"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me!" cries Jesus from the cross in Matthew's Passion Account. Matthew reports the words also in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, the way Jesus would have prayed Psalm 22 by memory during his lifetime. The psalmist describes the horrible things that are happening to him, but in the last verses he expresses his trust in God and concludes: "My soul lives for the Lord! My children will serve, will proclaim God to the future, announcing to peoples yet unborn, 'God saves.'"
We must not use this expression of hope at the end to tone down the raw aloneness of verse 1. This psalm on the lips of Jesus (and in its Old Testament usage) concerns real suffering, real abandonment, and real death.
Jesus within us enables us, whatever our passion, to cry with him these words of abandonment.
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