Psalm Reflection: Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion - Cycle C

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” - Psalms 22

I remember running away from home on two occasions. 

The first time, I was in the sixth grade and around ten years old. I bolted out the front door in the midst of shouting and arguing, not realizing that it was in the late evening and already dark outside. As I got about fifty feet from my front door, I was cold, scared, and had no idea where I was going. So, I ran into our neighbors front yard and hid behind a large pine tree that was maybe one hundred feet from my house. 

I sat there stewing for a few minutes, peeking around the side of the tree back at my front door. I was waiting for someone to come outside to call after me, to see a caring reaction from my parents, but nobody came. All I could hear was the sound of yelping coyotes in the distance. So, after a few minutes that felt like hours had passed, I picked myself back up and stormed back inside, intending to go straight to my room. 

As I walked back in, my dad looked at me and said, “didn’t get very far, did ya?” It turned out he was watching me through the blinds and knew exactly where I was the entire time. I did not see Him or feel His gaze on me, but He was there making sure I was alright.

We all have faced the experience of spiritually running away from the Lord, or of feeling lost and distant from Him. It is easy to sit and stew, or to get angry at God and act like He is not there. In our suffering we are tempted to ask, “where are you, God?” However, the truth is that His gaze is always upon us, and, whether we realize it or not, we are never outside of His love. There is no place we can run where the Lord cannot find us.

There is a song by Matt Maher called You Were On The Cross that beautifully demonstrates this, even from the opening lines of the song:

Lost, everything is lost

And everything I've loved before is gone

Alone, like the coming of the frost

And a cold winter's chill in my stony heart

And where were You when all that I've hoped for?

Where were You when all that I've dreamed?

Came crashing down in shambles around me

You were on the cross

As Scripture says, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). When we feel lost in the midst of suffering and despair, we cannot forget that God is with us in the midst of it, and that He died so we could be free of it.

Why then does Jesus cry out on the cross as though He feels forgotten by God, saying, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

One reason is that this is could have been an expression of Christ’s human nature, showing us that it is part of the human experience to struggle and doubt in the face of the mystery of God. 

On the other hand, it is also a proclamation from Christ that God knows what He is doing. These are not Jesus’ words, they come from the Psalms, chapter 22, where our Responsorial Psalm for this Sunday is taken from.

Any Jewish listener who heard Jesus say this on the cross would have known he was quoting this Psalm. They would have been able to recount the way the Psalm begins with words of abandonment, suffering, and despair. But they would also recall how the Psalm ends:

All the ends of the earth

will remember and turn to the LORD;

All the families of nations

will bow low before him.

For kingship belongs to the LORD,

the ruler over the nations.

All who sleep in the earth

will bow low before God;

All who have gone down into the dust

will kneel in homage.

And I will live for the LORD;

my descendants will serve you.

The generation to come will be told of the Lord,

that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn

the deliverance you have brought. - Psalms 22:28-32

Jesus is not doubting God, denying His own divinity, or giving up belief. He is invoking the prayer of the Jewish people to remind them that God rules and reigns over all, and that He is bringing deliverance to His people.

Jesus is reminding everyone there that God is right there with them, suffering with them and for them, so that they would know that they are never alone and that nothing can separate them from the love of God.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:38-39

God has never abandoned you, and God will never abandon you. When you felt abandoned, rejected, ashamed, hopeless, powerless, confused, alone, and afraid, He was right there with you. He was there with His own experience of feeling all those things on the cross, drawing near to your pain. He is able to understand our pain in only a way that a suffering Savior can.

When you hear the words of the Psalm this weekend, they are not meant to cast doubt upon Jesus’ trust in the Father. Rather, they are meant to help us call to mind the ways we feel abandoned, and to be reminded that God is there and that resurrection is always right around the corner.

I am praying for you, please pray for me and my family, and I will see you in the Eucharist.

Matt

This reflection is based on the Responsorial Psalm for this Sunday, April 13th, 2025, Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion - Cycle C: Psalms 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24.