The Passion in the Psalms: Good Friday Addresses

Detail of the reredos of Croydon Minster

THE PASSION IN THE PSALMS

The Passion in the Psalms. By the word passion I am referring, first, to the suffering of Christ. The word ‘passion’ comes from the Latin verb, passio to suffer, hence the word passion, meaning ‘suffering’. So in church as we speak of Passiontide it is the reflection on the suffering of Christ, ‘for us and our salvation’.

But the word passion has another meaning too; there is a play on words here. The word ‘passion’ can refer to things that are deeply held and heartfelt, things that set us on fire with something beyond ourselves. That may be love, indignation, a sense of justice.

And you could say that passion for things can be a form of suffering in themselves.

Today on Good Friday we contemplate Christ’s passion for us - meant in both senses of the word passion – his suffering and yearning love for us, the creation, the whole cosmos.

And what of the Psalms?

The Psalms, whose author traditionally is King David, have long been associated with the Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, of the House of David. From earliest times the Church Fathers have seen the language of the psalms as either referring directly to Christ, or narrated by Christ or as a way of associating directly with him.

Of all the Old Testament books most often found on the lips of Jesus, it is the Psalms that feature most.

ADDRESS ONE - PSALM 41

Psalm 41 is, at first sight, the most benign of the four psalms that I will focus on today.

It begins with a deep sense of reassurance of one who considers the poor and needy and who brings deliverance. It associates all those who endeavour to bring healing and reconciliation with the healing and reconciling ministry of Christ. It is a beautiful description of the ministry of Christ Jesus in Galilee, made clear in his quoting of the prophecy of Isaiah, when he stood up to read the scroll in the synagogue his home town of Nazareth:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4.18, 19).

That text, he declared, speaks of him: anointed, Son of David, the one to bring healing, release and the favour of God to his people. In that it further echoes Psalm 41 which speaks of the deliverance of the Lord ‘in the time of trouble’ (v1b).

Yet, as happened in Nazareth, Jesus’ words, even if they are words of healing and peace expose - and even draw out - the malice and ill will of other people. In Nazareth, we read, ‘all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drive him out of the town, and led him to the brow of a hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.’ (Luke 4.28b, 29)

Jesus, who comes in the name of the Lord, uncovers the rage within the human heart, a rage and malice that becomes hones and refined in systems of brutality and murder, reaching its apparent apogee in the sophisticated brutality of Roman methods of death and execution: look no further than crucifixion. (Of course, had the Romans not perfected it, somebody else would have, such is the human condition).

And this is where Psalm 41 begins to turn as we come to verse 5. My enemies speak evil about me, asking when I shall die and my name perish. Moving ahead to Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, after the triumphal entry into the Holy City, the site of David’s Temple, ‘the chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to put Jesus to death’. The circle is closing, the enemies plotting.

Human rage is not just manifest in hot blooded lashing out, as in the synagogue in Nazareth, but is in cool, premediated, murder. The hot blooded sins we commit are bad enough, but the cold blooded, the thought-through sins we commit are all the more pernicious. Verses 6-8 speak of this, their heart gathers mischief; when they go out they tell it abroad. All my enemies whisper together against me, against me they devise evil, saying that a deadly thing has laid hold on me, and that I will not rise again from where I lie.

We don’t have to go far to make the connection with the plot that Judas is at the heart of. The psalm points us that way, in verse 9, even my bosom friend, whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted his heel against me.

Therein lies betrayal. There are few things more devastating in our human experience, which Jesus shared in its fullness, than this form of betrayal. The Passover meal, a meal that both recalled and placed the people of Israel in the experience of liberation from slavery and death into freedom and life, and profoundly bound together God’s people, became the locus of its attempted reversal. Judas was set, hell bent you could say, on a destructive path that moved away from life and into death, not reconciling but dividing and fracturing: even my bosom friend, whom I trusted, who ate of my bread. That bread that Jesus shared with his disciples, including Judas was so much more now than the Passover from Egypt, but was now also the New Covenant in his body and blood. Judas shared Jesus’ life, in bread and wine, his body and blood, and now sought his death.

But Psalm 41 does not leave us there: because of my integrity you uphold me and will set me before your face for ever (v12). It is from this position of integrity of faithfulness to the Holy One of Israel that Jesus is strengthened, given courage to go on, praying, in the words of the psalm: But you, O Lord, be merciful to me and raise me up, that I may reward them. By this I know that you favour me, that my enemy does not triumph over me (vv. 10, 11)

It is this integrity that anchors Jesus throughout to his primary mission of reconciliation and healing, by bringing us to be one with the Father, such that he can pray from the cross, as related in St Luke’s Gospel ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (23.34) and ‘I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23.43).

The psalm ends with a phrase known in the beginning of St Luke’s Gospel, the Benedictus spoken by Zechariah, the father of our patron John the Baptist,

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,

who has visited his people and set them free.

He has raised up for us a mighty Saviour

born of the house of his servant David. (Luke 1.68, 69)

Psalm 41 speaks of friends turning into adversaries and enemies plotting. In Zechariah’s words, the mighty Saviour, Jesus Christ, raised up for us, will set us free from the hands of our enemies (Luke 1. 71, 73), and he will lead us from the shadow of death and guide our feet into the way of peace.

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and Amen. (v 13)

Prayer

God our deliver,

raise up the poor and comfort the betrayed,

through the one who for our sakes became poor

and whose betrayal brought our salvation,

Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

ADDRESS TWO - PSALM 88

I suggested in the first address that perhaps our first psalm, Psalm 41, begins in a benign way before becoming much darker.

Psalm 88 begins confidently, O Lord, God of my salvation but immediately signals something despairing and dark I have cried to day and night before you.

If Psalm 41 bespoke the betrayal of Jesus by the bosom friend who once shared bread with him, pointing us to the supper Maundy Thursday and the successful conclusion of the plot against Jesus with his arrest in Gethsemane the arrest, then Psalm 88 speaks of Christ in the Garden and thrown into the dungeon.

This psalm is truly a Psalm of the Passion and it offers very little by way of comfort or a happy ending. Indeed it short circuits the notion that all will come good. We are held in the grip of an unremitting bleakness. There is a cry of hope at the end, but almost as a last breath before the suffocating darkness envelopes him again.

There is a place in Jerusalem which archaeologists believe to be the house of Caiaphas, who was high priest when Jesus was arrested. As you will recall Jesus was led away to the high priest’s house after his arrest (Luke 22.54). What is more, it was in the court yard of the high priest’s house that Peter, who had followed along, denied Jesus three times– which makes us ask, was the betrayal referred to in Psalm 41 something we should only place on Judas, or does it stretch to Peter too, a bosom friend, a rock?

Beneath the site of Caiaphas’ house is a dungeon, which again archaeologists are quite clear, was used for the holding of prisoners, where shackles and manacles would be fixed. Descending further there is a cell, which, when the single electric light is turned out, is pitch black.

For pilgrims to Jerusalem this is often one of the most poignant moments. If this is not the cell Jesus was held in after his arrest it was pretty nearby, and, either way, the power of the words of Psalm 88 bring home his experience. Indeed, in an open Bible the text of Psalm 88 is laid out and then read for pilgrims:

4    I am counted as one gone down to the Pit; I am like one that has no strength,

5    Lost among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave,

6    Whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.

7    You have laid me in the lowest pit, in a place of darkness in the abyss.

There is an echo here of Jonah in the belly of the great fish. Swallowed up, descended to the very roots of the mountains, one out of sight who feels that he is drowning, drowning with weeds wrapped around his head, suffocating, inhibiting breath. That in itself points to the slow death of crucifixion, but also to the depths that he has plunged. In the words of Psalm 88:

10  I am so fast in prison that I cannot get free; my eyes fail from all my trouble.

11  Lord, I have called daily upon you; I have stretched out my hands to you.

Jonah took time to wake up to call to the presence of God in his Holy Temple, but in Psalm 88 that is the first place the psalmist, Christ, looks to. It is in the second verse that he prays:

2    Let my prayer come into your presence; incline your ear to my cry.

What we have here is the Psalm of Christ who suffers the agony of isolation for us. Our human identity is profoundly in relation to others. Egocentrism, narcissistic self-sufficiency cuts us off from relationships which shape us and give us hope. That is why the blight of loneliness is so corrosive to society and to individuals.

We like to believe that torture does not exist in our society yet we cut people off to suffer in loneliness - spiritual, emotional and physical - such that interest in the wellbeing of another person is construed as interference and is hedged around by rules and regulations that leave them further isolated.

Christ is passionate, in both senses of the word, about those people: suffering and deeply moved; moved from the depths of the isolation he knew for us and in the face of the iniquity of the raging, angry and murderous:

19  All day long they come about me like water; they close me in on every side.

20  Lover and friend have you put far from me and hid my companions out of my sight.

He is alone. ‘A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’.

Prayer

In the depths of our isolation

we cry to you, Lord God;

give light in our darkness

and bring us out of the prison of our despair

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

ADDRESS THREE - PSALM 69

In St John’s Gospel Jesus, hanging on the cross, gasps, ‘I thirst’ (John 19.28)

That cry of thirst is representative of the deepest cry of the human spirit. The One Who Thirsts is also the One who says, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me’ (John 7.37). In him all our hungers are satisfied and thirst is quenched.

In this address we will consider Psalm 69, but another psalm, psalm 63, picks up the theme of thirsting:

O God, you are my God, eagerly I seek you; my soul is athirst for you…as in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water. (Psalm 63.1, 2a)

Psalm 69 deploys water in a quite different way. It cries for salvation because the waters have come up, even to my neck (v 1) and water floods sweep over me (v 2). This psalm is the psalm of one crying out to be rescued and of thirst not slaked, but vinegar offered instead (v 23).

So what of this water we thirst for? The imagery in this psalm is more of the prisoner being tortured; the scandal of water-boarding, of simulated drowning. That torture is a parody of giving someone a drink: ‘when I was thirsty you gave me nothing to drink…’ (Matthew 25.42) In water torture, nothing given to drink but water is forced down the throat.

As Margaret Saunders’ poem, Corpus Christi, says of food:

Don’t give rich food to starving babies.

it chokes them

gives them belly ache.

They need

pilgrim food for journeying

manna, waybread

bread of affliction.

They need thin gruel

to sustain

the aching lonliness.

Perhaps the only bread

that holds them in that narrow place

in which the broken body

is fragmented and shared

can be food for the journey.

Rich food on an empty stomach is like water poured onto a dry land, there is no way it can be absorbed. It needs to be sprinkled gently, ideally over land tilled and prepared.

Water in this psalm is threatening, evocative of the Great Flood which engulfed the earth, of which Noah and his clan was the remnant. God promised then, with the rainbow it its emblem never to seek to destroy the earth in such a way again.

Water is emblematic of the Christian life born into the waters of baptism, a stream of life that flows from the primal waters of creation, over which the Spirit of God moved in the beginning.

Being plunged into the waters of baptism is for deliverance into life; descent for ascent. Drowning is not what baptism is about: except at Epiphany when the Prayer over the Water says ‘drown sin in the waters of judgment’.

This thirsting for God is what Jesus leads us to, and then gives us is living water that will last forever. John’s gospel sees transformation through and in water: water into wine; living water as with the woman at the well (4.1-4); healing at the turbulent waters of Bethzatha (5.1-10); water of service transformed into a kingdom action (2.1-11).

Jesus gasps, ‘I thirst’. He thirsts for human comfort on the cross, no doubt, and he articulates the thirst of us all, so that no longer are our throats raw (v 3) but are enabled to say, as in verse 32:

I will praise the name of God with a song; I will proclaim his greatness with thanksgiving.

In Ezekiel (Ezekiel 47) the prophet sees a vision of the Temple filling with water. It echoes the psalm:

Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple towards the east (for the temple faced east); and the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by way of the north gate, and led me round on the outside to the outer gate that faces towards the east; and the water was coming out on the south side.

Going on eastwards with a cord in his hand, the man measured one thousand cubits, and then led me through the water; and it was ankle-deep. Again he measured one thousand, and led me through the water; and it was knee-deep. Again he measured one thousand, and led me through the water; and it was up to the waist. Again he measured one thousand, and it was a river that I could not cross, for the water had risen; it was deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed. He said to me, ‘Mortal, have you seen this?’

The waters were rising up, as per our psalm, yet that water flowing forth from the Temple brings life to everything it touches. Jesus speaks of the Temple of his Body, the place of sacrifice that will be destroyed and in three days be raised again (John 2.19).

This body hanging on the Cross is the Temple, the place of sacrifice, and from it flows water and blood not to drown the world, but to drown sin , and not to be vinegar but the wine of the kingdom and water of new life in baptism.

Prayer

Thirsting on the cross,

your Son shared the reproach of the oppressed

and carried the sins of all;

in him, O God, may the despairing find you,

the afflicted gain life

and the whole creation know its true king,

Jesus Christ our Lord.

ADDRESS FOUR - PSALM 22

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, and are so far from my salvation, from the words of my distress? (v 1)

This is the ultimate cry of desolation and despair.

This cry has been uttered before.

Jesus is not the first to speak these words but he takes them and cries out: cries out with David; with God’s ancient people the Jews, the first to hear his word; with prophets killed on account of their proclamation of word of the Lord; with those condemned to death; with all who know the pain of desolation.

This cry of desolation has raised many questions: Has God abandoned Jesus? Has Jesus abandoned God? Can God abscond? Is there ever a time, or place, that really can be God forsaken? Does this undermine the unity of the Blessed Trinity, if the Father and the Son are separated by a gulf of presence? We speak of the real presence of Christ in word and sacrament, can we, should we, speak of the real absence of God?

The mystics, who form their response to God in the deepest contemplative prayer of the heart, teach that the times of desolation, when God seems far from us, might just be the times when he is closest at hand.

The intensity of darkness may be due to the overwhelming light of the presence. And as night falls Jesus speaks of ‘his glorification’ (John 13.31)

Far from being a sop or piety that diminishes the human suffering of the abandoned, and indeed Jesus’ own suffering, we can come to see that just as the Father and Jesus are one, so then, in communion and fellowship with him, we too are at one with him and he with us.

This is borne out by the likelihood that by quoting the first line of a psalm Jesus is alluding to the content of the whole psalm. And this psalm narrates Jesus experience on the cross.

Psalm 22 takes on a journey that implies that far from abandonment, Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word, begotten not made, is in the bosom of the Father. The contours of the psalm are of the cry of desolation, that insist that the speaker is still in a relationship with God, indeed such a relationship with God that he can speak in this way.

Perhaps it is those who are closest to us, who love us most, who can say the hardest things to us. A cry of desolation or a cry of intimacy?

From there being no answer we move through lament and anguish, until in verse 19 and 20 a plea comes forth that asks God not to be far from this experience of desolation, rather it is a cry for deliverance: it echoes Moses’ cry ‘let my people go!’

At no point in his ministry does Jesus hint that something or someone is beyond redemption (unless they place themselves outside the possibility of redemption in an exercise of radical freewill that sins against the Holy Spirit): those who have sinned are told that they are forgiven and should go and sin no more; Peter, who denied him three times is given the chance to express his love three times; the Penitent Thief who asks to be remembered in the Kingdom is told, ‘today you will be with me in paradise’.

The work of the Spirit of Jesus Christ is one that is utterly transformative. Dry bones in a valley are given sinews to be knitted together into a body:

17  I can count all my bones; they stand staring and looking upon me.

These bones will not remain dry. Verse 21 signals a change of tone and of gear: you have answered me!

God is not absent; God is in the midst of this suffering pain and anguish.

This is not to diminish in the slightest the pain, bitter torment and agony of the Cross or anyone else’s pain. Rather the psalm points to God’s capacity to redeem even the darkest situation, to be with us in the hour of our trial when our bones are out of joint, and when my heart has become like wax melting in the depths of my body (v 14).

When Jesus utters that famous first line he points us to the rest of the psalm, such that we can be moved to praise: ‘we sing the praise of him who died, of him who died upon the tree’.

These psalms that we have considered in these hours when we commemorate the death of ‘Jesus Christ, King of the Jews’, upon the cross have taken us from the supper of betrayal, through the depths of loneliness and isolation, through the suffocation of condemnation to the redemption of abandonment.

All this Christ endures with and for us, out of the deepest love, which knows no limits and gives of its very self. The jeer of verse of 8 comes to be truer than the scoffers could ever have imagined, beyond their wildest imaginings:

‘He trusted in the Lord; let him deliver him;  let the Lord deliver him, if the Lord delights in him.’

Deliver him he does: ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’

Prayer

Restless with grief and fear,

the abandoned turn to you:

in every hour of trial,

good Lord, deliver us,

O God most holy, God most strong,

whose wisdom is the cross of Christ.

Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England, material from which is included here, is copyright © The Archbishops' Council 2000 and published by Church House Publishing.