Canter Bridge

The famous rhetorical question of the eighth Psalm is widely misgauged:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3–4 ESV)

The assumption behind the question is too often thought to be that human beings are too measly and pathetic to warrant such divine attention. In fact, the context suggests just the opposite: there is some intrinsic glory—albeit veiled—in human beings that holds YHWH’s gaze:

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

Next to the massive dimensions of the moon and the stars, humans are manifestly small creatures. One might not expect YHWH to find them fascinating and worthy of his care. Yet in spite of their humble bearing, we read that YHWH is mindful of them, cares for them, indeed has exalted them over the rest of creation.

This divine fascination in those whom onlookers might consider marginal appears also in the book of Isaiah.

In a chapter that is saturated with Isaianic code words for both exaltation and humiliation, we learn that YHWH makes his residence in paradoxical extremities of his universe:

For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.’ (Isaiah 57:15 ESV)

The earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible finds this choice of lodging scandalous for a high and holy deity like YHWH. The Septuagint translator, tasked with the disquieting task of translating such an audacious Hebrew work of sacred literature into Greek, quietly airbrushes out the shock of it:

This is what the Lord says, the Most High, who dwells forever in lofty places— Holy among the holy ones is his name, the Lord Most High who rests among the holy ones and gives patience to the faint–hearted and gives life to those who are broken of heart. (Isaiah 57:15 NETS)

YHWH’s generous spirit remains intact in this translator’s work, but he certainly shares neither roof nor tear-stained floor with the objects of his charity. The scandal, as sensed by the Septuagint translator, throws a light upon the remarkable insistence in the Hebrew Bible that YHWH dwells with the broken.

Then again, near the end of the long book called Isaiah, we find YHWH’s fascination located once more where we might least expect to glimpse it:

Thus says the Lord: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the Lord. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.’ (Isaiah 66:1–2 ESV)

The passage possess a rhetorical structure similar to the other two that I’ve cited. It first introduces something grand that might be presumed to represent the preferred object of the Lord’s attention (sun, moon, high and holy lodgings, Jerusalemite throne and temple), then asserts that he actually cares more for something or someone that we might have considered a marginal detail—even a blemish—upon his creation. In every case, YHWH or his biblical spokesperson reports that the Lord is most fascinated, most drawn to human beings who are humble and/or humiliated.

The glory of the foil—those heavenly lights, that high palace, that immense throne—is not dismissed as anything less than beautiful or impressive. But it plays a distinctly second fiddle to YHWH’s human children in all their broken, lowly, and penitent straits.

What comfort, this, for readers like this one, no strangers we to the crushed spirit, hearts trembling before his word.