I’m sure you’ve heard of the Chronicles of Narnia – maybe you’ve seen the movies from the children’s novels written by C. S. Lewis. One of my favourite books that he wrote in 1940s is called The Problem of Pain. As WW2 raged he tackled the BIG question:
Why does a good God allow this kind of pain in the world?
The book was well received, but he was still relatively young when he wrote it. Years later he met an American writer Joy Davidman. They corresponded, she visited England and the love they felt intensified through Joy’s diagnosis of cancer – when he thought he was going to lose her he realised how much he cared about her and wanted to marry her. They got married, and the cancer miraculously went into remission. They had two blissful years in which they travelled all over the world. Then the cancer came back with a vengeance, and Lewis lost his beloved wife.
20 years earlier he had philosophised about pain and suffering in the world. Now it was personal – and none of his answers comforted him. In those private moments and under a pseudonym he wrote what became another book, A Grief Observed. Therein he says things that sound a whole lot like the writer of Psalm 22. When God seems so distant, practically inaccessible, Lewis says this about his experience of God:
But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.
The same person who wrote about Aslan, the great lion coming to rescue needy children, found himself in a place where he couldn’t hear the lion roar, he wasn’t even sure there was a God. If he existed, it seemed like God was blanking him.
And the truth is, when you look through the course of church history, you will find literally hundreds of stories like this one—all kinds of people we might think of as ‘the giants of faith’ are just people, like you and me. And at times they admit to struggling. In hard places where God seems a million miles away. Like Mother Teresa, near the end of her life wrote to a very good friend: “Jesus is a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
Anyone listening echo that feeling?
I’m talking to someone and you feel it, very deeply. Maybe you’re not sure about Christianity. Or things have happened so you’re not as sure as you once were about anything, including God. You know there’s a lot of pain in the world and you don’t want to just hear some clichés about it.
When I feel like that I open my Bible in the middle and read a Psalm. And lots of them are sad songs. God keeps them in there because he knows at times we’ll sing them. When I read Psalm 22 for instance, it seems to me like the lights are going out. One after another. It’s like the world is getting darker.
It starts out:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? (literally ROARING! Roaring in pain like a wounded animal)
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
Ever been there?
When people say ‘Hi’ and ask how you are you say ‘fine’ but we have feelings we’re too scared to put it into words. You try to deal with it on your own, if you have church friends you don’t want them to throw a Bible verse at you and say,” All things work for good!” Or, “God has a plan” or “it all will work out in the end” or “there’s a reason for everything”. You don’t have to pretend if you’re in pain, you can be honest to God.
Psalm 22 isn’t pretty, it’s not religious. But it’s honest. Honest to God. That tells us – whatever it is, you can bring it all to God, every emotion; anger, grief, despair, abandonment. You don’t have to clean it up first.
In fact a great theologian called Walter Brueggemann says this about Psalm 22:
“The very fact that the writer is addressing these feelings to God suggests a level of confidence that God will in fact listen and care enough to do something about the situation.”
You might feel far away but the fact that you honestly express what you’re feeling means that you believe in God. Not expressing it shows that you don’t trust him.
They made a movie about CS Lewis and Joy dying, called Shadowlands. At one point a good friend comes to Lewis and tries to make him feel better, saying, “I know how hard you’ve been praying. And I know God is answering your prayers.”
Lewis replies, “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.”
I can pray like that today and so can you, because whatever we go through, Jesus has been there too.
Our God is not removed from pain and suffering – Jesus stepped right into the pain and unanswered questions of this world. Where it seems when we need God most he feels furthest away, when it seems we’re abandoned, Jesus even knows how that feels because on the cross he cried out with everyone else who ever said it or felt it, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
That’s such a vulnerable, precious prayer. The Psalmist uses words that Jesus himself repeated on the cross to say it feels like I’m surrounded by wild animals and violent enemies. Like I’m helpless and alone and it’s getting as dark as it can be. Until you hit this one word, YET.
It’s not over – because of YET…
Yet you are holy…
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame ….
This transition occurs in just about every lament psalm. The psalmist starts out questioning God and fully expressing his grief. Then – there’s a turn: as he’s in God’s presence: ‘Yet I will trust you. Yet I will praise you.’ How do they get to that new place?
You don’t get to a place of praise and trust on an intellectual leap. You get there by going down into the valley of the shadow of death, and finding the ‘Lord is my shepherd’- here. You get there by descending. Then as you ascend you realise he didn’t meet you in the valley. He never left you.
Walter Brueggemann says lament is like doing battle with God. You’ve pushed up against him and wrestled. Then you have confidence – he’s there!
It’s not just an intellectual hope anymore. It’s real. You’ve grabbed hold of God and shaken him and now you know him like never before. Things you used to sing about or read about in the Bible, about his goodness or faithfulness – now you realise like never before that they are really true!
Because he’s wrestled with God, the psalmist can say, “I know he’s Lord. I trust that he’s King.”
We don’t learn about God’s sovereignty through what someone else has told us we should believe. We learn because we’ve wrestled and struggled with him and when we finally surrendered again we know – we can trust him.
The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a revolutionary during the days of the rule of communism in the Soviet Union, where there were gulags – prison camps like the Nazi concentration camps. He spoke against them, got caught and was sentenced to go there himself. Eight years in hard labour. He recorded his experience and wrote honestly about who he was before he went into the camp: “I was an arrogant man. I was a self-righteous man … in the intoxication of youthful successes, I had felt myself to be infallible, and therefore I was cruel.” But the dark years in the prison camp changed him. He was brought down – to a place of deep humility.
Years later as he looked back on his time in the camp, he said, “So I turned back to the years of my imprisonment and say sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, ‘Bless you, prison.’ I have served enough time there. I have nourished my soul there. I say without hesitation, ‘Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.'”
How could someone say that about such suffering? But this is exactly what we believe as followers of Jesus —that some of the change and transformation we need to go through only happens in the furnace of pain, grief and darkness. That’s where we’re changed. Some of you who’ve been through darkness and come out on the other side know what I’m talking about, because you know how it feels. And you can be real about it.
This Psalm says we can all be REAL. It says God wants us here at Ivy to be a community where whatever we go through we can be REAL about it and if you stick around long enough and go deep enough in doing life with each other we’ll go through these experiences, so we come in like this on a Sunday morning we don’t have to pretend, or compartmentalise our lives. We can be real with one another. We need to love one another like that, enough to make this more and more a safe place to bring our whole selves. Because God is our refuge and strength – safe enough for us to bring not just the good stuff to him but the hard stuff, too. Because he’ll be there. Because – he’s been there.
Our God really knows how suffering feels too.
How can I know whatever I go through he’ll be there?
Because whatever we go through, Jesus has been there too.
Our God is not removed from pain and suffering – Jesus stepped right into the pain and unanswered questions of this world. Where it seems when we need God most he feels furthest away, when it seems we’re abandoned, Jesus even knows how that feels because on the cross he cried out with everyone else who ever said it or felt it, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Those are the exact first words of Psalm 22. In fact at least three other parts of this psalm are quoted in the story of his death.
In verse 7: “All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads” —those are the exact words. Then I read Matthew 27:39 and it says: “And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads” because this psalm is a prophecy – being fulfilled as Jesus id dying for us on the cross.
And in verse 16 of the psalm it says, “They have pierced my hands and feet.” They didn’t do that to King David. But he’s speaking prophetically – about who? JESUS! They put nails in there and there.
In verse 18, “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” Who did they do that to? That’s what the roman soldiers did as Jesus was absorbing into his sinless self, the sins of the world, yours and mine.
So the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are part of this psalm that is like a script written hundreds of years before – for Jesus’s last hours. All predicted in advance.
Why? Why did Jesus cry out about being forsaken?
So we would know now we never will be.
Because he bore our sins and broke the curse and died as a prisoner so we can life free!
With that in mind the way the Psalm ends (I love the way it flows in the Message) turns this solitary song of despairing alone, into one of hope for everyone – because of Jesus!
From the four corners of the earth
people are coming to their senses,
are running back to God.
Long-lost families
are falling on their faces before him.
God has taken charge;
from now on he has the last word…
As the word is passed along
from parent to child.
Babies not yet conceived
will hear the good news—
that God does what he says.
Through this psalm God is saying no matter what – as you go down into the darkness, trust that He will be there. God does what he says. You’re never alone – grab hold of him, and as you wrestle with him, you’ll come out the other side knowing he will never ever forsake you.