Canter Bridge

A man’s bones ache under the guilt he acknowledges. His heart lies shattered.

That the psalms should present King David as knowing this, indeed, that they should have him say so in the first person is testimony to the enduring, transparent genius of the biblical David. Even the king—reader of Torah, spokesman for justice—’went in to Bathsheba’. Is there anyone, one asks in the shadow of this, who has not had his Bathsheba? Has anyone not known the grating rot of bones, the fearful terror of a heart that’s been crushed?

The fifty-first psalm probes at the layers of a man’s knowledge of his own sin. It studies the fear that God might turn his face from such a sinner, finds the language to beg the deity instead to turn his face from my transgressions. It is a deeply moving exposé of a man who has been caught on camera when he is not at his best, a deer-in-the-headlights snapshot of the individual who has acted as though driven by a death-wish, whipped onward by the need to lose everything.

It is David at his worst. Yet in the odd logic of grace, it is David at his best.

How can this be so?

The entire psalm sees human brokenness not as an object worthy of contemplation for its own sake. There is no reveling in depravity here. Indeed, only the psalm’s title—usually acknowledged to represent a late-stage literary locating of a pre-existing poem—names the violation. The psalmist himself refers with a persistent plural to his own sins but does not identify them for the reader who is no doubt expected to fill up this generic container with his own.

Paradoxically, the visceral outpouring of guilt that occupies the lines of the psalm merely construct the platform upon which the depressed pray-er cries out for divine mercy:

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin. (Psalm 51:1-2 NRSV)

These, after all, are the psalm’s opening words. Its final ones are, similarly, a plea for mercy. All rests upon God’s ability and willingness to respond tenderly. The poem’s drama turns upon the tension created by the wider assumption that he can and will, on the one hand, and the psalmist’s own sense that his own failure might be too deep for this, on the other.

It is a deeply human drama, not a contrived morality play. It is too common to our experience for publication in anything but an audacious anthology like that of the biblical psalms. The soft underbelly of human experience is placed on stage as though it were—for it is so—far more central to life as we live it than any of us cares to acknowledge while others are listening in.

The writer feels there is no good in him, no pretext at all for continued usefulness in an arena that requires justice and right thinking.

Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.

He can find no innocent place to stand, no moment prior to his confessed depravity. So, he must depend upon God’s ability to create something pure and good where only chaos has swirled:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.

This translators’ (NRSV) decision for ‘put a new and right spirit’ over against the traditional ‘renew a right spirit’ is a discerning move, for the context fairly demands this uncommon nuance from the Hebrew חדשׁ (chaddesh). In concert, the vocabulary pleas for God to bring his generative creativity to bear on this man in the state in which he finds himself. That is to say, on me, in this muck in which I founder.

The psalm’s most astonishing claim comes in the English text’s verse 17:

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

It ought to be read slowly and repeatedly.

If this description of reality is factual, if it is trustworthy, then all that we think we know of God, all that construes our science of religion, is stood upon its head.

God, by this description, is then good, indeed better than we knew. The rot of bones is the immediate precursor to the incense of God’s presence, indeed the aromas mingle in olfactory embrace. Grace is everything.