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This blog post is part of the Jesus in the Old Testament Series.

The Old Testament doesn’t simply prepare the way for Jesus; it bears witness to him through promises, prayers, and patterns. In this series, Dr. Donna Petter, in her piece titled, “From the Calf to the Cross,” connects God’s justice and mercy in the narrative of Exodus in relationship to Christ’s sacrificial death. Dr. Trey Nation’s, “The Lament of the King,” highlights Jesus’ anguish on the cross and also the promise it portends as expressed through his cry from the first verse of Psalm 22. Finally, “The Seal of the King,” by Dr. Seong Park, explores how the prophecies of Balaam impart signs of the coming Messiah. This exploration invites readers to see the entirety of Scripture as one unfolding story, rich with allusions, that culminates in the coming and salvation of Jesus, the Coming One. (President emeritus Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. wrote the first such reflection.)

Trey Nation

Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani – My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

Most Christians are familiar with Jesus’s famous cry of dereliction from the cross. Many are aware that these words, cried aloud in Aramaic, are drawn directly from the first line of Psalm 22. Less realize how thoroughly Matthew’s account of the crucifixion is tied to the psalm or the ways in which his gospel is shaped by lament.

Psalm 22 is attributed to King David and is a psalm of lament. If you reflect on David’s life, it is not surprising to hear that the majority of psalms attributed to the ancient king are psalms of lament. David’s life of worship, at least seen through the prism of the psalms bearing his name, was marked above all by prayers of anguish and painful questions directed at God. In fact, psalms of lament are far and away the most common type of psalm in the entire psalter. Scholars differ in their classification of the genre of some individual psalms, but by all accounts, almost half of the 150 canonical psalms are lamentations: questioning laments, pleas, or even complaints leveled against God.

Old Testament scholar Michael Rhodes analyzed the top 25 Christian worship songs back in 2021 and found that not a single song directed a question towards God, much less an anguished cry for deliverance. A similar review today reveals that nothing has changed: none of today’s top songs of Christian worship direct a single question towards God from a place of pain, despair, or desperate need.[1]

Why is contemporary worship so out of line with the worship we see in scripture? For that matter, why is it so out of line with the worship modeled by Jesus?

For modern readers, it is easy to miss that when writing his gospel, Matthew clearly had lament on the mind. He begins with a rapid-fire presentation of Old Testament prophecies fulfilled during Jesus’s birth and childhood. Many of these prophecies are not “predictive” but instead are general descriptions of Israel as a nation. Yet many of them come from passages of lament. Herod’s destruction of the infants of Bethlehem, after the infant Jesus is whisked away to Egypt, is a fulfillment of a lamentation from Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (31:15).

And when the family was able to return from Egypt, Matthew tells us that this fulfills Hosea chapter 11—“Out of Egypt I called my son”—the entire chapter of which is God’s lament over his people: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me; . . . (11:8).

In other words, the slaughter of the infants and the salvation of the Christ-child are framed by Old Testament lament.

The theme continues in Matthew’s chapter 23, after the triumphal entry to Jerusalem. Jesus laments over the city: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (v.37). He laments again in Gethsemane, where he tells his disciples that “my soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” And then on the cross as he faces death, he culminates his lament with the first lines of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The crucifixion narrative in Matthew 27 parallels the psalm at several points, both texts speaking of his enemies piercing his hands and feet and casting lots to divide his garments among them:

“All who see me mock me;
they make mouths at me; they wag their heads;
‘He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him;
let him rescue him, for he delights in him!’” (Psalm 22:7-8)

The chief priests, scribes, and elders of Israel themselves repeat the refrain from the psalm: “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him.” In Matthew’s gospel Jesus clearly sees the circumstances of Psalm 22 as referring to his own suffering, and the anguished outcries of the psalm as appropriate to his own anguish.

At the same time, there is an incredible hope at the center of Jesus’s embodiment of Psalm 22. The psalmist interwove anguish with reminders of God’s historical salvation of Israel and how God loves the nation with a parental tenderness. The psalm ends with an eschatological vision of a time when all the nations and families of the world turn to God in worship and praise. So while Jesus cries aloud in anguish with the opening line of the psalm, he also implicitly anticipates the final assertion about the global salvific work that his death and resurrection will achieve.

Haunted by the survey of contemporary worship, I wonder if, for many in the western church, themes of lament might not be more instructive for our moment. The worship of Israel was marked by honesty about the pains we suffer, the injustices in the world, the many lives that endure oppression and end in violence. The worship that God demanded from his people was full of lament and anguished pleas. And Jesus, in both his life and at his death, embraced lament in prayer and worship.

Could we be comfortable doing the same?

[1] While many popular songs express pain, doubt, and need, they move quickly toward reassurance rather than lingering in unresolved questioning.

Dr. Trey (William) F. Nation III is assistant professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. His article, “Rites for the Dead, Amity for the Living: The Old Assyrian nasbītum rite and its relation to the Old Babylonian kispum,” came out in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions (JANER) in 2024. He is contracted to write a two-volume commentary on Kings and is finishing a manuscript on Old Assyrian Religion.