Psalms for Turbulent Times - Psalm 39: My hope is in you

Psalm 39

The Goodman Family, Friday Night Dinner Channel Four

¹    I said, ‘I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue;
     I will keep a muzzle on my mouth as long as the wicked are in my presence.’
²    I was silent and still; I held my peace to no avail; my distress grew worse,
³   my heart became hot within me.
     While I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue:
⁴    ‘Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days;
     let me know how fleeting my life is.
⁵   You have made my days a few handbreadths,
    and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight.
    Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.  
⁶  Surely everyone goes about like a shadow.
    Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
    they heap up, and do not know who will gather.
⁷   ‘And now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you.
⁸    Deliver me from all my transgressions.
     Do not make me the scorn of the fool.
⁹     I am silent; I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it.
¹⁰  Remove your stroke from me;
     I am worn down by the blows of your hand.
¹¹  ‘You chastise mortals in punishment for sin,
     consuming like a moth what is dear to them;
      surely everyone is a mere breath.  
¹² ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry;
      do not hold your peace at my tears.
      For I am your passing guest, an alien, like all my forebears.
¹³  Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
      before I depart and am no more.’

This is a complex and unusual psalm. At its heart is a study and acceptance of mortality. As with the previous psalm, this is a theological journey from despair to hope rooted in the experience of unexplained bodily afflictions. The suffering and fleetingness of life leads the writer to link these things with God. He or she has a sense of being ‘consumed’ by God’s punishment for unnamed sins. Yet again, there is an uncomfortable connection (to modern ears, perhaps) between sinfulness and the punishment of God experienced as illness or suffering.

The psalm starts with the plaintiff deciding they are not going to speak out about their suffering. They are not going to blame God. They are not going to question it (vs1-3). But it all becomes too much. The silence acceptance of the suffering does not work. It causes inner pain. There’s an elephant in the room and it needs calling out. But the psalmist does not want ‘the wicked’ to join in a finger-pointing exercise (vs1). It seems that going down the route of blaming God in their presence will only serve their intentions of denying God. But, what the Hebrew bible teaches us in the end – and especially the psalms – is that it is important to wrestle faithfully with God rather than dismiss God’s involvement or blame God.

So, this ill and suffering person breaks their silence. It has been building up like a hot volcano in them. They need to articulate their questions. They cannot hold back any longer. And out comes the big question: ‘How long am I going to live for?’

In an episode of Friday Night Dinner, the hit Channel Four comedy of a secular Jewish family meeting weekly for their Sabbat meal, it is the birthday of Martin Goodman. He is the middle-aged father of two young adult boys, Adam and Jonny and is married to Jackie. He walks around the house, mostly not wearing a shirt, often with a calculator to hand always doing silly sums. He has found some kind of statistical analysis that predicts the ‘death days’ of all his relatives, his wife’s and sons’ included.  They don’t want to know. But he tells them anyway! He is particularly peeved that he is predicted to die in 2048, two years before a colony of humans might be established on Mars. Jackie, Adam and Jonny are horrified by the dates, yet strangely fascinated. I guess we all are. Yet we don’t want to know, understandably.

In confronting his own mortality, the psalmist chases his thoughts down several despairing tunnels – surely our life is but a mere breath; surely we are shadows and phantoms of reality; surely all our turmoil is for nothing (vs5-6). The circumstances of his or her life has created an existential crisis of great magnitude. But rather than rail against God in anger, the psalmist choses a different path. And in verse 7, at the epicentre of the anguish and the poem, comes his only answer: ‘And now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you.’

Silence leads to truthful speech. Despair leads to hope worth waiting for. Loss of control leads to a trusting perspective. This trusting perspective even articulates an apparently contradictory request. The psalmist does not ask God to turn God’s face towards him or her, as might normally be expected. With radical confidence, the psalmist asks God to ‘turn his gaze away’ so that he or she may smile again. What are we to make of this?

Walter Brueggemann says this: ‘The Psalm evidences courage and ego strength before Yahweh which permits an act of hope, expectant imperatives, and an insistence that things be changed before it is too late.’[1] The psalms in general, and this psalm in particular, encourage honesty and a strong sense of standing up before God rather than living passively and fatalistically.

We are not to know the time of our death. But we are to live life with courage and hope – even if that means asking God to leave us alone so we can smile again. The fact that the psalmist asks God to do this shows a tremendous sense of worth in God’s eyes and a willingness to speak out with courage rather than hide cringingly, as if God is a despot. I have huge admiration for this psalmist. I would like to spend time with them and talk with them over a meal – perhaps a Friday Night Dinner. I just don’t want to know the span of my life: that is for God, alone, to hold and handle.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, ‘The Costly Loss of Lament’ Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1980), p66 [Quoted in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Vol IV, p 839]