Psalm 22 — My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me

Five observations across the full Psalm 22 network:

1. The Synoptics narrate; John names. The Synoptic passion accounts saturate their crucifixion narratives with Psalm 22 vocabulary — the head-wagging, the taunt's exact wording, the dividing of garments — but only Matthew and Mark quote verse 1 explicitly (and that on Jesus's own lips), and only John supplies the fulfillment formula at verse 18. The pattern is consistent across the Gospels' use of the OT: Matthew and Mark let the action speak the OT script; John interprets the action by labeling the script. Reading the four passion accounts together, Psalm 22 is the OT text the evangelists most uniformly assume is in play.

2. The lament-to-praise pivot is the canonical key. Jesus's cry of verse 1 from the cross is not a citation of one verse in isolation; it is — by Jewish citation convention — an invocation of the whole psalm. The cry of dereliction is also the announcement of the speaker who will, by verse 22, declare God's name to his brothers and, by verse 27, see all the ends of the world turn to the LORD. Hebrews 2:12 confirms that the NT reads the psalm this way: the same first-person speaker who voices verse 1 voices verse 22. The cross and resurrection are not two separate moments mapped onto two separate texts; they are the two movements of one psalm.

3. Psalm 22 supplies the passion narrative's OT substrate the way Psalm 110 supplies the post-resurrection Christology's substrate. Psalm 110 anchors session, intercession, and priesthood (Christ's heavenly office). Psalm 22 anchors mockery, crucifixion-imagery, dereliction-cry, and the public declaration that follows vindication (Christ's earthly suffering and resurrection-voice). Together they form a two-psalm Christological scaffold: Ps 22 for what happened at the cross, Ps 110 for what followed.

4. The prosopological logic is identical to Psalm 110's, but the voice runs the other direction. Psalm 110: the Father addresses the Son (the auditor position). Psalm 22: the Son addresses the Father (the speaker position). The same canonical practice — reading the Davidic first-person voice prosopologically — generates both networks. Jesus is the auditor of Ps 110:1 and the speaker of Ps 22:1. Hebrews exploits this symmetry deliberately: Hebrews 1 stacks the Father-to-Son addresses (climaxing in Ps 110:1 at Heb 1:13); Hebrews 2 immediately follows with the Son-to-Father address (Ps 22:22 at Heb 2:12). The two psalms are two of the prosopological pillars of Hebrews's Christology (with Psalm 40:6-8 at Hebrews 10:5-7, a third first-person Son-to-Father speech — the Father-to-Son / Son-to-Father symmetry).

5. The psalm functions as the interpretive grammar of suffering for the apostolic church. Paul in 2 Timothy 4 reads his own forsakenness-and-deliverance through the Psalm 22 frame. Peter in 1 Peter 5 reads the devil's predation through Psalm 22's lion imagery. The psalm is not merely a prophecy fulfilled at the cross; it becomes the template by which the suffering church reads its own life — not a pattern to be reproduced in the believer's own strength, but a Christ to be joined to and satisfied in. The lament-to-praise arc is offered to the church as the shape of all faithful endurance — endurance by participation in the Sufferer, lest the shape become a wage the weak soul cannot pay.

Psalm 22 carries a Christological weight that, with Psalm 110 and Isaiah 53, stands among the principal OT prefigurations of the passion-and-resurrection. Three implications:

For Christology. The cry of dereliction (Matt 27:46 / Mark 15:34) is one of the most theologically loaded utterances from the cross. Jesus does not merely feel abandonment; he cites the canonical text in which Israel's representative sufferer voices abandonment. He places himself in the speaker-position of David's psalm and thereby identifies his own suffering as the consummation of the suffering Davidic king. The cry is not a moment of theological collapse; it is a moment of theological concentration: Christ, the true David, voicing the lament-arc that ends in the eschatological worship of the nations. Without Psalm 22, the cross's words have no canonical frame; with Psalm 22, the cross is the consummation of David's psalm.

For the doctrine of substitution. The forsakenness of verse 1 is the most arresting OT cry of that abandonment — and it must be defined rightly. It is a penal, judicial abandonment: the Son bearing the curse due to sin, the comfortable sense of the Father's love withdrawn — not a rupture of the Trinity or a cessation of the Father's love (the sufferer still cries "my God"), and not a merely emotional cry. The faithful sufferer experiences the very abandonment from which the God of Deuteronomy 31:6-8 promises to shield his people; and that is the exchange — Christ drank the forsakenness (v.1) so that to the believer the word "Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you" (Deut 31:6 → Heb 13:5) stands unbreakable. A precision the psalm itself requires: Psalm 22 announces the forsakenness and (against Deut 31's promise) sets the tension; the vicarious mechanism by which one bears it for the many is supplied by Isaiah 53 and the NT. Psalm 22 gives the cry; Isaiah 53 gives the doctrine.

For ecclesiology. Hebrews 2:12 names the church as the assembly in which the risen Christ declares God's name — and those he sanctifies as his brothers. The church is structurally constituted by Psalm 22:22's praise-half: the gathered congregation that hears the risen Christ's voice. The lament-arc of the psalm closes in the ecclesial gathering, and that gathering extends — per verses 27-31 — to the nations and to the generations yet unborn.

For the suffering church. Paul's application of Psalm 22 to his own forsakenness-and-deliverance (2 Tim 4:16-17) and Peter's application to the church's spiritual warfare (1 Pet 5:8) authorize the church to read its own suffering through the psalm's frame. The lament is real; the deliverance is promised; the eschatological vindication is the announced trajectory. The psalm is not only Christ's; it is, by participation in Christ, the church's.

For the beholding of the forsaken-and-vindicated Christ. The psalm does not end in the dark. It turns at v.21b, and the turn is the whole point: the One forsaken in v.1 becomes, by v.22, the lead worshipper in the great assembly (Heb 2:12); by v.26 "The poor will eat and be satisfied"; by vv.27-31 "all the ends of the earth" worship. And the psalm's very last word is עָשָׂה — the sons yet unborn are told "all that He has done" (v.31) — the OT's own "It is finished" (John 19:30, τετέλεσται): the accomplished work the cross announces is the work this psalm has been singing from its first cry. The anguish of v.1 purchases the feast of v.26 — the God-forsaken Christ was forsaken so that the afflicted might be satisfied in God as their treasure, and He Himself, unashamed, gathers them as brothers to lead their praise (v.22; Heb 2:11). So the network does not terminate in a catalogue of fulfilled passion-details but in the Sufferer beheld and adored — the deepest desolation and the widest doxology held in one Speaker, the admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies — beheld with unveiled faces until the beholding becomes becoming (2 Cor 3:18). The forsaken One is the satisfied ones' satisfaction. Beholding becomes becoming.