THE PSALMS - Week 7

We’re back! After a week off from reflection, a selah if you like, we’re going to get stuck into some lament this week.

I can’t believe we’ve covered so much in this journey without mentioning lament – we’ve had vengeance and thanksgiving, but it’s time to sit in a place of grief with the Psalmist.

Out of this week’s readings, we’ll focus on Psalm 88 in this reflection.

Psalm 88

I read somewhere that this Psalm sounds as though it could have been written by Job. If there’s one biblical character you’d rather not be compared to, it’s Job. This is a guy who lost everything and almost everyone he cared about. Job’s tale is a search for God in the depth of despondency.

That, however, is a useful comparison as we read this Psalm. Whoever the author or narrator is, they are encountering what St. John of the Cross calls ‘the dark night of the soul’. Maybe you’ve experienced such a thing?

The voice of the poem is a desperate one. If you haven’t had what you’d think of as a ‘dark night of the soul’, where hope is all but lost, perhaps you can relate to feeling desperate for God to act in a particular situation? This writer repeats ‘I cry’, ‘my cry’, ‘I pray’, ‘I call out’; each line is drenched in emotion.

There are other parts of what we call the Old Testament that address moments like these in a wider context. Exodus 2, for instance;

“The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Their cry for help rose up to God from their slavery.  God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.” (Exodus 2:23-25)

There is traditional understanding that God hears the cries of Their people and responds. But in Psalm 88, we find ourselves in the in between, from the perspective of one who feels that God has been absent and is calling out. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us that this reveals something about the faith of Israel;

“The unanswered plea does not silence the speaker. Perhaps the speaker is in fact speaking to the empty sky, but that does not deter the speaker. The faith of Israel is like that. The failure of God to respond does not lead  to atheism or doubt in God or rejection of God. It leads to more intense address. This Psalm, like the faith of Israel, is utterly contained in the notion that Yahweh is there and must be addressed. Yahweh must be addressed, even if Yahweh never answers.” (Brueggemann, ‘The Message of the Psalms’)

Over many years of running Alpha courses and having lots of conversations about faith with people who don’t believe, a question that comes up again and again is this;

Do you ever doubt your faith? Do you ever doubt God?

For some reason, there appears to be an attachment made between the Christian faith and the inevitability of doubt. Probably, for some, it will be because some of the claims of Christianity are so wild that to an unbelieving person, they seem unbelievable! It follows, therefore, that a reasonable person (which most Christians are) would have some element of doubt about these bizarre claims. It is logical to doubt that a human who is dead could come back to life. It is fair to question whether someone could genuinely walk on water or give sight to someone who was blind.

The modern Church increasingly, it seems to me, encourages the role of doubt in a life of faith. It is reasonable to ask big questions about Christianity, particularly if you think these claims are significant, then we must explore with an open mind.

For some, however, doubts become too much and unresolvable. If we are looking for definite answers to our questions, they don’t always appear. Those doubts, then, can lead people away from faith or stop them from exploring faith further in the first place.

One possible explanation for the increased prominence of doubt in Christianity is that we have lost the art of lament.

To lament, as we see in Psalm 88, is to have that certainty in God, but uncertainty about life.

To doubt asks ‘what’ questions of God, whilst to lament asks ‘why’. To lament is rooted in a relationship of trust.

A powerful illustration of this is found in Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s accounts of putting God on trial in Auschwitz. A group of Jewish prisoners were at a loss as to why God might have allowed such atrocities to happen and why they and so many others were suffering so profoundly. They decided to carry out a trial, as if they were in a court of law. There was a prosecution and a defence and judges. After all of their arguments back and forth, it was decided that God was guilty. Such a deliberation and outcome could have left these men to abandon their faith. Instead, immediately after passing the guilty verdict, the group prayed together. These biggest of questions about God were not about the existence of God but about the nature of God. The response, even to answers we don’t want, can still be a response of faith.

The heart of one in suffering is not satisfied by easy answers.

I’m sure that many who walk away from faith because of doubt, do so because they expect easy answers and don’t find them.

Psalm 88, like the story of Job, offers no such answers. It is, instead, an honest and real depiction of the cry of a broken heart, desperate for some response.

Perhaps this Psalm can offer comfort to people in a moment of desperation. When we suffer or grieve or feel the burdens of life, there are two things we might need.

One is a pick me up, some positive words that remind us that things can be better, that goodness is still strong. If that’s the case, we can simply turn a page in our bibles to Psalms 91,92 and 93, where the goodness of God is celebrated.

The other is empathy or feeling seen in our despondency. That’s where Psalm 88 comes in. We can see ourselves in these words and find that we are not alone in these experiences. We are shown that it’s okay to feel this way and to ask such big questions of God.

A biblical faith can include lament.