Christmas in the Light of Psalm 22

We know from all four gospels that the twenty second Psalm was deeply intertwined with the fate of Jesus, so deeply intertwined that, according to Matthew and Mark, Jesus himself took it upon his lips as he died to express his trust in God, even as he was nailed to the Cross.

Yes, Jesus was not claiming that he had actually been separated from God on the Cross, but, rather, that God's help was not evident to him, that he was going through dryness, or, rather, the greatest of all aridity, the greatest of all feelings of abandonment ever known to man. But all this he did in trust to God. If Psalm 22 expressed the plight of Jesus in moving terms, it also expressed his belief in his ultimate vindication by God with the greatest confidence.

You who fear the LORD, praise him!
all you sons of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel!
For he has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted;
and he has not hid his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.

If all of this seems to have only a slight connection with Christmas, it may be because we haven't thought it through yet with sufficient clarity. What or who was on Jesus' mind on the Cross as he meditated on the twenty second Psalm? On the one hand, we might take our cue from the very end of that Psalm.

All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him. (Ps. 22:27)

Certainly, Jesus meant by his death to draw all nations to worship the God of Israel. "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." (Jn 12:32) We see this solicitude for the right ordering of the world in the repentance of the Good Thief. Actually, the Good Thief was not a thief, but a revolutionary (Gk. lestes), meaning that he was in the business of bringing about the freedom of Israel from the Roman oppressors by force. In receiving the repentance of the Good Thief, Jesus was showing that conversion of the Gentile nations to the God of Israel would now take the form of following his way of loving service, of self-giving, and not the way of violent revolution against Rome.

But if Jesus, meditating on and acting in accordance with Ps. 22, looked forward to the Gentile nations coming to the worship of the God of Israel, he must also have looked backward to the events of Christmas.

Yet thou art he who took me from the womb;
thou didst keep me safe upon my mother's breasts.
Upon thee was I cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me thou hast been my God. (Ps. 22:9-10)

Yes, in the mysterious providence of God, the Mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, played a special role. In meditating upon Ps. 22, Jesus must have seen his holy mother as the special locus of God's activity. It was her womb from which God took him. It was on her breasts that God kept Jesus safe. It was by the nourishment provided from her breasts that God made him grow. From his very birth, he must have thought, he was dedicated to God, a reference not only to his own willful obedience to the Father, but to that of his Mother, who brought him to the Temple to be circumcised on the eighth day, fully identifying him with God's covenant people, Israel.

Jesus, although greater than a prophet, was a prophet, and prophets in Israel used symbolic actions to express the message that God had given them for Israel. If, indeed, Jesus was meditating on God's past faithfulness to him through his Mother, and if Jesus was meditating on and enacting the new future, in which Jew and Gentile alike would share in God's kingdom, it only makes sense to see Jesus as intentionally connecting his other great action from the Cross with these two themes. God, who had been faithful to him in the past through his Mother, would be faithful to him again through his Mother, by bringing, through her, many sons to glory (c.f. Heb 2:10). Thus, acting in the mode of a prophet, he acted in the following way:

When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son!"
Then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (Jn. 19:26-27)

The Psalmist, reflecting on God's action through his mother, recalled God's faithfulness and trusted in God's ultimate vindication. Jesus, reflecting on God's action through his Mother, recalled God's faithfulness and trusted in God's ultimate vindication; trusted in it so much that he prophetically enacted it by setting up a new spiritual relationship between Mary and John, who in this case, symbolizes all the disciples of Jesus (c.f. Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible vol. 29, Pp. XCIV-XCV). And so, from the Cross, Jesus gave us his Mother to be the mother of all his beloved disciples; he gave us his Mother as our Mother. The events of Christmas, in which God's faithfulness to Mary and to Jesus are intertwined, lead us to the events of Easter and Pentecost (cf. Acts 1:14), in which God's faithfulness to Jesus and to Mary are once again intertwined. God, who acted once through Mary to bring Jesus into the world, will act again through Mary to bring Jesus into the lives of his disciples, and thus into the world.