The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
Christ Church, Lent 2021
Lenten Meditation # 2: “O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation,/
neither chasten me in thy displeasure” (Psalm 6.1)
Domine, ne furore is the Latin title to Psalm 6 derived from the first half of the first verse. Along with Psalm 38 which bears the same Latin title and for the same reason, it brackets Psalm 32, Beati, quorum, “Blessed is he (those) whose unrighteousness is forgiven.” These three Psalms form a triplet of penitential reflection. Our intent is to concentrate upon the opening lines in relation to the other verses in each Psalm in order to identify the voice of the Psalm, the different tonal qualities of the voices of penitence in the Penitential Psalms. The idea which is part of the devotional tradition in the liturgies of the Church is that in praying these Psalms, their words become our words of prayer through which we enter more fully into the heart of all prayer, the prayer of Christ. Tonight we focus on Psalm 6 as the preliminary Psalm of Confession.
The Psalter or the Book of Psalms is also called the Psalms of David. What is true for the whole remains true for the part. This Psalm is specifically entitled “A Psalm of David” in the traditions by which the Psalms have come down to us. It is largely a title derived from the Septuagint translation (Greek) as following the Hebrew. Psalm 6 is a Psalm of David within the later designation of the Psalter as The Psalms of David.
The Psalms we have suggested are essentially a prayer book giving us, as Athanasius says, “a picture of the spiritual life,” providing us, as Calvin notes, “an anatomy of all of the parts of the soul,” and presenting to us, as Dean Comber says, “the quintessence of all scripture.” To this we may add St. Basil’s trenchant remark that the Psalms are “a compendium of all theology” so much so that “no other book is needed for spiritual uses but the Psalms.” Given such encomia of the Psalter, what does it mean to say the Psalms are the Psalms of David? Perhaps it is something like this. In David we have a kind of picture of every man. David is the great and attractive figure in the Jewish Scriptures or Old Testament. But why? Because he constitutes an example for all. His history concerns and embraces all. In other words, we are in the story of David.
This idea is wonderfully expressed by the poet/preacher John Donne. Speaking about David, he says, “his Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King.” David epitomizes the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. For the Christian understanding, that is why the Davidic lineage of Jesus is so crucial. Jesus as “the Son of David,” as the blind man refers to him in the Gospel for Quinquagesima Sunday, and as the Canaanite woman on the Second Sunday of Lent, locates Jesus within the scope of Jewish Messianic hopes and what will become the newly emerging Christian understanding. Moreover, David epitomizes the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity not only in its truth but also its untruth. As Donne notes: “his sinne includes all sinne.”
Something of the essential character of our humanity and something of the essential character of our sinfulness is revealed in the figure and story of David. “We need no other Example,” Donne says, “to discover to us the slippery wayes into sin, or the penitential ways out of sin, than the Author of that Book, David.”
Psalm 6 in its opening phrase provides the preliminary approach to penitence, the entrance note, if you will, to the heart-note of all repentance which we saw in Psalm 51. Here that heart-note is voiced in the second verse, “have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak.” But the preliminary note is something different. “O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation, / neither chasten me in thy displeasure.” What is this beginning? We begin where David himself begins, we might say. We begin with the wrath of God, which is to say, we begin with the absolute sense of the opposition or separation between us and God, between where we are and where God is; in short, between sin and righteousness, between us in our sins and God in his righteousness. That is challenging.
God is not an angry God, remote, harsh, and cruel whom we must somehow try to placate by a cowering, simpering, grovelling and wheedling superstitious subservience. God is not a tyrant who is moved by arbitrary whim and whimsical fancy. Such a God is not worthy of belief. What then are we to make of God’s indignation? Indignation means anger or wrath and the displeasure of God. This is not akin to the wrath of man about which the Scripture wisely affirms that “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1.20).
No. This wrath with which the Psalm begins and with which we begin is nothing less than the righteousness of God. It concerns the essential rightness of his own eternal will, first and foremost, and then the rightness of his will in the just order of creation and providence, redemption and sanctification. The wrath is our sense and realization of our separation from that righteousness which is the truth of our being in the whole order of creation. It is about how we have set ourselves in opposition to the known will of God. We see God, as it were, but only as the searing light which pierces the darkness of our self-willed distance from Him and his truth. The sense of wrath manifests or makes known the sense of our untruth.
Confronted with the truth of God, inescapable and majestic, we find ourselves naked and exposed in our sinfulness. There is simply the gulf, the abyss between us and the God against whom we have sinned. But equally there is the prior truth of the righteousness of God accepted as that against which we have acted in our unrighteousness. Such is the meaning of the idea of punishment. Sin, as Augustine famously says, is its own punishment. What is the punishment? Simply the righteousness of God known as wrath, our experience of standing in opposition to God’s truth in our untruth.
Thus what appears to be a beginning in wrath is properly a beginning with the righteousness of God. The issue is our relation to that principle. The wrath is really God’s love of his own righteousness for the sake of which he seeks our good. The Psalm of David here is a prayer, the prayer of every penitent in this understanding who seeks that God’s righteousness not simply remain as wrath, the experience of opposition, as it were. Thus, “rebuke me not in thine indignation.” This is to acknowledge the deeper truth of God’s righteousness. The sinner does not challenge the justice of his or her situation; he only prays for something more than the opposition. That is to be open to the power of divine truth. He prays for God’s forbearance, to put it in human terms.
The Psalmist begs a reprieve of justice in its narrow sense but with an awareness of its larger meaning. This prayer of David opens us to the deeper meaning of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane where Jesus prays “that this cup pass from me, yet not my will but thine be done” (Lk. 22.42). The prayer of our Lord is never simply on his own behalf – it is always in the will of the Father and always on our behalf. Such is the ethical dimension of prayer itself. In Gethsemane, he prays in the spirit of his willingness to bear the wrath of God against our sins for our sakes. Such is the meaning of the Cross where he explicitly prays on behalf of us all who are, in our sins, his enemies, the enemies of God. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34). This Psalm prayer of confession carries us into the confession of the Cross.
Such is the wonder of confession. The sinner, you and me, turns to that very righteousness from which we have turned away. Such is prayer. “This whole psalm is prayer.” Notice in this Psalm how often he calls out to the Lord. The righteousness of God is invoked and beseeched as that which alone is merciful, which alone heals, which alone converts, which alone delivers, and which alone saves. The Psalmist calls upon the Lord to forebear his wrath and then his heart pours forth to God in five petitions.
O Lord, have mercy upon me (vs. 2)
O Lord, heal me (vs. 2)
O Lord, turn thee (vs. 4)
O Lord, deliver my soul (vs. 4)
O Lord, save me for thy mercy’s sake (vs. 4).
All good comes from God. Our lives are lived from him and in him. His righteousness is his mercy. This is the great spiritual insight. The purpose of our humanity is found in the right order of God’s creation. To confess God is to live in praise of God. “For in death no man remembereth thee;/ and who will give thee thanks in the pit?” (vs. 5). The end and purpose of our humanity as the shorter Westminster Catechism beautifully puts it is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
Our life of faith is prayer, our constant seeking of God’s good will and purpose towards us, our constant desire that our wills may be one with his. Sin is the enemy of that unity of will. The prayer of confession is the remedy. It is equally praise.
In a wonderful way, Psalm 6 complements and informs the spiritual teaching of the beautiful Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent.
Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thought which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p.143)
Psalm 6 awakens us to that profound truth that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves” precisely in the forms of our self-contradiction and separation from the truth of God in whom our good is found.
Psalm 6 begins with the wrath of God but it is the wrath which seeks our good in the essential goodness of God. Such wrath is the divine zeal, the divine love of his own righteousness for the sake of which he would cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Such wrath is the deeper meaning of God’s love of his own eternal righteousness which is the ground of all righteousness, of all truth and all goodness. Such wrath is the deeper meaning of Christ’s Palm Sunday cleansing of the temple of moneychangers and the merchants of sacrificial merchandise, such as cows, sheep and doves.
That extraordinary scene of divine wrath, which inaugurates Holy Week, is Christ’s zeal for righteousness. “Zeal of thine house hath even eaten me,” as Psalm 69 will say, but then goes on to say “the reproaches of them that reproached thee have fallen upon me” (vs.9). The cleansing of the temple portends the Passion but it is Christ’s zeal for our good in the absolute goodness of God that actively moves in his free-willing sacrifice. There he wills to feel to the utmost the wrath of God, that sense of alienation from all truth and goodness for our sake. Psalm 6 gives us a wonderful complement to Christ’s word of desolation. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” (Mt. 27.46).
This Psalm takes us into our Lord’s Passion. In the Penitential Psalms we learn to pray Christ’s Passion for that is to learn about ourselves and about God in his love and mercy.
“O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation,/neither chasten me in thy displeasure”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Meditation # 2
March 2nd, 2021