Canter Bridge

Psalms 77 and 78 both peer intently into the past, even to the point of employing the same vocabulary to access it, to render it recoverable by defining it with words.

Yet the two poets see a different picture. The author of the seventy-seventh psalm views a glorious past from within the painful longings of a present in which God has absented himself. Indeed, his pathos-filled language dares to suggest that God has changed. The deity of those good years no longer dwells with his people:

You keep my eyelids from closing;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
and remember the years of long ago.
I commune with my heart in the night;
I meditate and search my spirit:
‘Will the Lord spurn forever,
and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love ceased forever?
Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has he in anger shut up his compassion?’ Selah
And I say, ‘It is my grief
that the right hand of the Most High has changed.’ (Psalm 77:4-10 NRSV)

Perhaps the dead air of prolonged atheism is better than this, the knife-edge, Joban agony of one who has known God, then discovered that he has fled. Or changed. Theism like this, no opium for the soul, is rather its torment. One does not build such a faith in order to cope with life’s infelicities. To the contrary, one discovers their seamiest underside by having known God when times were better and then finding it impossible to deny him when circumstance turns putrid.

There is no comfort in the rest of the psalm, only memory. Uncharacteristically, the seventy-seventh displays no movement towards resolution. Confidence proves evasive. Only memory, its prequel, comes to stage. Sufferers know that for every ounce of trust that it serves up, memory first claims its pound of angst.

For what if, as this psalmist dares to declare, God has changed?

Psalm 78 looks backward towards a past differently configured. Israel has been rebellious in its core, hard-hearted from birth. The poet speaks ‘dark sayings from of old’ to his generation. They are the syllables of theodicy, the justification of YHWH for his stubborn goodness to a people whose tongues excelled at lies, their hearts corroded by ingratitude to the very brink of arrest.

Yet YHWH persists, prepares his land for them, builds his shrine for them, selects his king for them.

His heart—or that of his shepherd-king David, it is difficult to know—’tended them, and guided them with skillful hand’.

That hand, says the earlier poet, ‘has changed’, guides only to crush, seeks for his sheep the cliff, banishes them from their land.

‘Oh, God’, the psalmists pray in their collective lament, ‘come to us like this and not like that.’ In his temple, YHWH listens to pain, bends his ear for the sound of trust. Bares his arm.