The Prayer of the Righteous - Matthew 27:45-46

The Prayer of the Righteous - Matthew 27:45-46

In this passage, the Lord Jesus Christ offers an immortal prayer, as He is dying on the cross.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?”  Matthew’s quotation is an abbreviation of Psalm 22, which some biblical scholars believe Jesus recited in its entirety.  Nevertheless, His petition is a prayer of a righteous man who is being put to death unjustly, having been betrayed by a close associate and denied by many others.

This prayer ideally captures our hearts’ sentiments when we consider the world’s extensive evil, although we claim to serve an all-powerful, all-kind, ever-present and all-knowing God.  Why does He allow evil to flourish?  Why do the righteous experience pain and suffering?  If God is just, He will intervene immediately and completely reverse this trend.  With the great Russian author, Doestoevsky, we cannot comprehend the misery to which children are subjected.  I recall one winter in New York City in which someone abandoned a baby every weekend.  In fact, some of these babies were left in garbage dumps in sub-zero temperatures.  Others were left in gym bags in parks.  Countless children in the foster care system are often abused, neglected and mistreated by the people whom the State entrust in their care.  These innocent children do not deserve the oppression and cruelty that befalls them.  In the face of such tragedy, one asks, “Where is God?”  Furthermore, “Isn’t He going to do something?”

The words of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross, “My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me,” are “The Prayer of the Righteous.”  We utter this prayer in our own words when we stumble in the darkness of our lives.  We cannot understand our predicament.  We endeavor to rightly relate ourselves to God, realizing soberly we possess no intrinsic righteousness. Yet, as the victims of very difficult circumstances, we fall prey to the temptation of believing that the bleakness of our situation has eclipsed the righteousness of Almighty God.

This text is puzzling!  We have a man who studied the great teachers of his religion and gave the common person a new appreciation for the God whom the Law reveals.  This carpenter from Nazareth possesses a unique ability to love everyone, particularly the downtrodden.  In the power of the Spirit of God, he preaches the coming kingdom of God in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.  He teaches crowds of people about God’s limitless love.  In fact, he summarizes the entire law with two commands: first, love God with one’s entire being and second, love one’s neighbor as one’s self.  He heals innumerable people of myriad diseases and afflictions.  Zeal for the house of God consumes Him.  During the Passover festival, He enters the Temple courts and drives out the moneychangers who made the house of God equivalent to the New York Stock Exchange.  As this righteous man finds himself on a cross, bleeding to death, he prays the opening verses of the twenty-second psalm.

As it relates to the setting of the cross, the evangelist tells us “From the sixth hour until the ninth hour, darkness came over all the land.”  In these three hours of darkness, it appears that God turns His back on this righteous man.  There are times in our lives when it seems God turns His back on us.  Martin Buber, in his commanding book, I and Thou, posits that God recedes within the shadows of our challenges.  Nevertheless, in these trying times of adversity, the righteous simply pray.