Can Jesus Pray Prayers of Repentance?

Jesus Can’t Be Penitent

If the Psalms give a window into the human emotions and affections of Jesus Christ, we must ask what we are to understand when the psalmists express repentance for sins. Can Jesus Christ be thought to have prayed these prayers?

The obvious answer is no because Jesus Christ is without sin (John 8:46; Heb. 4:15); he has no sin to confess and no need for forgiveness. Perhaps, we think, we should say that Jesus does not and cannot pray these expressions of penitence.

There are, however, three factors that may give us pause for thought.

The first factor is that confessions of sin are woven into the fabric of the Psalms in such a way that it is not easy to excise them.¹ Even when the socalled penitential psalms have been excluded (Pss. 6; 32; 38; 51; 102; 130; 143), we are left with penitence in a number of other places. Examples include (1) Psalm 19:12–14 (where “errors,” “hidden faults,” and “presumptuous sins” are admitted at least as possibilities); (2) Psalm 25:7, 11, and 18 (“Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions”; “Pardon my guilt, for it is great”; and “Forgive all my sins”); (3) Psalm 39:8 (“Deliver me from all my transgressions”); and (4) corporately, Psalm 90:7–11 (“our iniquities” and “our secret sins” vis-à-vis “your anger” and “your wrath”). The removal of penitence leaves the fabric of many psalms in shreds.

The Psalms

Christopher Ash

In this comprehensive, 4-volume commentary, Christopher Ash provides a thorough treatment of all 150 Psalms, examining each chapter’s significance to David and the other psalmists, to Jesus during his earthly ministry, and to the church of Christ in every age.

The second factor is that sometimes part of a psalm may be quoted by or echoed of Jesus in the New Testament, while another part of the same psalm expresses penitence. Psalms 6, 31, 40, and 41 are striking examples. Psalm 6 (traditionally the first of the penitential psalms) begins with an awareness of the anger and wrath of God and a deep sorrow for sins (6:1–7), but it continues—in words strongly echoed by Jesus in Matthew 7:23 and Luke 13:27—with David telling the wicked to “depart from me.” It is unnatural to suppose that Jesus simply speaks the rebuke of Psalm 6:8 but does not voice the sorrow for sins of 6:1–7.

In Luke 23:46 Jesus speaks the words of Psalm 31:5 from the cross (“Into your hand I commit my spirit”), and yet the same psalm has the clause “My strength fails because of my iniquity” (Ps. 31:10). It is awkward to suppose that Jesus speaks the words of 31:5 but not the remainder of the psalm. The words of Psalm 40:6–8 are quoted on the lips of Jesus in Hebrews 10:5–7 (“When Christ came into the world, he said . . .”). And yet in Psalm 40:12, David says, “My iniquities have overtaken me.” Again, it feels artificial to hear Psalm 40:6–8 on the lips of Jesus but to exclude Psalm 40:12.

A verse from Psalm 41 is applied by Jesus to his betrayal by Judas Iscariot (“Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me,” Ps. 41:9; see John 13:18). And yet in Psalm 41:4, David says, “I have sinned against you.” Again, there is something arbitrary about supposing that David is a type of Christ in Psalm 41:9 but not in the whole of the psalm.

The third factor is the deeply theological theme that from the very start of his life on earth, and emphatically from the beginning of his public ministry, the shadow of our sins fell on Jesus. Perhaps we see this most clearly when he submits to a baptism of repentance under the ministry of John the Baptist, in order to fulfill all righteousness (Matt. 3:13–15). He was “numbered with the transgressors” (Isa. 53:12) long before the climax, when he who knew no sin became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). The shadow of that terrible identification with sinners fell on Jesus long before the cross—certainly from the start of his public ministry. As the Heidelberg Catechism expresses it, “During his whole life on earth, but especially at the end, Christ sustained in body and soul the wrath of God against . . . sin.”²

Jesus Speaks as Our Covenant Head

The combination of these three factors makes us wonder whether in some way Jesus can speak words of penitence in the Psalms as our covenant head to whom the sins of his people are imputed.

Let me support and illustrate this argument from three modern writers.

The first is the nineteenth-century Free Church of Scotland minister Hugh Martin (1822–1885).³ In his profound meditations on Gethsemane (published in 1875), Martin explores what it meant for our sins to be imputed to Jesus. With the letter to the Hebrews, he sees Jesus saying to the Father, in the words of Psalm 40:7–8 (quoting the KJV), “Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me; I delight to do thy will, O my God.” But he then quotes from a few verses later in the same psalm and writes that Jesus in Gethsemane “exclaims also, as one heavily laden with accumulated sins, and trembling, ashamed, and self-doomed because of them—‘Innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold of me so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs on my head, therefore my heart faileth me’ (Psa 40:12 [KJV]).”

Martin goes on to write this:

In forming a judgment of the sorrow and anguish which the imputation of sin to the holy Jesus must have caused, there is a vexing fallacy to be guarded against. We are ready to suppose that however hard and terrible to bear must have been the wrath and death which were the wages of the sins for which he suffered, yet the imputation of these sins to him could have, in itself, cost him little anxiety, or caused him little sorrow, in the consciousness that he was not personally guilty of them—the consciousness of his own unsullied holiness.

Jesus prays for the forgiveness of sins, yet not for his own but ours, which he has taken upon himself and for which he suffers.

Martin then points out that even the malicious and untrue accusations that people made against Jesus caused him great sorrow. And yet these were simply from people and were false. How much more, he reasons, when “God imputed to him—the Father whom he infinitely loved—the Judge whom he infinitely revered as one who could not do but what is right—reckoned him among transgressors.” He repudiates and denies the accusations of people (e.g., John 8:48–49). But he admits that the Father’s imputation of sins to him is completely righteous, “the proposal of infinitely righteous love and wisdom—the product and decree of divine Triune counsels from everlasting.”

“True,” he continues, “the sins which were charged upon him were not his own, but they were so laid upon him and so became his, that he could not merely endure, but accept as righteous, the penalty which they entailed.” Indeed, “the sins themselves had first been made his—verily, really his—to every effect save that alone of impairing his unspotted personal holiness and perfection.” They were “his to cause him grief and sorrow inconceivable in their imputation.” “True,” Martin admits,

they were not personally his own; and so they were not his to bring self-accusation, self-contempt, despondency, remorse, despair. But they were his sufficiently to induce upon his holy soul a shame, humiliation, sorrow—yea, sore amazement—as he stood at his Father’s tribunal, accountable for more than child of man shall ever account for unto eternity!

Martin writes as one who knows he stands on holy ground. But he helps us begin to grasp what it might have meant for Jesus to speak in the language of the Psalms weighed down by the burden of sins.

More briefly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks, “How can the sinless one ask for forgiveness?” He answers,

In the same way that the sinless one can bear the sins of the world and be made sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). Jesus prays for the forgiveness of sins, yet not for his own but ours, which he has taken upon himself and for which he suffers. He puts himself completely in our place; he wants to be a human being before God as we are. So Jesus prays even the most human of all prayers with us and, precisely in this, shows himself to be the true Son of God.⁴

Graeme Goldsworthy similarly writes, “In being made sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21), Jesus takes our place by accepting the role of evildoer for us, and defines the true nature of sin and the wrath of God upon it. There is, therefore, no aspect of the Psalms in the Old Testament that does not point to Jesus and find its ultimate meaning in him.”⁵

Despite being himself without sin, Jesus was so deeply identified with his people that he can speak these words as our covenant head. Now he leads us in expressing our sorrow for sins, our confession of sins, and our penitent turning from sins.⁶ In my view the most comprehensively biblical answer to this question is that Jesus our covenant
head confesses the sins of his people in the penitential psalms and now leads us in repenting of our sins today.

Notes:

This is perhaps a little similar to the difficulty that nineteenth-century liberal Protestants experienced when seeking to excise the miracles from the Gospels.
“The Heidelberg Catechism,” in Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 301 (q. 37).
The quotations that follow are from Hugh Martin, The Shadow of Calvary: Gethsemane, the Arrest, the Trial (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2016), 24–26. The whole of chap. 2 (“The Agony of Sorrow”) is the most profound meditation on this theme that I have read.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Prayerbook of the Bible, Edited by Geffrey B. Kelly. Translated by Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness. Vol. 5 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005, 172.
Goldsworthy, Graeme. Prayer and the Knowledge of God: What the Whole Bible Teaches. Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003, 129.
For a clear presentation of this understanding, see LeFebvre, Singing the Songs of Jesus, 82–87. For discussion of the most difficult and intense of these psalms, see on Ps. 51.

This article is adapted from The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary by Christopher Ash.

Christopher Ash is writer in residence at Tyndale House in Cambridge. He previously served as a pastor and church planter and as the director of the Proclamation Trust Cornhill Training Course in London. He and his wife, Carolyn, are members of a church in Cambridge, and they have four children and numerous grandchildren.