Sorrower's song

Last time we looked at three things the Psalmist was going through during his time of great trouble. These were that he experienced life without living, he faced death without hope and he was asking questions without receiving answers.

So how does the Psalm help us? I have four suggestions:

1. The scream of pain

What I mean here is that the scream of pain is a valid and legitimate expression to God of what it means to be a believer in a fallen world. It is tragic when we think that as believers we somehow shouldn’t feel pain, shouldn’t express it, or should never express how we’re feeling to God. Here the very structure of the Psalm is a lesson for us. In Hebrew, the last word of the Psalm is ‘darkness’. That’s how it ends: there is no happy ending.

Do you feel how pervasive this is? When he looks upwards he sees only God’s wrath, not his loving face; when he looks inwards he sees only terror and despair; when he looks outwards he sees only absent friends and when he looks forward into the future he sees only death and darkness. God is silent. He has nothing to say. We need to create a space in a Christian spirituality for this kind of grief.

Maybe parts of this Psalm give you the vocabulary for your grief; perhaps it is grief that no one else really knows you carry. If we don’t yet know what it is to feel what the Psalmist felt, we probably will one day. And here is God himself saying to us: here are words to say and sing and to pour out your heart to me with me. Derek Kidner said about a Psalm like this: ‘The very presence of such prayers in Scripture is a witness to his understanding. He knows how men speak when they are desperate’. Isn’t that lovely? God knows how men and women speak when they are desperate. Rather than leaving you without words, God himself says you are not alone, others have been there too, and you can use how they felt to express how you feel. Here, in my Word, are words which can be your words.

2. The perspective of death

Second, the Psalm shows us the perspective of death and one man’s struggle to come to terms with the reality of death. As it does so it says to us: death is coming. What you have in this world will one day come to an end. Death is real and it comes to us all.

In A Grace Disguised, Gerald Sittser describes how when people who suffer feel unspeakable pain they naturally reach for ways of coping with it. Some fight the pain by denying it: pictures are hung, names are never spoken, sadness is never expressed, tears never shed, stories never told.

Some fight the pain by bargaining with it — perhaps a new relationship or a new job or a new house will make it go away. Some cope by indulging appetites to numb the pain — a sexual rampage, or alcohol, or even just TV, patterns of behaviour emerge which develop quickly into addictions. Some resist the pain by venting their anger — at God, at the disease, even at the loved one who has now gone and left them like this.

Sittser’s discussion of each of those things is compassionate and tender, but he says that ultimately there is one way of responding which breeds healthy ways of thinking. It is something which we wouldn’t actually think of as helping: it is realising that at the core of loss is the frightening truth of our mortality. We are creatures made of dust. Life on earth can be wonderful and often is — but in the end all of us will die. It is facing this, realising this, and realising that this is what happens in God’s world that enables us to process our pain in realistic ways. What I think the Psalmist does for us is introduce true perspective into our lives.

Here is the best illustration of perspective I’ve heard. Imagine you’re standing on one side of a door about to open it and someone says: ‘On the other side of this door is a honeymoon suite in a five star hotel’. You open it and find yourself in someone’s living room. What you would think is: what a dump! But imagine before you opened the door someone said: ‘On the other side of this door is a prison cell’. As you walk in and find yourself in the living room you think this is luxury! Perspective changes the way you experience the event.

The perspective of the Bible is: live long enough and we will suffer. Give your heart to others and it will be broken. Love others and they will leave you with indescribable pain. If you know now what to expect, if you realise that God has not promised you a problem-free, pain-free, sorrow-free existence, then it alters the way we think about the world. As a Christian it will put you out of kilter with the rest of the world.

In the Victorian era everyone was obsessed with death, it’s all they talked about, and no one ever mentioned sex, it was the great unmentionable. Our culture is the opposite — we’re obsessed with sex and talk about it non-stop while we never mention death. The massive move towards body surgery, face-lifts, botox, in essence is a way of saying: we will do all we can to defy death because the best thing in the world is to be young and to try to live forever. That perspective places you on a path heading for catastrophic pain which you will then deal with in wrong and damaging ways.

3. The diagnosis of prayer

I don’t think we can lessen the blackness of this man’s pain, nor should we try to. But I think there are things in what he says which carry rays of hope which perhaps even he himself has not noticed.

Notice that although this man is engulfed in darkness he is not totally lost in the darkness, for he is always at every stage aiming his words at someone, at God, even though he cannot feel his presence. Notice that after all the ‘I ams’ of verses 4 and 5, then in verses 6-8 we get a series of ‘You haves’ — I am like this, I am suffering in this way, because you have done it.

This way of praying diagnoses the problem in two helpful ways. First, even in his despair, although he is wrestling with a God he cannot understand, he knows that he is not living in a world without meaning. His words are not, ‘fate has done this’ or ‘ill fortune has done this’, ‘I am not the victim of circumstances nobody can control’. Rather, he says, ‘you have done this’.

This man recognises that his fundamental problem, the place to lay the complaint is not at his parents’ door, nor at his friend’s door, but at God’s door. Recognising who is responsible for your pain stops you attacking others, it reduces the collateral damage of your anger and despair and it takes it to the person who can deal with it and is responsible: God himself.

But more than this, secondly, to simply pray in itself, even without answer, is always a sign of spiritual health — talking face to face with someone is always healthier than talking to yourself. Now, of course, this man’s problem is that he feels as if he is just talking to himself, there’s no response, no reply, and yet he’s not talking to himself alone. ‘You have done this’ — he is naming his problem. And so, to recognise what your problem is, and name and address it directly, is always to place yourself on a better path than to deny your problem or not know what it is.

There are analogies to this in physical health. To know that you are ill is, generally, to be nearer to a cure than to be ill without knowing it. You know what the problem is and take it to God.

Now, in this Psalm, more than this I don’t think we can say. There is no answer to his prayers, no light at the end of the tunnel, but notice that right to the end he doesn’t stop praying. Right there in the darkness, his last words are not to himself saying ‘there’s no point’. His last words are: ‘You have taken ...’ Prayer itself diagnoses the problem.

4. The cry of the damned

But, lastly, and I hope most comforting of all, is what I’ve called the cry of the damned. That is how this man feels. Your wrath lies heavily on me. Your wrath has swept over me. I am at the gates of hell and when I die that’s where I’ll be, lost forever. I think what he’s describing in this Psalm is the death that he dreads: death under divine wrath and he describes it so intensely that he’s become convinced that even though he’s a believer this is what is going to happen to him.

Imagine a pastor sits at the bedside of a dying Christian and, no matter what words of comfort he offers, the dying person is sinking deeper and deeper into despair that he or she will face eternity without Christ. That happens. It is possible to truly belong to Christ and yet to die convinced that he will say to you, ‘Depart from me, I never knew you’, when in fact waiting for you are words of welcome into heaven. Perhaps that’s the situation in Psalm 88, a believer is dying without assurance.

I want us to see that this cry of the damned, in the Psalm, has been cried by someone else on our behalf, so that we, no matter what we’ve done or what the extent of our pain, will never ever be abandoned by God. Mark 15.33: ‘At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. At the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi Eloi, lama sabachtani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”’

What happens here is an experience of the darkness and the absence of God that is more real and more terrifying than the darkness that engulfed the Psalmist, and more terrifying than any that can ever grip our souls.

Here is the Son of the Father’s love, in some mysterious way abandoned and seeing only God’s back, only the raised sword of execution from the Father he loved and delighted in from all eternity. And that cry, in verse 34, that is the cry of the damned — but it is the cry of the damned for us. For his own. Jesus was abandoned so that we might never be and what that means is this: he was really abandoned so that we can only ever feel like we’re abandoned. Your experience of darkness and abandonment might be very, very real, and the darkness might seem to have no end, daybreak might feel like it will never come — but, although your feelings are real, your abandonment is not. Christ was abandoned so that you need never be.

David Gibson,
minister at High Church, Hilton, Aberdeen

Second of two articles on Psalm 88

1. The scream of pain

2. The perspective of death

3. The diagnosis of prayer

4. The cry of the damned

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