The Prayer Jesus Borrowed on the Cross

(Psalm 22)

A long, long time before Jesus,
a king named David was hurting.
Do you remember David,
the shepherd boy who once stood against the giant?
He was a grown king now,
and when David hurt, he prayed.
But this prayer was different.
This prayer was too big for one man to fill.

He wrote:

My God, my God,
why have you left me all alone?
I call in the daytime. You do not answer.
I call in the dark, and no answer comes.

Maybe you know that feeling,
when you cry out
and it seems like no one comes.
David knew it.
He felt afraid, and lonely, and so very small.

He wrote:

They circle me, a ring of laughing faces.
They point. They wag their heads.
"He trusted God," they say. "Let God save him now!"
They stare. They gloat.
They split my clothes between them
and throw the dice for what is left.

He sang of pierced hands,
of a thirsty mouth,
of a crowd that only laughed.

But something strange hides inside this song.
David did write those words.
Yet David's hands were never pierced.
No one ever gambled for David's coat.

So whose sorrow was this, really?
Whose was so deep
that David could only borrow it,
a thousand years too soon?

It was a true prayer,
and one day it came all the way true.

Because on a dark afternoon,
on a hill, on a cross,
Jesus looked out at the laughing faces.
He felt his own hands pierced through.
He watched the soldiers split his clothes
and toss the dice for his coat,
exactly as the old song had said.

And the King of all the world
opened his mouth
and prayed the very words David wrote so long before:

My God, my God,
why have you left me all alone?

Of all the people who ever felt abandoned,
no one was ever as alone as Jesus was, right there.
He took the lonely.
He took the laughing.
He took the dark and the long silence,
so that you would never be left alone again.

But oh, child, do not close the song too soon.
David's prayer does not end in the dark.
Listen to how it turns:

I will tell my brothers your name.
I will sing in the middle of a great crowd.
The hungry will eat and be full.
People not yet born will hear of it,
and the ends of the earth will remember,
and a whole family,
every color, every land,
will bow down and be glad.

That is how the prayer ends:
not with a ring of laughing faces
but with a great, glad, singing family,
gathered close around the King who was once alone,
so that not one of them would ever be alone again.

He went into the dark by himself
to carry you home into the light.
And so the rescue came.
The family had begun to gather,
and he will not stop the gathering
until the very last child is safe inside.