Canter Bridge

Because of the quality of the relationship that binds YHWH and the psalmist to each other, even the most excruciating suffering is rarely if ever distanced from YHWH’s hand.

The psalms’ theodicy—their attempt to make sense of God’s behavior—is complex rather than simple. The Psalter cannot bring itself to remove causality from the list of explanations that describe God’s involvement in our pain. In my pain.

In this regard, the 150 prayers of the book of Psalms are tenaciously theological. There is no objective philosophical reflection here, no secularizing or pious banter about what happens when God is not paying attention or becomes distracted by bigger things.

Even a cry of gratitude for release from affliction like Psalm 66 finds its voice in this way:

For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. (Psalm 66:10 ESV)

The problem with such conclusions is that—carelessly read—they make it seem as though the sufferer knew all along that this was merely a test, a trying. In fact, in its darkest moments, its most hideous months, it felt like God’s enmity. It seemed like murder.

You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water …

Lament and complaint characteristically find their way to celebration in the psalms, not so much because the literary form requires a happy ending, but because YHWH does in fact listen, act, and transform.

In the sixty-sixth psalm, the poet’s desire to generate out of his experience instruction that will keep other sufferers from lingering too long in their sense of meaningless pain adds a didactic layer to his gratitude. It would be good, he seems to think, if you—in your darkness—could discover faster than I did that the passage through fire and water leads to a place worth fighting to discover.

Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer.

Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me!

When one talks too happily like this, too untouched by flame and water, the words are cheap and off-putting. When the speaker still limps, when the shadow of death still passes from time to time across his face—transformed but not erased by YHWH’s rescue—such words weigh almost more than can be spoken.