The Wonder of Scripture with Rosalynde Welch
Friends, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you to Morgan and Kim, who organize this series so well for us every week. Thank you to J. B. for being our fearless leader, and to BYU for providing the occasion and the space for this kind of work. I dare say this kind of a lecture could only take place at Brigham Young University. I am so honored to call this my workplace. I see so many friends and associates in the audience. Thank you for being here today.
Finding God through Interpretation
I want to start with a story that was introduced to me by Rabbi Zohar Atkins: Onkelos. Onkelos was a Roman nobleman in the second half of the first century, and he converted to Judaism. He became a disciple of the greatest rabbis. He devoted himself to the study of the Torah. When the emperor found out that Onkelos had converted, he was outraged and sent a company of soldiers to arrest him and bring him back to Rome in chains. When the soldiers arrived, Onkelos greeted them and conversed with them so graciously about religion that the soldiers threw themselves at his feet and begged to convert to Judaism.
Well, when the emperor heard about this, he was again outraged, and he sent another company of soldiers to arrest Onkelos, this time with the instruction that they were not to converse with him. When they arrived, Onkelos said, “I know you’re not allowed to converse. So instead, just answer a single question. The servant carries the torch for the emperor, but for whom does the emperor carry a torch?”
Appalled, they responded, “The emperor serves no man.”
Onkelos replied, “The God of Israel, Lord of all the earth, carried a torch for 40 years for his servants the Jews.” At this, the soldiers threw themselves at Onkelos’s feet and begged to convert.
Once more, the emperor sent a company of soldiers to arrest Onkelos, this time with the instruction not to converse or to answer questions. They arrived at his house, arrested him, and started to drag him away. At the threshold, Onkelos joyfully kissed the mezuzah, a tiny prayer scroll affixed to his doorpost. The soldiers couldn’t help but ask, “What does that thing on your door mean? And why are you so happy to be going to Rome where you will be executed?”
Onkelos replied, “The emperor sits in his palace surrounded by servants to protect him from danger. But the God of Israel allows his servants to sit at home where he protects them from danger. This is the meaning of the mezuzah on my door.” At this, the soldiers threw themselves at his feet and begged to convert. After that, the rabbis say, the emperor sent no more soldiers.
This is a great story. It has good narrative bones, and it also has real theological depth. Note that the events occur after the destruction of the temple, the place where for centuries Jews had gone to worship in the presence of God. For Atkins, this is important. Without immediate access to the physical presence of God, Jews had to improvise. Looking to Jewish scripture and ritual and then showing what these were capable of meaning in the present, Onkelos was able to manifest a divine power capable of converting a legion of Roman soldiers on the spot.
Here’s what Rabbi Atkins takes from the story: “Only when immediate divine presence becomes unavailable does space open for mature interpretive consciousness. . . . The God who accompanies us post-destruction is neither absent nor overwhelmingly present, but present-through-interpretation.” His description of Onkelos’s predicament is not a bad description of our situation today. God is not absent, but neither is he overwhelmingly present through the spectacular displays we associate with the prophet Elijah or the day of Pentecost or indeed the events of the early Restoration.
To be clear, I am with Moroni in insisting that the “same God who created the heavens and the earth, and all things [that] in them are” is making himself known to us at all times and in all things. But maybe it’s fair to call ours an age of divine subtlety.
To become acquainted with God, we have to learn how to hear him, as President Nelson taught. We have to learn how to precipitate a local manifestation of the divine power that is in all and through all things. Onkelos and his many Roman converts suggest that we can do that through the interpretation of scripture.
A year ago at this podium, I channeled Onkelos when I made the case that reading scripture is a revelatory practice, which is slightly different from saying that scripture is revelation. I argued that reading is a collaboration between reader and text, and that revelation, often but not always in the form of vision, occurs as meaning unfolds between reader and text. I pointed to Christ reading Isaiah in Luke 4 and to Lehi reading a heavenly Bible in 1 Nephi 1 as key scenes for understanding how the mind of the author meets the mind of the reader in a text, and how divine revelation that overflows both of these minds can be manifest in that encounter.
If you’re a regular attender of The Wonder of Scripture, this basic idea is not new. In one way or another, several of our past lecturers—I’d name Kristian Heal, Jared Halverson, Sharon Harris, Tom Russell, Robbie Taggart, and James Goldberg—all of these have also asked why we read scripture, what we seek, and what we find in the sacred text. If I’ve understood them rightly, they’d all agree that in the end, we go to scripture for a revelation of God. And that such revelation occurs when the reader faces the text as if it were another person, inviting us to respond with love to her experiences and her questions. Our response to that invitation is what we call interpretation. And in that interaction of text and reader, God’s power is revealed.
That’s not the only reason we go to scripture, of course. We also go there to learn the patterns of God’s love visible in the long sweep of history. We go there to see how the patterns of salvation history are worked out fractally in the lives of peoples and persons. We go there to learn how to serve God and others. Interpretation is necessary for all of these ends. And so fundamentally, the text of scripture is a “revelatory text,” a phrase that I borrow from Sandra Schneiders.
I’m curious how this account of scripture strikes you, because it’s not the only one on offer. The dominant scholarly paradigm for many years has been historical criticism, which finds the meaning of scripture in its original context or in the intention of its authors. Others might say that scripture’s primary meaning lies in its dictates on matters of morality, church governance and doctrine, and so on. Still others might say that the meaning of scripture is entirely personal, whatever the Holy Ghost tells you while reading it. And so, in some sense the text itself is incidental.
Today, at the risk of redundancy, I’ll again be mining the vein that I opened in my last Wonder of Scripture speech. If scripture as revelatory text feels like old news to you, I hope you won’t be bored today. I’m gonna try to get more specific about how this process unfolds. And I’ll take a cue from Onkelos and focus on interpretation in a time of divine hiddenness. With that as our angle, there’s only one place to go: If the Book of Mormon specializes in divine revelation, the New Testament in divine presence, and the Doctrine and Covenants in divine imminence, we might say that the Psalms specialize in divine hiddenness.
The Hidden Turn in Psalm 22
Psalm 10 opens with the lines, “Why, O Lord, do you stand aloof, heedless in times of trouble?” Here, the psalmist introduces a theme that haunts these ancient songs: the confusion and fear he feels when God seems far away. This anguish shows up in the Psalms both as the cry of an individual facing catastrophe and as the communal lament of an entire people from whom God has turned his face. God may hide his face from me, or he may stand far from my own. The Psalms give voice to both kinds of distress.
Of these psalms of lament, Psalm 22 is a standout. The song opens with a desperate question from a soul in crisis: “Why does God, who accompanied my ancestors through every danger in the past, now stand so far from me?” The speaker feels dehumanized by people who ridicule his faith and predict his collapse. The injury cuts deep because these people should be his comrades. He portrays them as predators to show the extent of his rejection.
Forsaken by God, forsaken by his neighbors, he’s further forsaken by his own body. Since the moment his mother gave him birth and life, the speaker has daily felt God’s bodily protection. But now, he’s dying. He graphically describes the effects of illness on his body and then envisions his own death, decay, and return to dust. Meanwhile, his neighbors gleefully divide up his possessions. So that’s part one.
If you’ve read a few psalms of lament, you can predict what’s coming. These poems are typically structured in three parts. First, a description of the speaker’s troubles. Second, a petition for divine help. And third, praise of God’s goodness. Scholars point out that the movement from the desperation of step two to the joy of step three typically occurs without transition. The psalmist’s sudden burst of euphoria at the end can leave the reader surprised and confused.
And in fact, this is exactly what we see in Psalm 22. Verses 1 through 19, which we’ve just read, express estrangement from God, community, and self in the wake of prolonged physical suffering. That’s part one. Verses 20 through 22 petition the Lord for rescue: “Hasten to my aid, save my life, deliver me.” Verse 23 supplies a reason why the Lord should intervene: “Then will I proclaim your fame to my brethren, praise you in the congregation.” If God restores life and health, the speaker promises he will praise God’s goodness to the very people who once mocked his faith. The fact that he lives will itself vindicate God’s power. So that’s part two.
And then, as if out of nowhere, verse 24 launches directly into that praise. “You who fear the Lord, praise him. All you offspring of Jacob, honor him.” The speaker seems to have been healed. He is suddenly reintegrated into the community. He invites everybody, healthy and sick, to join him in praise. The suffering of the poet’s past is balanced by his testimony to future generations. A bolt of divine power is the link that joins past and future, the first half of the poem to its latter half. It’s all the more striking then that the moment of healing itself is hidden in the poem, as we were warned. The poet passes from step two to step three, from past to future, without narrating the salvation event itself.
One scholar has hypothesized that the abrupt shift from petition to praise in the psalms of lament marks the moment in the ancient temple liturgy where the priest speaking for the Lord would promise salvation to the worshiper. This scholar argues that the Psalms are structured around this divine word, but they do not record it. At the crucial turn from petition to praise, we can imagine the temple priest uttering something like the Lord’s promise in Isaiah 43:1, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.” If we were to reconstruct that augmented text, those verses in Psalm 22 would look something like this: “Deliver me from a lion’s mouth, from the horns of a wild ox, and rescue me; then will I proclaim your name to my brethren, praise you in the congregation.” Then we would hear the priest speaking the divine word, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.” And then the psalmist resumes, “You who fear the Lord, praise him.”
The Gap Where Readers Enter
To make the divine word present in the text would explain the sudden turn from petition to praise. But, for my money, it would also take something away from its power as a written text. Let me suggest two reasons that the textual gap, I think, paradoxically adds to the psalm’s richness.
First, literarily. The absence of the divine word from the poem removes any dividing line between lament and praise. This produces a distinctive mingling of moods, like sweet and salty water in an estuary. One scholar puts it this way, “In the Psalms of the Old Testament, there is no, or almost no, such thing as mere lament and petition. By nature, it cannot be mere petition or lament but is always underway from supplication to praise. No longer mere petition, but petition that has already been heard. It is no longer mere lament, but lament that has been turned to praise.”
This is why I called the Psalms specialists in divine absence. Their intermixing of grief and praise gives rise to a style of faithful lament in the face of God’s hiddenness. This is a voice that I often reach for in prayer. In human experience, as in the Psalms, God’s presence is not often on the surface of the present. The psalmist speaks plainly of his abandonment and alienation. He confesses that God is not present to him and freely mourns that loss. Yet even Moroni could never accuse the psalmist of unbelief or denial, because his lament is always on the way to praise. The formal entanglement of lament with praise is what allows the psalmist to countenance divine absence without courting apostasy.
So, the absence at the center of this song reflects the experience of divine absence. But I think it also remedies it. Recent scholarship in the field of performance studies argues that a similar kind of textual absence in the Gospels leaves a space for the reader to enter that world and collaborate with the text through interpretation. In the same way, I suggest, the gap in the psalms of lament between petition and praise creates an entry point. Because the Lord’s promise remains unspoken, I, as reader, must cross from petition to praise for myself. I enter Psalm 22 at the site of my own faithful lament. Once inside, I shape my experience to the text’s pattern of cry, petition, praise. I respond to its questions with my own. I might fill the gap with an ordeal of chronic pain, bereavement, mental illness, financial disaster, alienation from my community, any of the losses that mark the human condition up to and including the loss of God’s sustaining presence.
Psalm 22 in Other Voices
If I’m right that the absence of the divine word in the psalms of lament furnishes, first, the literary power to express the depth of human faithful lament, and, second, the performative power to invite readers into its world, then the Psalms should prove capable of creating sacred meaning for readers in contexts far removed from its own. Formally, it invites acontextuality. And in fact, this is the case. Jewish commentators have long associated Psalm 22 with Queen Esther. And in some communities, this text is read on Purim, which was celebrated last week. We can imagine Queen Esther’s dread as she approaches King Ahasuerus, utterly alone, passing the idols that lined the royal courts, every step taking her closer to mortal danger. We can hear her voice crying, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” as she stands before a pagan king.
James Goldberg in his fictionalized life of Christ, The Five Books of Jesus, imagines Psalm 22 on the lips of the disciples in the days after the death of Jesus. First, crying in anguish, “My God, I cry by day, you answer not; by night, and have no respite.” And then, after Mary’s bewildered and joyous Easter tidings, singing together, “If you love the Lord, praise him. He hasn’t forgotten or forsaken the suffering one. He hasn’t hidden his face. When the sufferer cried out, he heard.”
This psalm is no less relevant in 2026. I hear it in the voice of Latter-day Saint writer, Melissa Inouye, describing the misery of chemotherapy. She writes, “In the midst of unbecoming symptoms, I feel abominably weak. I feel ashamed to be so useless, so untidy. I want to crawl into a dark corner and curl whimpering into a ball. Why would I drag someone else into this sickly swamp?” I imagine her echoing the psalmist’s cry, “I am a worm, less than human. All my bones are disjointed. My heart is like wax melting within me.”
Through the gap left by the absence of the divine word from the psalm, each reader slips into the poem and joins its faithful lament. We find ourselves inside the text at precisely the site where the priest’s blessing would turn lament into praise. It’s as if the gap in the text is a portal that deposits us in the temple just at the moment where the priest voices God’s promise: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.” In other words, Onkelos was right. God is hidden. But through interpretation, God becomes present to us.
Each of these imagined revoicings of Psalm 22 represents a distinct understanding of its meaning. Esther reads divine absence as the experience of an exile among foreign powers. And the meaning she produces is national and covenantal. Inouye’s insight is that the loss of self as the result of prolonged physical pain can be experienced as divine abandonment. The meaning she produces is personal and embodied. Goldberg’s interpretation, of course, is immediately familiar to all of us because it is the interpretation we find in the New Testament.
Psalm 22 at the Cross
I am not an expert in the Hebrew Bible, much less the Psalms, but I chose Psalm 22 as the center of my lecture because today is the fourth of seven Fridays in Lent. Three weeks from today, we will commemorate Good Friday—God’s Friday—when the Savior hung on the cross with a prayer on his lips. And that prayer, as you know, was Psalm 22.
I’ll tell the familiar story here through the Gospel of Mark. In its early chapters, the Gospel of Mark moves at a breakneck pace, rushing from scene to scene with its trademark adverb “straightway” or “immediately.”
But here in Mark 15, the narrative pace slows down drastically. Jesus has predicted his own execution several times to his dismayed disciples, and now, all too soon, it’s here. The Romans condemn him to an execution designed to prolong his shame and agony. Exhausted from the abuse he endured the previous night, he’s unable to bear the cross, and so a passerby is compelled to carry it.
The soldiers crucify Jesus at the place called the Skull, and afterward, soldiers gamble for his clothing. On the cross, he endures one form of mockery after another, from the irony of the placard announcing “the King of the Jews” to the raucous laughter of onlookers. The priests and scribes make cruel jokes at the sight of the “Anointed One” nailed to a cross. Even the rebels crucified alongside him add their insults.
The heavens recoil and darken. Jesus is completely alone. He shouts with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” Mishearing, a bystander says that he has called out to Elijah, thought to be a rescuer of the righteous in moments of need. But no, Jesus expels his last breath in a roaring groan. At this, the temple veil rips in half from top to bottom.
Maybe the best thing to do with our remaining 15 minutes would be to sit with you in silence and meditate on this account, doing as the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob admonished, “Believe in Christ, and view his death, and suffer his cross and bear the shame of the world.” But this is a lecture, not performance art, more’s the pity. So, the second-best thing we can do is to produce the best reading we possibly can of the text of Mark 15. And I’d like to try to do so through its interaction with Psalm 22.
Psalm 22 is braided tightly through Mark’s account of the Passion. The gospel writer knows its lines and images intimately, and he knows that his audience will know them too. In the same way that Esther, James, and Melissa’s imagined voicings of the psalm represent different interpretations of its relevance, Mark’s pointed allusions themselves constitute an interpretation of Psalm 22. In fact, I’m about to propose that we can see Psalm 22 being interpreted at three different levels in the text of Mark 15.
The first level is the oldest and most familiar to us, so familiar in fact that we may forget that it’s an interpretation at all. Mark quotes directly from the psalm in his Crucifixion narrative at three points:
- The soldiers “divide his garments among them, casting lots,” citing verse 18 of Psalm 22.
- The passersby wag their heads at Jesus on the cross, citing verse 7.
- Jesus himself cries out in Aramaic the psalm’s opening line, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” quoting the first verse of the psalm.
Mark’s audience, recognizing the psalm, is invited to understand the Crucifixion not as a senseless catastrophe but as the fulfillment of a scriptural drama already written. Conversely, they’re invited to understand Psalm 22 as a precisely detailed prophecy of Christ’s Passion.
This Christological interpretation was taken up with gusto by early Christian commentators. Our BYU colleague Shon Hopkin reviewed the Christological interpretation given by Church Fathers to nearly every verse in this psalm, from the predatory animals as Pharisees to the birthing mother as the Virgin Mary. Dr. Hopkin extends this project by reading the final turn to praise “in the great congregation”—which posed a puzzle for early Christians who held that Christ would no longer speak after his ascension. Dr. Hopkin reads that in terms of Doctrine and Covenants 138 and its description of the “innumerable company” gathered in the spirit world to hear Christ declare liberty to the captive. The Christological reading is so foundational to Christian reception of the psalm that it can feel like it is the text’s plain meaning. But it is an interpretation, a decision to read the psalmist’s “I” as Christ’s voice and to read the sudden turn from suffering to praise as an anticipation of the Resurrection. There is comfort in this Christological reading.
To hear the cry of dereliction on the lips of Jesus as his final words, as we do in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, is almost unbearably painful. I’m not surprised that Luke and John chose different sayings. But if we understand the psalm to be a prophecy of the Atonement, then we can hear in Jesus’s final words not only his agony and isolation but also a hint of his enduring faith and hope, and perhaps also a word of comfort to the women disciples who watched the events from a distance. Remember, he shouted. It seems as though he wanted them to hear. If they recognized that Jesus quoted the first words of Psalm 22, they would naturally anticipate its final words of deliverance and praise. In speaking the opening, Jesus implies the close. And thus, for those with ears to hear, [he] reassures them that despite the darkness of the present, morning is coming, and he will yet go before them into Galilee, as he promised.
But the Christological interpretation doesn’t max out the significance of the psalm. In a recent article, another BYU colleague, Jason Combs, argued that the Gospel of Mark advances a particular theological interpretation in its use of Psalm 22—we might better say “soteriological,” that just means having to do with the Atonement. Combs points to a curious feature that has long been recognized but not well understood. The Gospel of Mark arranges its quotations from Psalm 22 in reverse order. First, it quotes verse 18 when the soldiers divide his garments. Next, it quotes verse 7 when the passersby wag their heads. And finally, it quotes verse 1, placing the opening cry of anguish as Jesus’s final words.
As we’ve seen, Psalm 22, like all psalms of lament, in its proper order, moves from suffering cry to petition to praise. And as readers, we follow the text out of the shadow of death and toward deliverance. But Mark, in reversing the order of the psalm quotations in his account of the Passion, shows Jesus moving in the opposite direction, bravely walking toward suffering, isolation, and death, in order to make himself a ransom for many. The psalmist’s opening cry is Jesus’s final shout. As Dr. Combs puts it, “Rather than traveling the narrative path in the same direction as King David, Jesus meets David at the beginning of his journey out of sin.” Jesus waits for us on the cross at our moment of greatest forsakenness. That is such a beautiful reading and it’s not even the best one in that article. He makes another point that I thought was too complicated to share in an oral lecture, but I encourage you to go find that. Just Google “Jason Combs Psalm 22 New Testament Studies.”
The Psalm That Opens Heaven
So, we’ve seen Psalm 22 interpreted in Mark 15 at two levels, the Christological and the soteriological. I’ll conclude today by suggesting a third level: the revelatory. For this, I’ll imagine the interpreter not as the disciples at the cross, nor as the writer of the gospel, nor even as the readers of the gospel, but as Jesus himself. What meaning does the psalm produce when Jesus himself enters its world through the gap between lament and praise?
Long before the scene at Golgotha, Mark has established that the Psalms are a medium of communication between Jesus and his Father. At the baptism of Jesus, Mark writes:
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:10–11, NRSV).
Note here that the voice of the Father quotes from Psalm 2:
I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: he said to me, You are my Son. Today I have become your Father (Psalm 2:7, NIV).
When the Father wants to speak to his Son, he chooses a psalm to do so. Note also that the voice from the heavens speaks the psalm through a gaping hole. He speaks the psalm through a gaping hole that has just been ripped through the sky. It’s as if God opens a window through which his presence as light and voice and spirit will stream down on his Son throughout his ministry.
But now, at Golgotha, God hides his face, unable to look at the obscenity of the Crucifixion. The light that signals the presence of God disappears. Darkness covers the land. Jesus is alone and in agony. Where can he now find the presence of God? He’s nailed to a cross. He turns to the one channel still available to him, the one his Father used at the Jordan River. He turns to the Psalms.
The once gaping hole in the heavens is hidden, but in that very hiddenness, the hole in the text opens wide. It invites Jesus to enter its empty space between lament and praise, the space where God should be. And so he does. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” You know how it ends. God is made present to him through this act of interpretation. Onkelos was right.
Scholars tell us that the outer veil of the temple was adorned with a panorama of the heavens. At Jesus’s final cry, when the veil of the temple tears from top to bottom, the heavens that closed over Golgotha burst open once again. The holy place of God’s presence is now symbolically opened to all. The veil once separated the Holy of Holies from the people. Now it’s open. The torn veil echoes the torn sky at Jesus’s baptism. It enacts and celebrates Psalm 22’s final turn toward joyful, communal praise in the great congregation. And with the centurion, we all can testify, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”
The psalm that began in divine absence ends in divine presence. At the Jordan, God opened the heavens to speak to his Son. At Golgotha, the Son opens a psalm to call on his Father. When Jesus passes through the gap between its lament and its praise, a revelation occurs, the greatest revelation of all: the presence of God summoned in the interpretive act.
Scripture holds open the space where God hides. No temple recommend is needed to enter scripture. No Sunday clothes, no interview, no high mountain. And yet God is there, and I’ve found him. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
