Be gracious to me, O God,
according to your loving-kindness;
According to the greatness of
your compassion blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my
iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions, and
my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I
sinned and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified when
you speak and blameless when you judge.
Behold, I was brought forth in
iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I
shall be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness; let
the bones you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins and
blot out all my iniquity.
Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of my
salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Then I will teach transgressors
your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you.
Deliver me from the guilt of
bloodshed, O God, you who are God my Savior, and my tongue will sing of your
righteousness.
Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth
will declare your praise.
Psalm 51 is often used as a prayer or public reading at the beginning of
the Lenten season, especially on Ash Wednesday (All three years of the Revised
Common Lectionary use this Psalm on Ash Wednesday). The words
are powerful and convicting – they are at once a lament over the hopelessness
of our sin and of the glorious promise of our forgiveness from God. When read
aloud this Psalm takes us from the depths to the heights in just a few verses
of the most real language of humanity I’ve read.
The Psalm is even more
potent when we take its attributed setting into account.[2] If it is
true that this lament Psalm is the result of David being busted by Nathan over
the king’s infidelity with Bathsheba and the subsequent murder of Uriah,[3] then the
contrition and repentance we read of is of the most raw, gut-wrenching reality
of David’s life.[4]
He has been busted in front of “God and everybody;” his sins are laid out for
him to examine at the tip of Nathan’s bony finger shaking under his nose.
What passion! What
completely un-churchlike emotion! When we consider our sin - not a bullet-list
of particular peccadillos that are more failings of virtue than crimes against
God – our sinfulness and our
alienation from the full presence of God in our lives and in this world we are
brought low, as though we are descending into hell itself.
We’ve seen hell this year.
We’ve seen Sandy Hook and Aurora and we’ve seen the brokenness of our neighbors
and our own hearts. We pray, breathlessly, “God have mercy” at these events,
recognizing our powerlessness to change, let alone comprehend the wickedness we
see in them. We are breathing the same prayer of Psalm 51- God have mercy…
We don’t do sin well. Our
culture would just as soon call sin a depression, a mistake, a moral lapse. We
would rather go to therapy and “fix” the cause of the error, break the
addiction, solve the problem rather than do the even more painful work or
repentance. The church isn’t really helping this situation – many of my Baptist
neighbors sit through sermons that are the embodiment of Christian Smith’s
moralistic, therapeutic, deism.[5] As long
as sin is something to fix or be remedied the reality of Psalm 51 and
consequently of Lent is reduced to platitude and high-minded moralism.
Barbara Brown Taylor has
commented, “Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human
beings will continue to experience alienation, deformation, damnation and death
no matter what we call them. Abandoning the language will simply leave us
speechless before them, and increase our denial of their presence in our lives.
Ironically, it will also weaken the language of grace, since the full impact of
forgiveness cannot be felt apart from the full impact of what has been
forgiven.”[6] In much
the same way that my temptation to adopt more Mennonite traditions that would
take me apart from culture, the manner in which we are treating the sin that
permeates Psalm 51would render us impotent in its face. I’m not going down the
path of “naming sin as sin” as is the temptation; rather I believe that we
cannot appreciate what is personally my favorite Psalm so long as we pussy-foot
around the causes of our brokenness before God Almighty.
The hook for me in Psalm
51 is in the line “let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed
rejoiced.” Without getting into issues of theodicy,[7] this
verse represents the “middle moment” of the Psalm and serves as the hinge of
the speaker’s spiritual feelings. I can taste those words, begging to hear a
song of home, of hope, of something pleasant. I’ve cried for those same things
– to hear joy and gladness amidst the constant cadence of bad news. I’ve felt
at times that my spirit was ground into powder and blowing away in the breeze. This
is a real lament and a request for the one true blessing – “God have mercy…”
If we can crawl into the
suffocating space created by this Psalm and especially by the cry for joy in
the midst of the reality of our sinfulness then we can crawl through Lent. It
is true that our joy will not be made complete until the Resurrection that feels
so far away; but for myself and for my Baptist siblings, we would do well to
crawl for a bit just now, praying “God have mercy…”
[1]
Translation by Andrew Sullivan. See Sullivan, Andrew, “Psalm 51” in First Things no. 206 (2010), p. 64.
[2]
See Claire Brooks, “Psalm 51,” Interpretation
49 no. 1 (1995), p. 62-66. See also Frederick j. Gaiser, “The David of Psalm
51: Reading Psalm 51 in Light of Psalm 50,” Word
and World 23 no. 4 (2003), p. 382 – 94.
[3] 2
Samuel 11-12.
[4]
I’m not including the pain David feels at the death of the son conceived with
Bathsheba who dies in infancy; that episode would certainly bring a newer,
deeper, grief.
[5]
See Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The
Religious and Spiritual Lives of America’s Teenagers, Cambridge: Oxford
University Press, 2009.
[6]
Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin.
Cambridge: Cowley, 2001.
[7]
The verse is troubling in that it implies God has “crushed” the bones of the
speaker, thus demonstrating that God is responsible for the sin or at least the
suffering that the speaker is experiencing.
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