Belmont University Advent GuideSample

To see Psalm 22 among our Advent readings may give some of us pause since it is a text more often associated with Good Friday for its cry of abandonment that Jesus utters on the cross in the gospels of Mark and Matthew. How can this Psalm, then, speak to us as we live through this season awaiting the birth of Christ?

Advent marks a time in our liturgical year when we watch and prepare for the festival of the Nativity. We walk through Advent’s darkness toward the joy and light of God being born among us. Advent’s movement from darkness to light is echoed in the entirety of Psalm 22, for as a whole it gives us both a lament of groans for God’s presence and also a rousing hymn of praise for God’s deliverance.

“You have rescued me,” prays the psalmist as he begins his crescendo into praise. Note that the psalmist does not mention any outward change of circumstances in his life. Still, he trusts that God now has heard his cry. Traces of his trust even run through the psalmist’s initial complaint of pain and God’s absence: from his past, he recalls God’s intimacy and tender care bringing him into life like a midwife and keeping him like a baby on its mother’s breast. Read during this season, the Psalm’s maternal imagery for the divine can evoke for us images of Mary and the Christ child.

“You have rescued me” may indicate that, in this moment, he seems to know his despair cannot take him beyond the reach of God’s love, and that confidence is enough to move him from deep distress to praise. The scope of this psalmist’s praise is striking. His vow to glorify God in the congregation grows into a call upon different groups to join him in this hymn—Israelites, non-Israelites, the poor and rich, the unborn and even the dead.

His invitation to worship God draws on all across space and time. Such an expanding celebration of God’s saving work conjures up images from John’s universalistic vision in Revelation of all creation singing praise to God. Psalm 22’s stirring end reminds us that in Advent we await not only the coming of God in Jesus’s birth but also the coming of Christ to redeem our fallen world.

Lord, you who come to save us, let us see this Advent as our preparation for your coming now and again. Let us see our ending and new beginning. Amen.

Cynthia Curtis
Assistant Professor of Religion