Psalms for Turbulent Times - Psalm 77: Footprints of God

Psalm 77[1]

¹ I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me.
² In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
    in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
    my soul refuses to be comforted.
³ I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints.                                                                                                                                                                                                        Selah
⁴ You keep my eyelids from closing; I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
⁵ I consider the days of old, and remember the years of long ago.
⁶ I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit:
⁷ ‘Will the Lord spurn for ever, and never again be favourable?
⁸  Has his steadfast love ceased for ever?
   Are his promises at an end for all time?
⁹  Has God forgotten to be gracious?
    Has he in anger shut up his compassion?’                                         
                                                                                                                                                        Selah
¹⁰ And I say, ‘It is my grief  that the right hand of the Most High has changed.’
¹¹ I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord;      
      I will remember your wonders of old.
¹² I will meditate on all your work, and muse on your mighty deeds.
¹³ Your way, O God, is holy. What god is so great as our God?
¹⁴ You are the God who works wonders;      
      you have displayed your might among the peoples.
¹⁵ With your strong arm you redeemed your people,      
      the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.                                               
                                                                                                                                                     Selah
¹⁶ When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you,
       they were afraid; the very deep trembled.
¹⁷ The clouds poured out water; the skies thundered;       
       your arrows flashed on every side.
¹⁸  The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind;       
       your lightnings lit up the world; the earth trembled and shook.
¹⁹  Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters;       
       yet your footprints were unseen.
²⁰ You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

Sleepless night give way to anguished days; this is the life of this faithful poet of prayer. He or she cannot let go of the fact that God is faithful, yet, at the same time, everything in their anguished reality points entirely away from this eschatological truth: that God is sovereign and still rules.

From verse 1 to 10, the unnamed distress of the psalmist is writ large. Whatever has happened (scholars think this is a meditation on the nature of a faithful life in a time of exile) the prayer tells us that the afflicted one cannot make sense of the situation. Try as they might, their spirit faints and they are reduced to moaning and groaning (echoes of Romans 8.26-28). Their soul refuses comfort (vs3). Throughout the night they think and meditate and search for a resolution. But all that flows are questions about God:
                        ⁷ ‘Will the Lord spurn for ever, and never again be favourable?

⁸  Has his steadfast love ceased for ever?    Are his promises at an end for all time?
⁹  Has God forgotten to be gracious?
    Has he in anger shut up his compassion?’

Doubt appears to overcome hope. God’s forgetfulness seems to be the only certainty. There is no free grace any more (what a bleak world that would be). There is no more compassion (just anger and rage). The nature of God is the conundrum at the heart of this psalm,

Then, all of a sudden, quite out of the blue really, the psalmist finds energy for a different track of thought. Somehow, the poet begins to remember how to remember. A new kind of meditative practice seems possible. There seems to be an element of sheer will power at work here (vs11 and 12). Parallelism, that trick of Hebrew verse, accentuates this determined act of reflecting and going deeper into the story that shapes the faith. Four times we get a variation on this deep remembering: the psalmist pledges to ‘call to mind’, to ‘remember’, to ‘meditate’ and to ‘muse’ on the deeds and actions of God as described in the foundation story of the Jewish faith – the exodus which springs from the Passover.

This faithful soul languishing in deep despair, seems to force himself or herself to spend time remembering, dragging deep memories from the back of their mind into the foreground of their lives. This places a great deal of expectation on the cognitive capacity of this distressed, sleepless and possibly depressed person.

Yet, there is also room for the high mystery of God too. The psalmist recounts a very shortened edited highlights of the Exodus: he or she refers to the  the crossing of the waters of the Red Sea and the voice of God in the terror of a violent thunder storm. And then, most revealingly, the psalmist says in the penultimate verse: ^‘Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen.’

This is perhaps the most important verse in this psalm, to my mind. For it recognises both he presence and the absence of God in the midst of a turning point, a struggle, a wrestle or a life-changing point of discernment. The psalmist is happy to allow God to both present in guiding people through the most challenging of circumstances, and also the absence of God – because God’s footsteps cannot be seen at all.

This psalm is reminiscent of the very popular, but nonetheless powerful, poem: Footprints in the Sand by Mary Stephenson in 1936.

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.

                    Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.
                    In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.
                   Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only.
                   This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life,
                   when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat,
                   I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord,
                   “You promised me Lord, 
                      that if I followed you, you would walk with me always.
                   But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life
                   there has only been one set of footprints in the sand.
                   Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?”
                   The Lord replied,
                   “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints,
                    my child, is when I carried you.”
 
As we walk through these days of great uncertainty, a sense of un-tetheredness and a realisation that this is now a long-term way of life for us in this age of pandemic, may we all know and understand that the Lord carries us through the darkness and leads us to the other side of the cause of our trembling and trauma. 

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[1] New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised (NRSVA)
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.