Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology
Psalm 39 continues the theme of repentance begun in Psalm 38 by reporting the remorseful sinner’s internal thoughts: “I said [to myself], let me keep my ways from sinning by means of my tongue; let me keep my mouth from violence [emending the Hebrew from m-ch-s-m to m-ch-m-s, a minor change] while the wicked are before me.” The penitent person seeks to avoid social solidarity with cruel, sadistic, thoughtless people, preferring social alienation to such company. The psalm ends on a closely related theme by asking God to “Hear my prayer, O Yhwh, listen to my cry. Do not be silent about my tears. For I am an alien with you, a sojourner like my ancestors.” Why this self-portrayal as an outsider who needs divine hospitality? Why appeal, as the psalmist does, to the age-old convention that those who wander through the land must receive support from those who live there, and most of all from the God who does? Isn’t it an odd way to describe the condition that the sinner faces when, cognizant of wrongdoing, he or she seeks a remedy?
The answer, of course, is that this sense of alienation is precisely what we feel in such a circumstance. Where do we turn? How do we get over the humiliation that we must go through? Here we have a profound insight from the Psalter, according to which the only place to turn is to the God who welcomes aliens, the God who understands.
I recently came across a story by Juergen Moltmann in his 2008 autobiography, A Broad Place (Fortress Press). There he talks about his experiences as a nineteen- and twenty-year old prisoner of war at the end of World War II, during which he had been drafted into the Wehrmacht while still a teenager. Sometime at the camp, a chaplain came and brought the men Bibles. In the course of reading the Bible he encountered the gospel of Mark and near its end the plaintive cry of Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Moltmann writes about that discovery, “I felt growing within me the conviction: this is someone who understands you completely; who is with you in your cry to God and has felt the same forsakenness you are living in now. I began to understand the assailed, forsaken Christ because I knew that he understood me” (p. 30). He understood me.
The singer of Psalm 39 also assumes that God understood him or her and was ready to heal. The psalmist assumes that a request for information about the length of his or her life (or as the medieval commentator Rashi thinks, the length of suffering to be endured as punishment) is reasonable and will find an answer. Appealing to the temporary nature of human existence and thus the inappropriateness of prolonged divine discipline (verses 5, 11 — they form an envelope around the central idea, verses 7-10), the psalm asks for the removal of sin through suffering, seeking to find meaning in the dislocation caused by sin. (The psalm does not assume that all suffering comes as punishment for sin, so we can’t draw too many conclusions here!) The restoration of health and happiness will allow for a meaningful life before God, not a return to sin, because the psalmist has understood reality better and has become a better person. The hospitable God who receives sinners can count on this psalmist to live the gracious life he or she had earlier forsaken.
There is much else to say about repentance, but it is always useful to remember the nature of the One with whom we repent. The God of Israel is neither a cruel tyrant eager to find fault, nor a cavalier ruler ignoring the behavior of now abandoned subjects. Rather, this is a God who cares deeply about humankind and seeks its betterment. Repentance is part of that process of betterment. Hence this psalm and others like it.
Join me next week at the Sermon Seminar of the Austin Graduate School of Theology. The congenial, thoughtful group there is always worth being with!