The Prayer You Cannot Finish

You can sing the first line of a hundred songs. Try it. The radio hits from high school... the song your mother hummed in the kitchen while supper cooked, the one you never once heard her finish. The first line comes without effort. "You are my sunshine"... you know it. "O say can you see"... you have sung it with your hand on your heart. But sing one of them to the end. Every verse. All the way down. Most of us cannot do it. We are a people fluent in openings and lost by the second verse.

There is a first line like that in the Bible. You may know it from a Good Friday service... you may have never heard it in your life. Either way you are in the same spot, because almost nobody can finish it.

At three in the afternoon, nailed to a Roman cross, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (Matthew 27:46)

He was not composing something new. He was quoting. That sentence is the first line of Psalm 22, word for word... a psalm every Jewish worshiper knew the way you know the songs of your childhood. A dying rabbi praying a first line carried the whole psalm with it. Every ear on that hill would have heard the rest.

Most of us stop where he started.

But the cross is not where the piercing started either. Decades earlier, an old man in the temple held this child and told his mother that a sword would pierce her own soul too (Luke 2:35). Pierced was in the script from the beginning. And the child that old man held was already walking toward the psalm.

The Psalm Is Happening

Psalm 22 is not just being quoted up there... on the cross. It is happening.

The psalm says, "Everyone who sees me mocks me... 'He relies on the LORD; let him save him'" (Psalm 22:7-8). At the cross the religious leaders sneer, "He trusts in God; let God rescue him now" (Matthew 27:43). The psalm says, "They pierced my hands and my feet" (Psalm 22:16). Someone wrote that a thousand years before crucifixion existed. And a thousand years later a man hanging on a Roman cross is living inside it. The psalm says, "They divided my garments among themselves, and they cast lots for my clothing" (Psalm 22:18). John stood close enough to watch the soldiers do exactly that (John 19:24).

Written a thousand years early. Unfolding before their eyes on a hill outside Jerusalem.

He is not reciting the psalm. He is inside it.

Which means he is not done praying it.

The Psalm Turns

Keep reading and the psalm turns. The abandonment was real. He was truly forsaken. Truly bearing judgment... the weight of what our sin actually deserved, borne by him instead of us. He was not performing an old poem with a happy ending already attached. And the same psalm declares, "He did not hide his face from him but listened when he cried to him for help" (Psalm 22:24).

Sit with that. Forsaken, and heard. Both true at the same time, on the same cross. I cannot fully explain how. I am not sure I am supposed to.

Then the final verse of all: "They will come and declare his righteousness; to a people yet to be born they will declare what he has done" (Psalm 22:31). The psalm's last word is a completed act. The cross's last word is the same. It is finished. A finished work. Announced to people who were not born yet.

You.

He did not stop at verse one. He prayed the whole psalm... from forsaken to finished... and he prayed it from inside the piercing.

A People Yet to Be Born

You are the people yet to be born (Psalm 22:31). A thousand years before Bethlehem, the psalm ended with you. The ones who would one day hear what he has done.

What do you do with a prayer you cannot finish? The two a.m. why. The sentence you typed and deleted because you were sure God could not receive it. You do not need a keyboard to delete a prayer. We do it mid-sentence... swallow the words, take the question back, certain there is no shelf in heaven for it. The prayer that never got past its first line.

Jesus has already prayed it. Out loud. In the dark. All the way through.

And he did more than pray it. He bore the judgment our sin deserved... "pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:5). Then he walked out of a tomb three days later. The risen Jesus is the proof that verse one is never where the psalm ends.

Look at Him

John watched the spear go in and reached back for a prophecy: "They will look at the one they pierced" (John 19:37). A week after the resurrection, Jesus stood in a locked room and said to a doubting man, "Put your finger here and look at my hands" (John 20:27).

Risen... and still scarred.

He kept the piercing. I do not know why he kept the scars. Trophy is the wrong word. Receipt, maybe.

An unscarred Savior could not be trusted with your wounds. He would not know what they weigh. But a pierced Savior... one who bore your judgment and kept the scars... can be trusted with anything you bring him.

You know the first line. You have prayed it. He knows the whole song. He did not stop at verse one... and he will not stop at yours.

So maybe do not delete the prayer this time. Pray it past its first line... all of it... to him.

The door is open.
He is listening.
He always was.

Yours in Christ,
Mike Palmer
Pastor, Red River Baptist Church

P.S. If you are the one who deleted the prayer last night... he already heard the part you erased.

This article is drawn from the fifth sermon in the “Christmas in July” series at Red River Baptist Church—“The Sword Was for Her... Too,” Luke 2:22-38.