The Prayer Jesus Borrowed on the Cross

One of David's songs begins lower than almost any other,
down in the dust,
and ends higher than almost any other,
with the whole world singing.

At the top he wrote the name of a tune,
"The Doe of the Dawn,"
so the singers would know how it went.
(We have every one of David's words and not a single note of that tune.)

The song begins with a shout:

"My God, my God,
why have you left me all alone?
I call to you all day, and you do not answer.
I call all night, and I cannot rest."

Then he looked at the faces around him.
"Everyone who sees me laughs.
They shake their heads and sneer,
'He trusted the LORD, didn't he?
Let the LORD rescue him,
if the LORD is so pleased with him!'"

"But you brought me safe into the world.
I have been yours since the day I was born.
So do not stay far away.
Trouble is close, and no one else can help."

His enemies came at him like animals.
"Strong bulls from Bashan stand all around me.
Lions roar at me with their mouths wide open.
Dogs circle me, and a gang of wicked men closes in."

(Bashan was cattle country, famous for the biggest bulls anywhere. If you had stood inside that ring, you would have felt the ground shake every time one of them stamped.)

"I am poured out like spilled water.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
You lay me down in the dust of death.
They have pierced my hands and my feet.
They stare at me and gloat.
They divide up my clothes
and throw dice for what I am wearing."

Then, with the lions' mouths still open,
David's song turned around.

"LORD, hurry and help me!
Save me from the lion's mouth.
Right there among the horns of the wild oxen,
you have answered me!
I will tell my brothers your name.
God did not hide his face from the one in trouble.
He heard him when he cried.
The ends of the earth will turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations will bow down before him.
Children not born yet will hear about it
and tell each other:
He has done it."

But no one ever threw dice for David's clothes,
or drove nails through his hands.
David died an old man in his bed,
and for a thousand years people sang his song,
puzzling over its strangest lines.

One Friday outside Jerusalem, soldiers nailed a man to a cross by his hands and feet.
"He trusts God," the leaders sneered.
"Let God rescue him now!"
At his feet, soldiers threw dice for his clothes.
At three in the afternoon he shouted David's first line:
"My God, my God, why have you left me?"
Soon he said, "It is finished," and he died.

On the third day he was alive,
and he sent Mary Magdalene with a message:
"Go to my brothers."
David had sung that word too, right where his song turned glad.
Jesus had prayed the start of David's song.
Now its end was coming true,
and families from every nation would learn to sing,
"He has done it."