Matthew 27:39 → Psalm 22:7

At Golgotha the evangelist reports the crowd's scorn in the very words of David's lament: "those who passed by heaped abuse on Him, shaking their heads" (Matt 27:39) takes up Psalm 22:7 — "All who see me mock me; they sneer and shake their heads." The shaking of the head (Hebrew yāníʿû rōʾš; Greek kinountes tas kephalas) is no incidental detail but the set gesture of contempt the Psalmist suffered, now re-enacted before the cross. Matthew uses no citation formula; he narrates the passion in the Psalm's language, so that a reader steeped in the Psalter hears the righteous sufferer's prayer rising from Calvary. This is one strand in a dense Psalm-22 fabric woven through the passion — the cry of dereliction (22:1 at Matt 27:46), the divided garments (22:18 at 27:35), and the taunt "let God deliver him" (22:8 at 27:43). The Connection Method is Promise-Fulfillment, not bare analogy: Psalm 22 is the lament of the LORD's anointed righteous sufferer, and the NT presents its portrait of mockery-then-vindication as finding its truest and deepest voice in Christ — David is not held up as a moral example to imitate, but the affliction of God's righteous One reaches here its appointed fulfillment. The telos: the One whom the passers-by dismissed with a shake of the head is the very King whose lament turns, within the same Psalm, to praise "in the great assembly" (22:25) and the worship of "all the ends of the earth" (22:27). To behold the mocked Christ here is to see the despised One who is supremely desirable — the rejected sufferer whose vindication draws the nations to worship.