Miles from Nowhere
Psalm 22 (MSG) | Mark 15:37–39 (NLT)
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Why do you think I'm crying out like this?
Why are you so far away?
Why so indifferent? Why so deaf to my groaning?
God, you spoke to our ancestors when they were in desperate trouble and you rescued them.
They cried out to you and were saved.
They trusted you and their trust was not misplaced.
And here I am, a nothing — an earthworm, something to step on, to squash.
Everyone pokes fun at me; they make faces at me, they shake their heads:
'Let's see how God handles this one;
since God likes him so much, let him help him!'
And to think you were midwife at my birth,
setting me at my mother's breasts!
Well, you've been my God from the very start;
you've been God since before I was born.
— Psalm 22:1–2, 4–5, 6–8, 9–10 (MSG)
Then Jesus uttered another loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. When the Roman officer who stood facing him saw how he had died, he exclaimed, 'This man truly was the Son of God!'
— Mark 15:37–39 (NLT)
These past few days of Holy Week have left me quieter than usual. I find myself going through the motions at work — sorting, stacking, moving things from one place to another — and somewhere in the rhythm of all that ordinary movement, the weight of what happened on that cross keeps settling in. It's not dramatic for me. It's more like a low hum. A kind of somber awareness that something enormous was given, and I was one of the people it was given for.
David wrote Psalm 22 centuries before Jesus ever walked to Golgotha. But the first line stops me every time: Why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away? The Message puts it plainly — miles from nowhere, in great pain. I don't think David was being dramatic either. I think he was just honest. And that honesty is part of what makes this psalm so hard to shake.
I think about people I know — coworkers, people from my men's group, people I've watched navigate things I wouldn't wish on anyone — and I've heard versions of that question come out of them at one point or another. Sometimes it sounds like anger. Sometimes it sounds like exhaustion. Sometimes it just sounds like a person staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, not sure if anyone is listening. Life is genuinely confusing when trouble lands on you. The question isn't a sign of weak faith. It's a sign of being human.
What gets me is that Jesus asked it too. Standing there at the cross, in the worst moment of his life — which was also the most important moment in all of history — he quoted this very psalm. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He wasn't performing. He was crying out. The Son of God, carrying everything we've ever done wrong, felt the distance. Felt the silence. And he said so.
That does something to me. It means when I hear someone say they feel abandoned, or when I feel it myself, I'm not wandering into foreign territory. Jesus already went there. He knows the geography of that place. He walked it on our behalf so that it would never be the final word.
David makes this strange pivot in the middle of the psalm. He calls himself a nothing — an earthworm, something to be stepped on. He's not fishing for compliments. He's being honest about how small we are in the grand scheme of things. And he's right. When I'm stacking freight in the back of a store at five in the morning, I'm not exactly reshaping the world. None of us are, most days. We're small people doing small things, hoping it adds up to something.
But then David says something that won't let go of me: You've been my God from the very start. You've been God since before I was born. This enormous, universe-holding God — the same one Jesus cried out to from the cross — was present at David's birth. Was present at mine. Is present at yours. That's not the kind of God who operates from a distance. That's the kind of God who shows up in the details. Whose attention doesn't waver just because things have gotten hard.
When Jesus breathed his last, something split. Mark tells us the Temple curtain tore from top to bottom — the thing that had separated ordinary people from the presence of God, ripped open. Not by human hands. From the top. And a Roman officer, someone who had no reason to believe any of this, looked at how Jesus died and said: this man truly was the Son of God.
The curtain torn. The cry still echoing. And somehow in the middle of all of it — the abandonment, the pain, the darkness — God was not absent. He was doing the most present thing he has ever done.
That's Holy Week for me. Not a tidy story. Not an easy answer to the question David asked. But evidence — real, costly evidence — that the God who hears the cry of the abandoned is the same God who entered into abandonment himself. Miles from nowhere. For us
Reflection
Have you ever felt like you were "miles from nowhere" — that God was distant or indifferent to what you were going through? What did that season feel like, and how did you move through it?
