2025 Good Friday Message
In Hungary, and probably around the world, we read Psalm 22 on Good Friday. Jesus, being a Jew, prayed a psalm on the cross. Matthew 27:46 only refers to the first verse, but we may presume that Jesus prayed the whole psalm. He not only experienced being abandoned by God but also the reality of these lines: “All who see mock me” (22:8); “all my bones are out of joint” (22:14); “my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth (22:15); ”they pierce my hands and feet” (22:16); they divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.” (22:18).
This psalm can be the prayer of every suffering person. Before Jesus’ time, many people had whispered these words in their pain. Since Jesus, these words have come true in many people’s lives.
In his paraphrase poem, Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020) speaks on behalf of many sufferers:
My God my God, why have you abandoned me?1
I am a caricature of a person
despised by the people
They sneer at me in all the newspapers
Tanks surround me
machine guns take aim at me
barbed wire, loaded with electricity, imprisons me
Every day I am being called up
I am tattooed with a number
They photographed me behind the gates
and my bones can be counted like on an X-ray
All identification has been removed from me
Naked they pushed me into the gas chamber
and my clothes and shoes they have shared among themselves
I cry for morphine and no one hears me
I cry with the straitjacket
I cry every night in the mental hospital
in the ward for incurable patients
in the quarantine wing
in the asylum of the elderly
I agonize, covered in sweat, in the psychiatric clinic
I suffocate with the oxygen tank
I cry at the police station
in the prison courtyard
in the torture chamber
in the orphanage
I am contaminated with radioactivity
and no one comes near me, for fear of infection
But I will speak of you to my brothers
You I will praise at our public meetings
My hymns will be sung in large crowds
The poor will hold a banquet
Our people -- the people yet to be born –
will rejoice in a great feast.
When these lines were published by the Nicaraguan priest and poet, readers would first think of the victims of the military juntas in Latin America. But the painful words are still valid today, independent of time and space.
The first lines refer to the deforming and humiliating effect of the media. So many people are targeted by manipulative propaganda and character assassination. Then, we see pictures of a war that is real in many countries today. Being registered and tattooed with numbers not only reminds us of the monstrous deeds and concentration camps of a war which ended 80 years ago, but also of the destructive political powers of our time. Removing one’s identification is fully relevant to those who live in an occupied country, without basic human rights and citizenship. Straitjackets and mental hospitals are depicting those who are suffering under psychological warfare. The presence of a pandemic has been one of the most frightening global experiences lately and the reference to radioactivity also evokes the ecological emergency we are living in.
This is a psalm of global suffering.
In spite of all that, we have to underline that on Good Friday Jesus has taken all the miseries of humankind upon himself. He experienced the greatest depth, the moment of being abandoned by God. Therefore, all sufferers may pray this psalm together with him – and together with the author of the Hebrew Bible.
As believers, we know that Good Friday is followed by Easter. And then, a line of the same Psalm may resonate in us and in all the world: “I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you” (22:22).
By Bishop Dr Tamás Fabiny
LWF Vice-President for Central Eastern Europe. He serves as a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hungary.
