Daniel Lee
In the first installment in this series, I examined Psalm 22, finding that it reflects a movement from abandonment and isolation of a righteous sufferer to the restoration of that sufferer and the enriching effects this restoration has on the community and the world. With the background formed by this exegesis, analysis can now turn toward the Matthean account of the crucifixion. We will find significant overlap between the themes of the psalm and Jesus’ crucifixion, and will see how Matthew’s Gospel beautifully and subtly works Psalm 22 into the crucifixion scene and its surrounding passages.
Though Matthew engages many aspects of Psalm 22, at the outset it is important to note that Jesus’ utterance of the psalm’s opening words within the Gospel’s crucifixion narrative alone would be enough to bring the totality of the psalm to mind. “Whereas in his duress, Jesus uttered its first verse alone, it is well established that the first word or words of a Jewish text are understood as indicating its entirety.”1 As we will see, Matthew in fact frames the whole crucifixion as a depiction, even the primary depiction, of the psalm’s content. Much of the language surrounding Jesus’ words of agony is reminiscent of Psalm 22 and the pain it expresses. So, let us see what Matthew has to tell us.
The Gospel of Matthew Reading Psalm 22
If one is casually reading through Matthew, the first real linguistic hint that cues readers to a potential connection to Psalm 22 is found in Matt 27:35: “And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots.” This is a clear allusion to Psalm 22:18, and some manuscripts even include the quotational indicator “in order that what had been spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled, ‘They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.’”2 This makes the reference rather explicit and begins to draw the reader’s mind to Psalm 22 and all that it signifies.3 At this stage in the narrative of Matthew, we are prompted to view Jesus’ suffering in light of Psalm 22. By itself, this reference does very little other than communicate some actions on the part of those crucifying Jesus, adding to the humiliation of the experience and gesturing toward the psalm.
The reference to casting lots and dividing clothes is followed up rapidly by yet another reference, though one that is less explicit. Matthew 27:36 states, “Then they sat down there and kept watch over him.” With Psalm 22:18 on the mind, the skilled and informed reader will easily recall the verse directly before it that reads, “I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me” (Ps 22:17, NRSVUE). The stare of the Roman guards and Jewish onlookers is likened to that of the wicked assembly of dogs that oppressed the psalmist.
The psalmist’s cultic community had turned on him for selfish benefit. They scavenged what little remained of the psalmist’s life and belongings while the psalmist was in the process of dying but not yet dead. The Romans, for the sake of keeping peace and oppressing the people, facilitated the crucifixion of Jesus. The corrupt Jewish leadership—in an attempt to appease the Roman powers, garner political favor, and quell religious infighting—worked to frame Jesus as an insurrectionist. Both groups scavenged what they could from Jesus’ situation, and now all of Jerusalem looks upon their handiwork, displayed on the cross. With this second reference in quick order, Psalm 22’s poetic world begins to form in the midst of the crucifixion narrative.
As Matthew continues, he wastes no time in further solidifying these connections. Verse 39 says, “Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads,” forming a strong allusion to Ps 22:7: “All who see me mock me; they sneer at me; they shake their heads” (NRSVUE). Following this in Matthew are the mocking words of the crowds, which very strongly allude to the insistence of the psalmist’s enemies that, if the psalmist was righteous, God would rescue him. The accusation that the lack of rescue is proof of God’s rejection of Jesus is directly plucked from the pages of Psalm 22. Matthew 27:43 is not a direct quote but a very close paraphrase. Jesus’ enemies “knew that he had claimed to be the Messiah, and they knew that Psalm 22 was in their tradition a messianic psalm about the suffering Messiah. And so they simply used a line from the psalm to mock him on the cross—not realizing at that very moment they were fulfilling the psalm.”4 Jesus’ executioners and their conspirers make the same accusations the psalmist’s enemies make, seeing the very crucifixion they are imposing on Jesus as proof of God’s lack of favor upon him.
The physical situation also plays very much along the same lines as the psalm. Jesus suffers, surrounded by enemies on all sides, verging upon death at any moment. Psalm 22:11–18 aligns with Jesus’ situation most directly. These verses can represent Jesus’ lament, illuminating that “the powerful people who attack Jesus are religious and political leaders, whose position is characteristically imperiled by the teaching of Jesus.”5 Jesus’ ministry, message, and work shook up the status quo, and this crucifixion is, in the minds of the religious leaders (cf. John 11:50), the way to make right that wrong and protect the religious establishment from the ever-present threat of Rome. In their minds, their oppression of Jesus demonstrates the sinfulness and deservedness of Jesus’ situation. And as these words are spoken, we move ever further away from the turning point in the psalm where things improve.
In Psalm 22, the rescue of the psalmist is already unexpected, as I have previously argued. Similarly, in Matthew, things seem to go from bad to worse with no hint of improvement. Psalm 22:18 is Matthew’s first direct reference to the psalm, occurring in the psalm at the moment directly before the psalmist’s transition toward restored life. It is the last bit of darkness before the psalmist’s hope begins to emerge.
But in Matthew, it is at this point, in the depths of despair, that Jesus himself highlights the connection between his situation and the psalmist’s by crying the psalm’s gut-wrenching opening words: “‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matt 27:46). So far, Matthew has recounted the events of the psalm backward from the psalmic moment that expresses the deepest despair and directly precedes the psalmist’s unexpected redemption. “The allusions in the Gospels come in reverse order to their placement in the psalm, and generally do not make explicit a link with the psalm.”6 For any reader of the narrative familiar enough with the psalm to catch on to this fact, the internal reaction is to direct the narrative in the exact opposite direction—“No, Matthew, go the other way!” But Matthew does not go the other way. Matthew takes Jesus from the cusp of deliverance in the poetic world of the psalm toward utter forsakenness by God in the psalm’s opening line.
And yet, by uttering these opening words, Jesus does several things. First, as we have already seen, “It has been suggested that in taking up individual verses in this way, Jesus and/or the NT writers thought of the psalm as a whole as applying to Jesus.”7 Not only has Matthew referenced other parts of Psalm 22, but Jesus himself likely implies the totality of the psalm, a totality that holds the tension of deepest despair with the celebratory expansion of deliverance. This celebratory expansion is indeed on the horizon, though not as quickly as readers may prefer.
Second, Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22 functions to demonstrate the injustice of his situation to all those present and familiar with the psalm. The psalmist suffered unjustly, and so, too, Jesus suffers unjustly, despite the onlookers’ words of protest—words that indeed similarly echo the psalm (Matt 27:43; cf. Ps 22:8). In effect, his cry makes the accusatory statement, “Do you not see that I am the innocent psalmist, and you are the scavenging dogs salivating over my destruction?” Jesus’ words carry this meaning to the fore, rhetorically hitting Matthew’s readers like a punch in the gut, but the surrounding crowds remain ignorant of this irony.
Third, this quotation by Jesus functions as an answer to the accusers and mockers who question his royal status (Matt 27:40–42). His utterance comes from a Psalm of David. David, the quintessential king, and the New David, the messiah, both suffer unjustly within the context of this story’s psalmic framing. “David himself became an important model for depicting Jesus in the Gospels, with the Psalms contributing significantly to the various ways Jesus was depicted in the stories.”8 Throughout the Gospels, references to the psalms help align the reader’s imagination with Davidic messianic hope.
Psalm 22’s association with David makes Jesus’ words on the cross words that accurately depict the agony and injustice of his situation, counter the aspersions thrown at him from the psalm itself, answer the doubts about his royalty, and identify him with the precursor figure to the Messiah. Although the psalm is not “clearly messianic, since it never refers to the anointed king,”9 the association with David in the superscription is significant. Given the fact that “evoking the Psalms would have evoked David for early hearers of the New Testament”10 and the first-century Jewish mind, along with the psalm’s ascription to David, Jesus’ use of Psalm 22 carries messianic undertones. On the cross itself, moments before death, Jesus still claims messianic identity, directly combating those who accuse him. In this way, he typologically fulfills, incarnates, fleshes out the psalm.11
Of course, the claim of messianic identity from the cross while in the process of dying would present a certain tension in the first-century mind.
However, the depiction of David as a tortured, rejected, and suffering king in the Psalms provided a fruitful precedent upon which to reflect when trying to understand and articulate the significance of Jesus’ suffering and death. It is not simply that Scripture predicted Jesus’ suffering in the Psalms or other biblical texts; it is that one of the most important figures in Israel’s history, and certainly the most important king, also suffered greatly according to the Psalms and yet never lost his status as king or begotten son.10
So, these words as issued by Jesus on the cross beautifully bring together these seemingly tenuous themes, further cutting against the claims of the crucifiers that Jesus’ current predicament is an indication that his messianic claims are invalid. The ambiguity of Jesus’ words can be held in tension with his messianic claim because this is precisely what the psalms themselves do. David was a suffering king, and so Jesus is a suffering king.
At this point in the narrative, Jesus quickly approaches death, as the psalmist appeared to do. But as previously stated, Matthew has been carrying Jesus and the readers away from the psalm’s unexpected turn and toward its hopeless opening words. Whereas the psalmist experienced rescue, before any rescue comes to Jesus, Jesus breathes his last. Just as God laid the psalmist in the dust of death (Ps 22:15), Jesus is laid in a tomb (Matt 27:50–61).
After the burial, there are several ways that Mathew 28 represents the ending of Psalm 22. In the narrative of Matthew, we have been plotting the course of Psalm 22 backward from around verse 18. We have passed through the beginning of the psalm, with Jesus himself uttering the opening words, and now find ourselves at the triumphant and celebratory ending. After the resurrection, Jesus’ request to the women at the tomb that they should “go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee,” echoes strongly Psalm 22:22 declaration, “I will recount your name to my brothers.”12 This statement, both in the psalm and in the Gospel, functions as part of the pivot from despair to new hope.
This command ushers Matthew’s narrative toward the Great Commission, which closes out the narrative and also finds parallel in Psalm 22. The extension of God’s reign over the nations is a theme present in multiple ways at the end of Psalm 22. It first emerges in the psalm with the presence of the “fearers of YHWH” who form an inclusio around verses 23–25. “‘Lord fearers’ . . . is a term that specifically refers to non-Israelites who worship the Lord, but have yet to join themselves completely to Israel,”13 and this may be a subtle way of introducing the idea of foreign worshippers into Psalm 22 before they become explicitly present in verse 27. They make up at least part of the congregation to whom the psalmist is restored, as opposed to the pack of cultic scavenging dogs that surround the psalmist for the majority of the psalm.
Here already, the psalm prefigures the ending of the Gospel, with the Great Commission’s call to baptize the nations. Psalm 22 exchanges the assembly of wicked dogs who desire to profit from the psalmist’s death for a congregation of cultically pure and faithful followers of God. This then results in the extension of God’s reign to the ends of the earth, encompassing all nations and all social classes (vv. 22–31). Psalm 22 itself “anticipates that people will come to faith and become true worshippers when they hear what the LORD has done,”14 with verses 23–31 looking forward to the union of the nations and the uplifting of the weak. The New Testament presents this anticipation coming to fruition in the expansion of the religious community to Gentiles.
While Matthew’s closing words bring this into focus, his Gospel seems to imply the psalm’s entire progression by recounting Jesus’ words on the cross and initially framing the crucifixion scene within the poetic world of Psalm 22. In line with this intertextually evoked expectation, Jesus’ resurrection restores the cultic community of his people and opens the door to the peoples of the world. In the matrix of Psalm 22, the cultic community hostile to Jesus is the assembly of dogs, and those who celebrate the deliverance of the resurrection make up the psalmic congregation—a congregation that includes both the community of Jesus’ fellow Jews and the Gentiles at the ends of the earth.
Broader Points of Comparison between Jesus’ Story and Psalm 22
If we see Jesus’ use of Psalm 22’s opening words as an invitation to read his experience through the entire psalm—as I think is justified by the quotations, allusions, and echoes that surround it, as well as their typological alignment—then it is reasonable to explore potential connections with other sections of Psalm 22 that are not explicitly mentioned in Matthew’s recounting of the crucifixion scene. What follows is an analysis of some of the more prominent themes from both passages in Scripture, using the previous exegesis of Psalm 22 as a backdrop. Some of these points of similarity may seem self-evident given the prior analysis, but now is the time to state them with specificity.
The Ambiguity of the Psalm and the Ambiguity of Jesus’ Cry
Psalm 22’s ambiguity of emotion figured prominently in my earlier exegesis. This tension between expressions of hopeful expectation and bitter remembrance of God’s past faithfulness is one of the most apparent, beautiful, and moving aspects of Psalm 22. The use of its opening words by Jesus on the cross carries with it a similar ambiguity, and much debate has taken place regarding the significance of those words. I do not think these words function to describe a break in the Trinity, or the turning away of the Father from the Son.15
Though God may not be distant in actuality—after all, in trinitarian theology and Matthew’s Gospel alike, Jesus is God—the appearance of distance is ever before the eyes of those watching the crucifixion. In Psalm 22 the appearance, and even actuality, of distance did not reflect God’s disapproval or total abandonment of the psalmist. The far-near polarity poetically expressed numerous times may have been real to the psalmist’s perceptions, but as is evident by the psalm’s closing, God was ready to deliver when the time was right. Thus, it still seems that “the Psalms gave the Gospel writers the freedom to juxtapose and hold in tension Jesus’ divine sonship with his suffering and rejection as a human being.”10 It is precisely the ambiguity of the psalm that helps Jesus express the deep pain and ambiguity of his position as the divine and human sufferer. This scandalous claim separates Christianity as a religion from the other Abrahamic faiths, and Psalm 22 seems to hold the space necessary to allow this scandalous tension in a beautiful way.
In Psalm 22 itself, we see the stress and strain of delayed deliverance, and we feel along with the psalmist the agony of waiting, hopelessly and bitterly, while God seems to do nothing on our behalf. It is precisely this bitter waiting that gives the psalm its power; it is the unexpected rescue that gives the psalm its resonance. And these features of Psalm 22 are reflected in the narrative of the crucifixion. In Matthew, the resurrection is often predicted and assumed well before it occurs, but even still, when the crucifixion scene is center stage, Jesus’ psalmic cry seems well placed from an emotional standpoint, as abandonment legitimately appears to be the only logical reason for the events as they transpire.
But, just as in Psalm 22, delayed deliverance is still deliverance, and it occurs at the right time. God must first bear the world’s sins and carry the burden of death to the utmost. The imminent-yet-delayed deliverance does not lessen the pain but magnifies it, revealing the depths of God’s love for humanity. It is only in the agony of the cry “‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matt 27:46) by God that the true measure of divine love can be expressed by God to us.
Poisonous Speech and Gardens
Another of the tensions of Psalm 22 is the distinct power of speech to bring life or death. Psalm 22:6–8 “make[s] clear that Jesus’s problem is the hostility of humanity. His affliction indicates God’s willingness to let humanity go to the very end in rebelling against God. It also indicates Jesus’s willingness to go to the end of being the embodiment of the love of God as God carries the sin of the world.”15 Verses 6–8 describe the antagonistic speech that pushes the psalmist toward death, and in Matthew 26:59, the power of false speech is deployed against Jesus in a successful attempt to bring about his death.
Matthew does not seem to explicitly draw the line between the passages depicting false speech and any particular psalm, but the power of speech—and particularly its destructive capacity—plays a large part in the psalms in general, usually depicting the enemies in bestial imagery that aligns them with the serpent in Eden.16 “This application of serpent imagery is intriguing because the primordial serpent destroys not with literal venom but with deceptive speech, with false words. The serpent is the archetypal liar,” and in the context of Jesus’ crucifixion, those who crucify him step into that role.17 Thus, Jesus’ crucifixion takes us back, through the psalms, all the way to the garden—where crucial decisions were made that altered the course of human history, where it was first promised that a head would be crushed, though not without the striking of a heel (Gen 3:15). Intriguingly, Matthew’s passion narrative returns to a garden, this time in Gethsemane, where another choice has to be made, and Jesus chooses obedience unto redemption (26:36–56).
Abrupt Transitions and Unexpected Events
In Psalm 22, the verb tense switches abruptly, signaling the cessation of lament and the startling transition to a hymn of praise blended with a song of thanksgiving. So too in Matthew, the mourning of the women abruptly turns to a celebration at dawn on Sunday. The psalmist seems to have had an answer to prayer that maintained his life; Jesus’ prayer of those same words was answered in even more dramatic fashion. Because “it is in Psalm 22 that the righteous sufferer experiences the greatest reversal of fortune,”18 the psalm provides a natural lens for framing and interpreting the experience of Jesus even as Jesus “becomes the perfect example of the message of the psalm.”19
Daniel Lee is the Program Manager at Samford University’s Center for Worship and the Arts and holds a Master of Divinity from Wake Forest School of Divinity, where he concentrated in biblical studies and church history. A former youth pastor, Daniel is an aspiring Bible scholar hoping to contribute to the study of Scripture to bridge the gap between scholarship and religious practice.
Image: Jāzeps Grosvalds, Three Crosses
- Catherine Tkacz, “Esther, Jesus, and Psalm 22,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (October 2008): 714.[↩]
- Michael David Coogan, Marc Zvi Brettler, Carol A. Newsom, and Pheme Perkins, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1778.[↩]
- Many of my exegetical connections between the Gospel narrative and the psalm are also recognized by other scholars, notably Tkacz, “Esther, Jesus, and Psalm 22,” 715.[↩]
- Allen Ross, A Commentary on the Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2011), 536.[↩]
- John Goldingay, Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 342.[↩]
- Goldingay, Psalms, 341.[↩]
- Goldingay, Psalms, 341–42.[↩]
- Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll and William P. Brown, “Psalms in the New Testament,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 272.[↩]
- Ross, Commentary on the Psalms, 527.[↩]
- Ahearne-Kroll and Brown, “Psalms in the New Testament,” 272.[↩][↩][↩]
- Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 66: “These famous words are the ones pronounced by Jesus in his last agony—though in Aramaic, not in the original Hebrew. That moment in Matthew is a kind of pesher, or fulfillment interpretation, of this psalm, because there are other details here (for example, verses 16–19) that could be connected with the crucifixion.”[↩]
- Tkacz, “Esther, Jesus, and Psalm 22,” 716.[↩]
- Beth Tanner, Nancy deClaisse-Walford, and Rolf Jacobson, The Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 582.[↩]
- Ross, Commentary on the Psalms, 546.[↩]
- Goldingay, Psalms, 342.[↩][↩]
- Trevor Laurence, Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2022), 135.[↩]
- Laurence, Cursing with God, 139.[↩]
- Gordon Wenham, Psalms as Torah: Reading Biblical Song Ethically (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 248.[↩]
- Ross, A Commentary on the Psalms, 548.[↩]