Time Traveling

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Psalm 22:1

I’m a bit of a sucker for a good time-traveling novel. Sometimes, during a walk around the neighborhood, I imagine that I’ve stepped into another time, into some dystopian world where everything is the same and yet strikingly different. Those are the same neighbors, but now we cross into the road to avoid each other; those are the same roads, but now they are bare of cars. There is a blanket of post-apocalyptic stillness upon the world, the silencing of all regular markers of life, and in some ways time has lost its meaning.

Psalm 22 is a time-traveling psalm. Within the text itself, David takes himself from present (verses 1-2), to past (verses 3-5), to present (verses 6-8), back to past (verses 9-10), to present (verses 11-21), then to the future (verses 22-31)—as if it is only be revisiting the past in the context of his present affliction that he can be driven to a glimmer of future hope. It is only by stepping outside of his present moment that he can reconcile himself to it.

But the psalm also reappears hundreds of years later when Jesus speaks its first line on the cross. There is no way David could have known how closely he was describing the passion of Jesus as he wrote these words, and yet they could not have been more eerily accurate if Jesus himself had traveled back in time to write them. Matthew goes to particular trouble to show this in chapter 27 of his gospel: “All those who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads” (Psalm 22:7) parallels “And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads” (Matthew 27:39); “ ‘He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him’” (Psalm 22:8) parallels “ ‘He trusts in God; let God deliver him now’” (Matthew 27:43); “they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” (Psalm 22:18) parallels “they divided his garments among them by casting lots” (Matthew 27:35). Jesus’ hands and feet were pierced (Psalm 22:16) and he thirsted (Psalm 22:15, John 19:28). It is not difficult to imagine that Jesus had this entire psalm in mind when he spoke on the cross. 

Spurgeon wrote: “For plaintive expressions uprising from unutterable depths of woe we may say of this Psalm, there is none like it. It is the photograph of our Lord's saddest hours, the record of his dying words, the lachrymatory of his last tears, the memorial of his expiring joys… We should read reverently, putting off our shoes from off our feet, as Moses did at the burning bush, for if there be holy ground anywhere in Scripture, it is in this Psalm.” That is how I find myself wanting to read it, this Good Friday season. Sometimes dystopian experiences provide valuable perspective; new times lend fresh meaning to old words. I have here a picture of the heart of my beloved Jesus as he hung on the cross for me, and it is as real for me now, in my time, as it ever was before.