Abstract
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” (Ps 22:1-2)
These words express the depths of God-forsakenness. The psalmist complains, God has forsaken him. God is far from his cry. God doesn’t answer. The psalmist complains, but he doesn’t complain either to other human beings or cry into empty space. He complains to God! He complains to God about his God-forsakenness. He cries to God, that God does not answer his cry. What does this mean? Is the psalmist crazy? In fact, many seem to have asked that very question.
“All who see me laugh me to scorn, they curl their lips and wag their heads, saying, ‘He trusted in the LORD; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, if he delights in him!” (Ps 22:7-8)
In our hour of greatest need, everything seems to speak against God–either against God’s love, friendliness, and goodness, or against God’s nearness and presence. Either God is definitely present, but God is present, not as love, but as cruelty. Or God is definitely love, but God is absent. There seems to be no other way to connect the misfortune that has happened to us with God. Anyone who resists this either-or logic has clearly “lost it” and makes himself a laughing-stock.
Yet, is this dichotomy really compelling? The question is explosive, and the answer we give to it is highly consequential. If we say “yes,” then we are left with a fair-weather God and fair-weather prayer. When things go well, then we may take this as evidence of God’s love and presence and thank God for it. When things don’t go well, there remains only silence before God’s cruelty or estrangement. Prayer to a cruel or absent God would turn prayer into a practical contradiction. What kind of God are we dealing with, if we can’t turn to God in our hour of greatest need?
In his exposition of Psalm 22, Calvin rejects this deadly either-or. Calvin takes seriously the utter need, the experience of God-forsakenness that drives the psalmist into prayer. “Who is able to hold onto a spark of faith, where no trace of God’s help is to be found?” The rhetorical question suggests its answer: “No one!” In the hour of need, Calvin acknowledges, God withdraws any signs of his favor. We look around for signs of God’s goodness and help. Yet, we see nothing but darkest night. The experience of suffering drives us to the conclusion that God has rejected and forsaken us. Every bit of this is true. None of it can be denied. The experience of need, of suffering and unhappiness show us nothing about God.
Does Calvin think that our hour of need really is a time of God-forsakenness? Here we must listen carefully to what Calvin says. In his commentary on Psalm 22, he writes: “Yet, it is inevitable that the godly will be torn by this inner conflict, whenever God withdraws the signs of His favor, so that no matter where they look, they see nothing but darkest night.” Calvin characterizes our hour of great need as a time in which God has withdrawn the signs of His favor. The word ‘sign’ surfaces repeatedly in Calvin’s writings. There are signs in the world that show us that God is gracious to us, that God loves us, that God is benevolent towards us, that God hears our prayers, etc. These signs help us win through to certainty and confidence. But what is of utmost importance is that the signs are not the things themselves! Signs do not even stand in any cause-effect relation to the things they signify. One cannot automatically infer from signs to things, and–what is even more important here–one cannot automatically conclude from the absence of signs to the absence of things. Calvin says, in our hour of need, God has withdrawn the signs of His favor. The signs, but not the favor!
But in our hour of need, how can we confirm our faith in God’s favor, in God’s loving presence? When God withdraws the signs of His favor, His favor is not to be seen, it is not shown in the experiences we have at the time. Would we show our faith to be genuine, if we stood fast, firmly held on to God, no matter what happens, no matter what outward events may say for or against our faith? There may well be people who crack the ideological whip, who see things that way and inflict the implications on suffering people. Calvin is not among them. He says quite clearly, it is “inevitable” that faithful people will be torn by inner conflict in the experience of severe suffering: namely, the conflict between the appearance and the feeling of God-forsakenness versus the drive of faith, precisely in the midst of God-forsakenness, to seek refuge in God. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This conflict is inevitable “for the godly,” as Calvin says. People who are indifferent to God or people who are convinced of God’s non-existence, absence, or cruelty–these will suffer and be distressed, but they will not experience this conflict, the conflict between faith and God-forsakenness. Likewise, people with an ideological fixation that successfully nails down God’s love, that harmonizes or explains away any and all experiences to the contrary–they, too, are exempt from this conflict. Only those who reckon with the living God in their lives, with the free, undetermined, sovereign will of God, whom we never “have in our pockets,” only those who at the same time know themselves to be in existential need of God’s love are horrified by the withdrawal of signs of God’s favor and put to a shattering inner test.
Suffering through the conflict between faith and God-forsakenness is definitely not a sign of weak faith, but an indication that faith is genuine. King David (to whom the redactor of the psalms attributes Psalm 22) prays, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And for Calvin, King David is the greatest model of prayer. Jesus of Nazareth prays the same way at the hour of His death, and we know from the Garden of Gethsemane, that He too had to struggle repeatedly to bring Himself into harmony with God’s will.
“So the faithful experience everyday how–according to the perception of the flesh–they are esteemed rejected and abandoned by God. Nevertheless, faith grasps hidden grace.” There is “the perception of the flesh,” sense perception, and there is faith. With our senses we perceive things which we take to be signs of God’s grace when they are good, delightful, comfortable, and helpful. With the senses, we also notice when these things are missing, and when unpleasant or horrible things take their place. We interpret these as signs that God’s grace is far from us. But the grace of God itself is not accessible to sense perception; it is hidden from the senses. “Nevertheless, faith grasps hidden grace.” The grace of God is hidden from the senses, but accessible to faith! The contrast holds, not only in situations of extreme suffering, but also when our experiences are good and agreeable. Calvin is speaking about the everyday experiences of all believers.
Thus, the experience of God-forsakenness can also be brought in prayer to this very God. We don’t show ourselves faithful by never experiencing God-forsakenness. We show ourselves faithful by bringing everything before God: not only what is agreeable and happy, but also what is difficult and distressing, yes even the affliction of God-forsakenness. When we do that, something happens.
When we flee to God in our trouble, something changes. Anyone who prays can bear witness to this. We can also gather it from Psalm 22. The psalmist begins with the gripping complaint: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?… O my God, I cry in the daytime but you do not answer.” He continues with a reproachful contrast between the good things God has done for Israel in the past and his own present distress. Then the psalmist remembers his dependence on God and God’s past care for him.
“Yet, you are the one who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast. I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born; you were my God when I was still in my mother’s womb.” This leads him, however, not to renewed complaint or accusation, but to a request. “Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help.” By “none” here he means “none but you, God!” There is no longer a complaint of God-forsakenness, but a plea of trust to a helpful God. This is the first major turning-point in this psalm: the turn from complaint to petition.
There follows a long portrayal of the psalmist’s own precarious situation: “be not far away… hasten to help me… save me… help me.” Then comes the second major turning-point: “You have heard me.” Confident petition carries with it the certainty of a hearing and leads to the praise of God: “I will declare your Name to my brethren, in the midst of the congregation will I praise you.”
On the outside, nothing in the unhappy situation has changed, and yet the psalmist recognizes: “You have heard me.” Many critics of religion, psychologists, and even theologians have felt obliged to conclude from these observations that the efficacy of prayer lies in its practical contribution to psychological health. August Comte, the nineteenth century founder of a system of rational religion without God, regarded prayer as so useful that he recommended that his followers pray for two hours per day!
No one will contest that prayer produces effects in the person who prays. Yet, most people who pray do not regard prayer as a means to the end of psychological health. Nor is it–as believers often say–a means to the end of relationship with God. Prayer is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is not a means to the end of relationship with God, but is itself an expression and an aspect of relationship with God. Prayer is practising relationship with God, and not–as we often hear–practising for it! It is perfectly natural for both parties in a life partnership to change; likewise, the praying person. But the relationship is not lived for the sake of that change, but is willed for its own sake. Turning the relationship into a tool for individual development, would kill the relationship!
Return to the person who prays Psalm 22. When he brings his complaint before God, “unburdens” his entire misfortune “into God’s bosom” (as Calvin puts it), it is not just his complaint that changes. Something else happens, indeed something of the highest importance. When things go well for us, we are all too often only inclined to take the good as a sign of God’s favor and–if we’re honest–we do not much concern ourselves with the distinction between signs and what they signify. In our hour of need, this suddenly doesn’t work any more, because in our hour of need the signs of God’s favor are lacking. If we fail to maintain the distinction between sign and thing, or if we associate sign and thing too closely, we take the absence of signs to mean that we are God-forsaken. This can drive people to give up or lose their faith. But it can also lead to a painful process of learning the distinction between sign and thing all over again: of learning not to rely on things such as health or well-being, but on God Himself; not to depend on the evidence of the senses but on God’s promise to help us in our need. This is possible only if we unconditionally hand ourselves over to God, to God’s goodness.
This changes us and our relationship with God more radically than any psychological technique could. It has consequences for the fair-weather times of our life as well. The good things of life are neither something to congratulate ourselves on nor mere chance, but signs of God’s favor. They are, however, only signs of God’s favor, neither proofs of favor nor the favor itself. Calvin writes, “faith calls believers back to the promises. It teaches them to wait patiently, to settle down in God’s bosom, until He shows His fatherly face again.”
This is exactly what happens in prayer. Amen.