What do we do with Psalm 88? Do you know that one? Depending on where your life has turned—whether in valleys of death or green pastures or both—probably shapes your attention to that Psalm. The Psalm of lament is significant because, unlike the rest of the Psalms, it does not end in praise. This writer, a “son of Korah” (see the superscription of the Psalm), cries out in protest to God’s wrathful abandonment. He moans, “You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths” (v6). And in desperation he asks, “Why, O Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?” (v14). This is how the Psalm ends:
“Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend” (vv16-18).
It’s a troubling ending. It ends without resolution. The reader is draw into despair, into the darkness where lonely emptiness is the only companionship one can find. Psalm 88 shivers in the same dark waters as those words Jesus quotes from Psalm 22 while on the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46, Ps. 22:1a). But when we follow Psalm 22’s lament, half-way through the path of despair opens up into pastures of life, a life governed by God’s loving-kindness: “He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden His face from him but has listened to his cry for help” (22:24). And the Psalm goes on to celebrate this God who will be present, who will not let the world and any of God’s people fall into dissolution. The light of hope breaks into the despair. There is a resolution. It is a Psalm that follows the logic of Christ’s death and resurrection. We can quite easily see how it figures into the canonical salvation story.
But Psalm 88 doesn’t fit quite so easily. It’s difficult to see how it falls into our vision of God’s story. And this is the place I wanted to get to from the beginning: What do we do with a text whose message we want to identify as part of God’s redemptive story, yet whose logic resist easy assimilation? So it sits there…surd-like. Psalm 88 is that member of the family nobody knows what to do with. He’s at all the family reunions, and his name comes up in all the jovial stories, but nobody wants to get caught alone with him in the living room. He’s awkward…irrational…strange. So he sits there and everyone goes outside and explains why he’s so strange and how he fits into the whole family dynamic. But nobody takes the time to really listen to strangeness and let him explain himself, and maybe change how everyone else views the family.
Enter my professor Dr. Allen Verhey . He made a name for himself back in the 1980’s by calling into question the way the academy creates a gap between theology and biblical studies (it’s a division of labor that’s been around ever since Kant’s enlightened project). He now is breaking new ground at the intersection of theology and medicine (an area Protestants haven’t spent much time thinking about). Anyhow, in my New Testament ethics course this past week he talked about Psalm 88 and I didn’t like the way he dealt with it. He recognized its strangeness. It is strange because, like I showed above by comparing it to Psalm 22, it doesn’t testify to the hope of resurrection. It lingers in the pain and despair. It doesn’t reach beyond. It’s hard to map onto the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. So, Verhey wouldn’t let it sit there in all its strangeness. He made it fit into the salvation story as Verhey understands it. This strange text is welcomed into the meta-narrative on the condition it stay in its place, that it stay within the lines, that it only speak the lines its character is supposed to say—no straying from the script. So, in Verhey’s model of narrative hermeneutics where the overall story determines the place of each part—where the reader must start with the one voice of the Word and place the multiplicity of voices in their place in the unity—the reader sits with the voice of Psalm 88 for a little bit, but then moves on. Psalm 88 articulates a necessary phase on our way to the resurrection where we find the reconcilation of all textual voices.
But I don’t want to move too quickly from this stranger. Augustine has taught me that the strangeness of our holy Scriptures is part and parcel of the reason why God gave us texts in all their cultured humanness instead of speaking primarily in direct revelation, like with angels. For Augustine bible study is the life-long process where we find ourselves in the other. It is the dance of divine charity—the knot of unity —the work of the Holy Spirit moving in our midst to draw us to each other and participate in the Truth—that is, Jesus Christ who is made available to us in his body, the gathered church wherever she may appear. As Augustine writes,
“How would there be truth in what is said—‘For the temple of God is holy, which you are’ (I Cor. 3:17)—if God did not give responses from a human temple, but called out all that He wished to be taught to men from Heaven and through angels? For charity itself, which holds men together in a knot of unity, would not have a means of infusing souls and almost mixing them together if men could teach nothing to men.” (On Christian Doctrine , prologue 6)
God could have chosen to instruct us in truth through angels, but he didn’t and the fact of the matter is that we somehow have to see the difficulties of reading the text as part of revelation—to see that the mode or medium of revelation is also revelation. And the reason why the difficulties are there, Augustine claims, is because God desires us to discover the divine love in the Spirit’s work of unity drawing us together in a knot of unity, the dynamic of charity.
So, the difficulty of the text, the difficulty of listening to the voice of Psalm 88, is reason to rejoice (maybe in a tragically twisted way at least). For in the discovery of strangeness within the text, we are given the possible gift of discovering divine love—and the God who is love—through the struggle with one another where we hear the one Word spoken in the polyphony of humanly accented words. And just because the text is strange doesn’t mean here isn’t gospel there, and that’s the problem I have with my professor’s discussion of Psalm 88 falling into its predetermined place in his narrative structure.
The task, as far as I can see it, is to resist the sublation of this disruptive voice, to welcome this stranger without forcing him to play the part in my story that I already had for him. And the only way I can see this working out, is to put flesh and bones on the text, a body that resists sublimation. That means that this strange text that we have trouble hearing on its own terms should call us to discover someone who intimately knows the despair of the Psalmist and hear how that voice can speak the gospel. It’s a challenge to turn outward—to follow the text’s strangeness away from the written words which defy our attempts at interpretive mastery, and to an other voice whose life speaks the strangeness in a new key; a strange newness that enlivens the text, that begins again our dynamic work of forming doctrines from the revealed (and revealing) Word.
13 responses so far ↓
1 Jason // Oct 4, 2005 at 3:17 pm
Good meditation on a psalm I hadn’t paid much attention to previously. This sounds similar to what often happens with Ecclesiastes where oftentimes we force Qohelet to either speak a thoroughly pessimistic message (he’s the doom and gloom guy that makes us realize what life without God is like) or we force him to be fundamentally hopeful (either by letting the last few verses trump the rest of the book or by letting the few hopeful passages win out—i.e. a cord of three strands isn’t easily broken, there’s a time for everything, etc.). But it seems to me that Ecclesiastes is strange and we ought to sit with that. He sees both fragile joy and heartrending emptiness in the world and doesn’t easily resolve them. And there’s something I like about his observations. They feel incredibly honest and raw—a bit like Psalm 88.
I guess my question for you would be, how should we come up with a unified theology from Scripture, or should we? Are there strands of unity that hold texts like Ecclesiastes and Psalm 88 in the Christian fold? Do they somehow faithfully fit the story, even in their strangeness?
2 isaac // Oct 6, 2005 at 8:08 am
Jason, your question exposes the issues running deeply into my mind and soul. I am really struggling to figure out how the diverse voices in our Scriptures speak in the one voice of the Word of God. Professor Hays calls this struggle to figure out the unity of Scripture the “synthetic task.” I don’t know if you read his book (MORAL VISION OF THE NT), but he has a section in there about this task. He comes up with three images (cross, new creation, and community) that bring the NT into focus as a unity, a “firm common ground” for ethics. I think the proposal is good. It offers something constructive that doesn’t leave us awash in the flood of voices. But I am not sure if it answers all my questions just yet. I think I am going to have to think a bit more about this ‘synthetic task’ of reading scripture. Do you (or anyone else, for that matter) have any helpful proposals? I don’t want to dismiss systematic projects; I think they are important. But I am somewhat suspicious of their confidence because they seem to end up creating a system that doesn’t need the Scriptures anymore. Theology, I think, serves its purpose when it makes us re-read those familiar texts in new light; and makes us look more deeply at those with whom we choose to read the texts, and those we don’t choose. Systems are dangerous because they can easily silence the individual voices for the sake of making Scripture say the one thing that Scripture is supposed to say (i am thinking of reformed and lutheran reading strategies that make all texts speak about ‘justification by faith through grace.’ Sometimes that’s just not the gospel message proclaimed in a particular text).
3 Anthony Amor // Oct 10, 2005 at 10:06 am
This is a very interesting issue. One of my questions would be (similar to Psalm 88) how do you handle the story of Jonah, another book that ends alright as far as the Ninevites changing their position towards God, but Jonah stuck up on the hill still in his place of unresolve. I am not an authority at all on the continuity of Scripture, but I am a firm supporter of studying Scripture for what it is and how it interrelates. Theology is great, but I agree with you Isaac that something is lost when you go to scripture just to check on something rather than letting it flow out of you because of what you are constantly reading. I went to Multnomah Bible College and there is a Professor there that is very strong in the argument for the Bible alone. He might be a little biased, but maybe a good resource for an evaluation of Psalm 88. I think that he still holds to the view that all the Psalms are Messiahnic so there might be something to it being related to what Christ was feeling on the Cross, but not the resolution of Psalm 22. His e-mail is rlubeck@multnomah.edu. Anyways, just in case your interested. I’ll keep looking to see if you come up with anything to this thought.
4 Anthony Amor // Oct 10, 2005 at 10:07 am
Sorry, for the extra comment. The professor’s name is Ray Lubeck.
5 Jason // Oct 13, 2005 at 9:44 am
Anthony, welcome to the blog! I’ve come to enjoy the story of Jonah more and more over the years, mostly because I think it’s one of those stories that shows God has a sense of humor. To send stodgey old Jonah out to the horrible Ninevites and then have them all have a mass conversion on his watch is just wonderful.
Isaac, for a while my answer to the “unifying threads of Scripture” question came from Jonathan Wilson. He remarked that perhaps what unifies the evangelical community is the very things we argue about. So it’s not necessarily the things that we agree upon that unify us, but the ideas and practices we find worth arguing about. I’ve applied this to Scripture in a couple of papers in the past, saying that the things the authors of Scripture found worth arguing about (the lordship of Christ, the divinity/humanity of Jesus, the inclusion of the Gentiles into the church, etc.) are the things that unify Scripture. I’m not so sure of the argument any more, it seems it might be a way of avoiding the question, and I’m not sure it can be used to demonstrate the unity of Scripture in other areas (i.e. oneness of God, importance of repentance, etc., aboout which Scripture seems to have a unified voice). But maybe it’s a starting point.
6 Fred K. // Oct 19, 2005 at 2:41 pm
Off the cuff, drawing on Hans Urs von Ba lthasar, I’d say that this Psalm is answered in the NT by the abandonment of sinners that Christ took upon himself on the cross.
I also wonder if it is related to the history of the Sons of Korah. They tried to abolish the temple priesthood and make the priesthood of all believers the only priesthood. For this rebellion, they were swallowed by the earth.
What do you think?
7 isaac // Oct 23, 2005 at 11:43 am
Jason, I like the way you talk about discovering the unity of Scripture through arguments. We are unfied “by the ideas and practices we find worth arguing about.” I think you might be onto something there. In that way of thinking about the unity of the texts within the canon it makes the boundaries between the conversation within the Bible and the conversation about the bible a little blurry, in a good way I think. I mean, just under the surface of claims and questions about the unity of the biblical message for our lives resides concern about authority. What does this text mean for my life? And who has the authority to name that unity, to make those connections, to make the message of the Bible shape my life, my convictions? So, your suggestion helps, I think, because it makes the conversation itself authoritative—the conversation within the Bible invites us to join in. As Stanley Cavell says, “the conversation decides.” There is no authority for the church outside of this conversation, this appeal to the voices of the text spoken or read at the table of churchly discernment. There is no simple reduction of “authority” to the text (sola scriptura), nor is authority reduced to the whim of the interpretive community. There is a relationship between the two that is irreducible to either. And the authoritative voice emeges through the irreducible dialectic of bible and interpretive community. So, the voice is always a hoped production, or work, this relationship. How does that sound? Too Hegelian? Maybe.
8 isaac // Oct 24, 2005 at 3:46 pm
Fred K., I think you are right about how Jesus answers the desperate cries of Ps. 88 with his own death and resurrection. That definite seems like the right thing to say—we are Christians after all! But I guess I still wonder about if I really know how to listen to that voice in Psalm 88. I mean, it is so easy for me to say, “Yeah, that sounds depressing. But thank God we don’t have to wallow in that pain because Jesus rose up from the grave!” So what happens is, as I said above, “Psalm 88 articulates a necessary phase on our way to the resurrection where we find the reconcilation of all textual voices.” But I have a hard time seeing how that takes Psalm 88 seriously. We don’t have to linger there. Feel the pain. We just escape to Jesus’ resurrection. And I think there has to be better ways to deal with the pain of Psalm 88, or, I should say, better ways to listen to that voice, to really listen, not just pay lip service. I want to say that there is something we are missing about the Christian life when we can’t listen to that abandonment and let it shake up our views about the world. So, that’s why I said that maybe texts like Psalm 88 should make us pick up our eyes and go out into the world and find people who’s very life speaks of this pain. And, because they intimately know the voice of Psalm 88, they might be able to shed light on how the gospel makes sense in that voice, not escaping to another. Does that make sense?
So, since that post, I stumbled across a more contemporary voice that might offer more light on Psalm 88, another voice that speaks of the same despair and calls us to take it seriously, not dismiss it as a phase in our theological project(“Don’t worry, Jesus loves you and died for your sins and even though it feels bad now, Jesus will make it all better.” Yuck!!) The voice is that of Ellison. When I listen to the pain he experienced in racist America, I can’t help but hear Psalm 88 with a different accent. Here’s the quote from THE INVISIBLE MAN: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. You’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.” Do I see this man? Do I really hear that voice in Psalm 88? Maybe not. But how would I know if I saw this invisible man or really heard that voice in Psalm 88? I know I suffer from poor vision. How am I set free from all the ways I blind myself? Who can illumine the text? Now, as I read those voices like Psalm 88 that grind against the way I think the canonical story is suppossed to flow, I hear Ellision and think of all the others who I refuse to see. I wonder if there are ways, practices we can cultivate, that make us better at lingering with these voices instead of bumping into them on my way somewhere else, somewhere more comfortable, more familiar, not so strange.
9 MIND and SOUL - Dr Rob Waller // Jan 16, 2006 at 12:38 am
Unhappy Endings…
One of the main things that keeps me going as a Christian is the idea that there is a happy ending. Call it heaven or community or satisfaction or success or prosperity or whatever you want, but the message is…
10 eam selaw // Jan 8, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I do not have any real comment on this subject. I am just starting to study this text and came across your site. It is interesting, thought provoking and helpful. Thank you
Eam
11 isaac // Jan 10, 2007 at 3:35 am
Eam, thanks for checking out the website, and reading this post. As you continue reading Psalm 88, please feel free to comment again. Let me know if you think I’m right or wrong to push in the direction that I did.
thanks
12 SUNDAY MEDITATION: Hallo Darkness, My Old Friend: Living with the Unresolved Questions of Grief « // Oct 3, 2009 at 12:55 pm
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13 Naked Prayer: Praying the Psalms (part 4 of 5) : CapChurch // Oct 13, 2009 at 9:44 pm
[...] “Psalm 88 is that member of the family nobody knows what to do with. He’s at all the family reunions, and his name comes up in all the jovial stories, but nobody wants to get caught alone with him in the living room. He’s awkward… irrational… strange. So he sits there and everyone goes outside and explains why he’s so strange and how he fits into the whole family dynamic. But nobody takes the time to really listen to the strangeness and let him explain himself, and maybe change how everyone else views the family.” (www.rustyparts.com) [...]