The Psalmody of the Passion
Tuesday 15 April 2025
The Psalmody of the Passion: Three addresses given by The Very Revd Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury.
First Address: Psalm 118
‘When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives’
In just fourteen words St Matthew describes the end of the last supper that Jesus shares with his disciples. The bread has been broken, the cup has been shared; now the company sings a hymn, and together they leave the warmth of the lamplit upper room for the shadow-filled Mount of Olives. It’s a scene of almost unbearable poignancy.
We cannot be sure what the hymn was, but the historical consensus is that it is likely to have been what we know as Psalm 118 – one of the Passover psalms. And so Psalm 118 is the first of three psalms of the passion that we will consider this evening.
Jesus goes to the place of his betrayal and arrest with its words ringing in his ears, words that attest to the steadfast love of God and the saving providence of God:
‘O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
his mercy endures for ever…
Come, O Lord, and save us we pray.
Come. Lord, send us now prosperity’.
As he sang that verse Jesus may have recalled the last time he heard its words being uttered publicly. It was a few days earlier, on Palm Sunday, as he rode into the city. Then, the crowds had shouted ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’
Paula Gooder, Chancellor of St Paul’s and Biblical scholar, has recently reminded her readers that the only occasion on which the Hebrew word ‘Hosanna’ appears in the whole of the Old Testament is here, in the twenty-fifth verse of Psalm 118. ‘Hosanna’ means ‘save us’. The psalmist uses it in an urgent plea for God to act and for God to save; on Palm Sunday, the same expression is shouted as a triumphant greeting, as an expression of praise for Jesus of Nazareth. But perhaps that change of use is not odd: perhaps those who shouted it shouted it in the supreme confidence that God would indeed save them – or had indeed saved them.
So Jesus goes to the place of his betrayal and arrest singing words that accompanied his tumultuous arrival in Jerusalem. The crowds expressed their belief that God was their God and that their God was everlastingly for them: that’s the hope that the early verses of the psalm articulate. Four times the refrain ‘His mercy endures for ever’ is repeated; it reappears in the very last verse of the psalm and brings the whole to a conclusion. The Hebrew word translated as ‘mercy’ is sometimes translated as ‘steadfast love’. This is the quality that the psalmist most closely associates with God, and he believes it will endure for ever.
Such is, as it were, the character of God. God loves his people; God is steadfast in his love for his people; God has saved his people before they have even asked him to do so. Perhaps the recollection of the cheering crowd; perhaps those words; perhaps that confidence lifted Jesus’s spirits as he left the lamplit upper room and made his way to the shadow-filled Mount of Olives.
Second Address: Psalm 22
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Hours after citing one psalm Jesus cites a second. He sings the former, amidst the company of his loyal disciples. He spits out the latter, amidst his tortured breathing.
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Many of Psalm 22’s verses seemed to the first Christian apologists to point unequivocally to the crucifixion. The psalmist’s hands and feet are pierced; his clothing is divided; his bones are out of joint; the enemy surrounds him on every side. Yet Jesus’s use of the psalm’s opening verse bewildered the early Church. Saint Augustine, the greatest of its expositors, writes ‘What did the Lord mean? God had not abandoned him, since he himself was God’.
In answering his own question Augustine creates a dense theological tangle which I will not attempt to unpick. Instead, let me suggest that the psalmist’s work – and Jesus’s use of the psalmist’s work – is what we might call an act of radical candour – an act of radical candour before the mercy-seat of God. In his isolation; in his agony; in his despair, Jesus’s fevered recollection scans the prayer book he has known since he was a boy. He lights upon the only prayer possible:
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
It’s not – not – a prayer that doubts God. Jesus and his friends have sung of the God whose steadfast love never fails; they have sung of the God who has reached out to save his people before they have even asked him to. This prayer is now directed at that same God. It’s ‘God of steadfast love, God of my salvation, my God – why have you forsaken me?’ It’s an honest prayer; it’s a courageous prayer; it’s a prayer that tells it like it is. The Son of God fears he has been abandoned by God, and he says so
I once heard a Good Friday preacher open his meditation with the observation that we had come to this place to do serious business with God. We had, and we have. In Holy Week we do serious business with God.
And it doesn’t get much more serious than this. Jesus prays Psalm 22 from the cross and his prayer sits in judgement on all the prayers of our mouths. Dare we tell God the truth about ourselves? Or do we offer to God the version of ourselves that we think he most wants to see? The version in which our heads are never buzzing with rage; the version in which our hearts are never close to breaking; the version in which thoughts of God have been pushed beyond the margins of our capacity to think and cope and care?
We cannot begin to follow in the way of the cross unless we find the resource to own our deepest pain, our greatest fear, our most ardent longing; unless we find the strength to be radically candid before the mercy-seat of God. We need to say what we need to say – and when we have said it – when our anger and our exhaustion and our fear and our loathing have worn themselves out, when we have unburdened ourselves, when we have no more words left – then, and only then will we be able to heed the primal call of our faith: repent.
Third Address: Psalm 31
‘Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last.’
In Saint Luke’s account of the crucifixion the very last words uttered by Jesus from the cross are the words of a psalm: the fifth verse of Psalm 31. He has given voice to his sense of abandonment in the words of Psalm 22; he dies with a different psalm on his lips:
‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
Psalm 31 is, like Psalm 22, a psalm of rage and a psalm of lament. The psalmist writes that his life is wasted with grief; that he has become an object of dread to his acquaintances; that the crowd schemes to take his life. All this the psalmist pours out as vividly as the author of Psalm 22. But the psalmist does not linger in the fear and grief. ‘My trust is in you, O Lord’ he writes; ‘You are my God’.
The psalmist repents – he turns, which is all that repentance means. He repents: he remembers, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, that he is penultimate; that he is not the goal and mission of existence; that his life is situated in a mystery and a gift and a summons that is beyond him and beyond his dismay. He has shaken out all the bile and poison that threaten his life. He has fallen silent – and then, only then, has he recalled that he stands before the mercy-seat of God. He yields. He entrusts all that he is to God.
‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
This is the psalm that Jesus offers as he dies. He has concluded his last supper with his friends by singing a psalm of God’s steadfast love and God’s saving action. He has acknowledged in the words of another psalm the unimaginable suffering of the cross, speaking truthfully of its agonizing cost. Now, in his final moments, in the words of a third psalm, he is recalled to the presence and the providence of the God with whom he has walked, in whom he has trusted, of whom he has sung. Thus recalled he turns – he yields.
When you and I have said all that we can find to say we can hold onto the anger, the grief, and the fear – or we can, as Brueggemann suggests, commit to the proposition that at the bottom of reality – social, personal, and cosmic reality – there is a fidelity that will not fail. We can turn to it and yield to it, laying aside our isolation and our anxiety.
This is Holy Week, and we have come here to do serious business with God. Because God’s nature is steadfast love and because God has acted to save us before we even acknowledge our need of salvation we can dare to be candid before God’s mercy-seat – and we can dare to yield, and to entrust ourselves to his everlasting arms.
‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
If we offer that prayer – perhaps, only if we offer that prayer – will the dawn of Easter break upon us, inviting us into a new world which we can barely begin to conceive.