February 23rdI feel the walls closing in
Psalm 22: 1-21
In the overcrowded conditions of our modern world loneliness has possessed us:
"He’s a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his Nowhere Plans
for nobody." [the Beatles]
This feeling of hopelessness has been around a long time. The ancient writer of Psalm 22 cried out:
‘Dear God, right now I feel like a worm, not a person.
I feel so used by other people. And to make it worse,
I feel resented by the very same people who use me!
Sometimes when my back is turned,
I can feel everyone making faces at me, sneering in derision.
O God, stick close to me - I’m up to my neck in problems and all alone.
I feel like the walls are closing in around me.
And in the dark I can see starving lions ready to swallow me up and digest me into oblivion.
My strength drains away like water,
And my bones feel loose and shaken.
My heart feels like a lump of hot sticky wax melting inside my chest.
My mouth is as dry as a broken piece of clay pot,
And my tongue sticks to my jaw.
I feel trampled and beaten.’ [a paraphrase of vs.9-15 by Ken Chalker]
The threat for the psalmist is imminent as a “company of evildoers” surrounds him like bulls ready to attack and lions eager to devour. Bystanders despise and mock him. Even God seems to have forsaken him. The One in whom his ancestors trusted, the One who he has worshiped since his birth, this One has also seemingly cast him aside. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the psalmist cries. “O Lord, do not be far away! … Come quickly to my aid! (verse 19).” Yet in his time of trouble, God remains agonizingly silent.
The distress of the psalmist is so intense we can almost feel it. With no one to help, the psalmist is consumed with a fear that debilitates him, exacting a physical and emotional toll. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax (verse 14),” the psalmist murmurs. For twenty-one verses, the psalmist voices his agonizing pain, his loneliness, his feelings of abandonment. God, where are you? “Deliver my soul from the sword … save me from the mouth of the lion! (verse 20a, 21a),” the psalmist pleads.
Even though it may have been written by King David, today it could fit a frustrated homemaker, a retired person, an unemployed person, a depressed stressed student, a business person, a minister, a teacher, or a healthcare worker. All of us, at times, feel that the world has left us, and we are left alone to fight it out. Remember, fathers can be lonely; mothers can be lonely; children and youth can be lonely.
The great Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier points the lonely ones to faith, "Why does the Bible so often speak of the ‘living’ God? Surely it is because the God it reveals to us is not the God of the philosophers, outside time and space ... He is a living person, a person whose voice breaks in upon us, who himself intervenes, who acts, who suffers, who enters history in Jesus Christ, who enters into men by the Holy Spirit."
"People often say to me," continues Tournier, " ‘I don’t seem to he able to say my prayers; what ought I to do?’ I reply: ‘Talk to God as you are talking to me; even more simply, in fact.’ Saint Paul writes that the truest prayer is sometimes a sigh. A sigh can say more than could be contained in many words."
The haunting words of Psalm 22.1 are quoted by Jesus on the cross:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
By telling the story of Jesus using this psalm, the Gospel writers affirm that in Jesus’ faithful suffering, as in the psalmist’s faithful suffering, God was present.
[Part two of Psalm 22 next week]
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=gkK4OxVZGJs&feature=share
‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ – Paul Robeson