Lenten Meditation #1: The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent

admin | 24 February 2021

The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
Christ Church, Lent 2021

Lenten Meditation # 1: “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness.”

Introduction:

There are seven Psalms that have come to be grouped together as the Penitential Psalms, a designation attributed to Cassiodorus in the sixth century but perhaps as derived from Augustine in the fifth or even Ambrose in the late fourth century AD. They became an integral feature of the medieval Lenten liturgies. Gratian in the 12th century explicitly mentions the recitation of the seven Penitential Psalms on Ash Wednesday. Both the patristic and medieval traditions have carried over into the reformed liturgies such as in the books of the Anglican Common Prayer tradition illustrated, for example, in praying Psalm 51 on Ash Wednesday as part of the Penitential Service. The Penitential Psalms figure prominently in the liturgies of Lent.

Following the numbering of the Psalms in the Hebrew Masoretic text which carried over into the English translations of both the Coverdale and the King James Versions, the seven Penitential Psalms are Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143. As such they belong to the whole range of the Psalter with its one hundred and fifty Psalms. But as one scholar suggests, they seem to have a certain symmetry rather than an arbitrary quality to them that is captured in the Latin titles which are attached to them in the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer.

The Latin titles derive from the first lines of each Psalm. That the Latin titles have been retained in the liturgical psalter of the Prayer Book reveals an important sense of the continuity of prayer and of the Church universal. The idea of a certain symmetry or structure belongs not only to the strong medieval sense of order but to the unity of Scripture itself within which the Psalms play a crucial role.

The Latin titles are:

Psalm 6 – Domine, ne in furore (O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation)
Psalm 32 – Beati, quorum (Blessed is he (those) whose unrighteousness is forgiven)
Psalm 38 – Domine, ne in furore (O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation)
Psalm 51 – Miserere mei, Deus (Have mercy upon me, O God)
Psalm 102 – Domine, exaudi (Hear my prayer, O Lord)
Psalm 130 – De profundis (Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord)
Psalm 143 – Domine, exaudi (Hear my prayer, O Lord)

Psalms 6 and 38 bracket Psalm 32 while Psalms 102 and 143 bracket Psalm 130. Psalm 51 at the center of the sequence stands alone as expressing the heart-note of all penitence. It shall be our Lenten devotion to consider the seven Penitential Psalms and I commend them to your study and to the discipline of committing them to memory so that they become part of you. But first, a few words about the Psalter and its place in the Scriptures.

The Psalter is the prayer book and hymn book both of ancient Israel and of the Christian Church. It occupies a special place within the Jewish Scriptures but also exercises an important role in the liturgies of the Christian Churches. The Psalms become ‘Christian’ prayers or songs through the addition of the Gloria Patri said at the end of each Psalm in the liturgy.

The Psalter or Book of Psalms gathers the whole of the Old Testament into itself in an intense and concentrated way, so much so that Luther called the Psalter “parva biblia, a little bible and a summary of the Old Testament.” Athanasius in the early fourth century describes the Psalter as epitome totius scripturae, “the epitome of all of the scripture.” The late seventeenth century Anglican Divine, Thomas Comber, Dean of Durham, says it presents the “quintessence of all scripture.”

But the Psalter does not simply gather up the Bible into itself as into a hermetically sealed box, locked and inaccessible. As Athanasius notes, using the lovely image of a garden, “each of the books [of Scripture]… is like a garden which grows one special kind of fruit; by contrast,” he says, “the Psalter is a garden which, besides its special fruit, grows also some of those of all the rest.” He observes that all of the subjects noted in the historical books and in the books of the Prophets are mentioned in one Psalm or another. And, of course, in the Christian reading of the Psalms, Christ himself in all of the moments of human redemption is also ‘found’ in the Psalms. He suggests, moreover, that the Psalter “is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed, and, seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given”, for “in the Psalter … you learn about yourself.” The Psalter “has this peculiar marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul.” Calvin echoes this point observing that the Psalms present “an anatomy of all of the parts of the soul.”

Beyond providing an intense expression of the whole range of our humanity in its righteousness and unrighteousness, the Psalter is also the voice of our souls. It teaches us how to pray. Its voice is the voice of prayer, “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” as George Herbert puts it. “The Psalms all call upon God,” Calvin notes. It is not only that prayer, as Hooker says, “signifies all the service that we ever do unto God,” but that prayer speaks to the highest possibilities of our humanity in its truth and union with the will of God.

We read the Psalter to find ourselves in each of the Psalms and finding Christ in the Psalms and ourselves in him as the head of the body. We read “as though it were one’s own words that one read … offering the words to God as [one’s] own heart’s utterance … as though they voiced [one’s own] deepest thoughts.” It is in this sense that Athanasius says that “the Psalter gives a picture of the spiritual life.” Augustine draws out the further spiritual implications of this way of reading the Psalms. In them we learn the whole Christ, totus Christus: Christ speaking to us in his own voice; Christ speaking in our own voices; and Christ speaking in the voice of the Church (Augustine, Ennarrations). To be alert to the voices of the Psalms is the interpretative challenge.

Psalm 51

If prayer means turning our whole mind and being toward God, that we may become prayer, as it were, living in and from God, then the Penitential Psalms express that turning back to God from whom in sin we have turned away. All of the Penitential Psalms signal the prayer of repentance – turning away from sin and turning towards God. At the center of the structure of the Penitential Psalms is Psalm 51, itself the Psalm which expresses most fully the theme and idea of repentance. It is, we might say, the heart-song of all repentance.

Psalm 51 is rooted in David’s awareness of his own sins as brought out in the story of David’s sin, the story of David and Bathsheba. The lust conceived in his heart for Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, led David first to commit adultery, then to conspire to have Uriah killed in battle. The story shows how David violates a number of the Ten Commandments. At issue, though, is how he comes to be convicted of his sinfulness. He is convicted through the power of story by Nathan the prophet. Nathan tells a parable about the ewe lamb of the poor man which was taken by the rich man in lieu of one of the rich man’s many lambs to provide a feast for a traveller. David’s response elicited by Nathan convicts David himself: “as the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” Nathan replies, “thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12.7).

The Psalm is often understood to be David’s recognition of his sin. And so, too, for us, it is a Psalm for the acknowledgement of our sins. But to recognise our sins means to know the goodness and the truth of God which we have negated and denied. You cannot know sin without knowing in some sense the goodness and the truth of God. The whole possibility of repentance lies in this recognition of the goodness of God against which we have acted.

The cry of mercy – miserere mei – recognizes God’s goodness and our defection from that goodness. “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness.” The prayer for mercy stands upon that understanding of the goodness and mercy of God as prior and absolute. “According to the multitude of thy mercies, do away mine offences.” The psalmist appeals to the power of God’s mercy in taking away what stands between us and God. We can’t bridge the gap our own sins have created. But to acknowledge the gap is to grasp the prior goodness of God as that against which we have acted. Sin means the wilful refusal of a known good. The point is that all sin is really against God, “against thee only have I sinned.”

David confesses his sin as it were in this Psalm and in so doing provides us with the words of the confession of sin for ourselves. To confess is to want to see ourselves as God sees us. Our thoughts and actions which hurt ourselves and others are fundamentally actions which contradict our relation to God. “Against thee only have I sinned.” God alone is the source of the goodness and the truth of all things.

You may ask, “how can I hurt God?” The answer is that you can’t anymore that you can tweak his nose. What you hurt is yourself (and others) – “the wages of sin is death.” The soul in sin is dead to God. Our sins try to make the goodness of God not-good. We try not to be subject to him but to make him subject to us. Such is folly. But that we might see at once how hideous our sins are and what in reality they intend, we must look at the cross in the Christian understanding. There we see what sin attempts, namely, the death of God. Yet God suffers for us so that by Christ’s passion and death, the very means of our self-alienation and destruction may become the means of his transforming grace and glory.

The psalmist continues with what is for many a troubling and difficult verse. “Behold, I was brought forth in wickedness/ and in sin hath my mother conceived me.” This is the concluding verse with respect to the initial acknowledgment of sin. Sin is always about us, about our thoughts, words, and deeds. It is not our business to confess the sins of others. So the point here is that the psalmist is not blaming his mother nor his family for his own actions. Nor must we blame others, nor circumstances, for the things which we have conceived in our hearts and done with our hands. This verse simply highlights the universal condition of human sinfulness; it looks back to the sin of Adam and Eve in the story of the Fall. Our separation from God taints every thought, word, and deed. Our motives are never truly pure; they are invariably mixed and, indeed, mixed up.

The full acknowledgement of ourselves as sinners in the first five verses of Psalm 51 does not end the story any more than it concludes the Psalm. To know one’s sin means knowing the goodness of God against which one has acted. That leads to the subsequent thought of God’s goodness not as against us but as towards us in purgation, in illumination and in restoration or union. God’s goodness and truth is prior to our lies and wickedness, hence the recognition that “thou requirest truth in the inward parts.” This is to begin to seek to be cleansed and restored. “Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;/ thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

This is all part of the turning back to God that is the signal mark of repentance. Here is the voice of the penitent, our voice, to God. “Turn thy face from my sins,/ and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart, O God,/ and renew a right spirit within me.” This is the great truth of repentance; it seeks restoration and wholeness which can only be found in God. Our penitence sings God’s praises in words which come to shape the very pattern of our liturgies. “O Lord, open thou my lips,/ and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.” Prayer and praise are one. They go together.

Such praise in penitence opens us out to the heart of Lent, namely, to our hearts in contrition and sorrow. Contrition moves us to prayer and praise. This is the great insight of the psalmist. “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit:/ a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise.” Such prayer is impossible without the recognition of the goodness and mercy of the Lord which runs through Psalm 51 and joins this Psalm as the mother source of repentance to all of the Psalms of Penitence.

In the Christian reading of this Psalm, we are gathered into the heart of Christ through his passion and death for us, in his being broken on the cross. Such is his sacrifice. To think Christ’s sacrifice is to be broken-hearted ourselves, to be convicted even as David was convicted. It is to pray and to give praise; to find our voice in the voice of Christ.