Day 6 Tues May 19th

Prayer

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Let us bow down in humility at the power and grandeur of the Holy Spirit. Let us worship the Holy Trinity and give glory today to the Paraclete, our Advocate. O Holy Spirit, by Your power, Christ was raised from the dead to save us all. By Your grace, miracles are performed in Jesus’ name. By Your love, we are protected from evil. And so, we ask with humility and a beggar’s heart for Your gift of Faithfulness within us. You, O Lord, are ever faithful. You are faithful until the end. Though we are weak and distracted, please give us the grace to be faithful to You as you are to us!

Reflect on these words

There is good reason to believe that Jesus uttered a festal shout of victory as he died on the cross. Betrayed, denied, and deserted, he even felt abandoned by God when he quoted a line from Ps 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In his book on the psalms, Albert Gelin comments in his book The Psalms are our Prayers, “This complaint is not that of a rebel or of someone in despair. It is that of a just man, suffering but yet assured of the love and protection of all holy God who will accompany him even to death . . . The cry is not, in the Jewish sense, an expression of despair, it does not express revolt but remains in harmony with the devotion of the Old Testament and, in consequence, expresses a sense of communion with God.” Gelin also points out that if a Jew quoted the first line of a psalm, book or document, he was in virtue of that fact invoking it in its entirety. This would lead us to believe that Jesus silently recited the rest of Ps 22 in his mind. Having expressed his sense of anguish we have reason to believe that he strongly identified with the following words, “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the congregation I will praise you. You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor him! Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!  . . . From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you will I fulfill my vows” (Ps 22:22-24). Jesus never lost trust in his Father’s power to save him. As the end of his earthly life approached, he affirmed this truth. We are told that, “He cried out in a loud voice, Father into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46). This was the teruah of Christ, his triumphant, festal cry of victory, which anticipated his glorious resurrection from the dead.