowly, the whole way through – from the ‘why have You forsaken me’ to the ‘all the ends of the earth will remember.’ Do not stop at the part that matches your mood. Let the psalm carry you past it.

CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING

FURTHER READING

The Shepherd-King Who Wrote His Pain into Worship

David