by CCW | 16 March 2021 20:00
This is the third in a series of four Lenten meditations. The first is posted here[1] and the second here[2].
The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
Christ Church, Lent 2021
Snakes, shamrocks and shillelaghs don’t make much of an appearance in the Psalms even on the Eve of St. Patrick’s Day. And no green beer. Yet something of the poetic quality and sensibility of the voices of the Psalms is captured in the rich lyricism of Irish spirituality, especially in St. Patrick’s Breastplate with its Trinitarian and Christocentric intensity as wedded both to Scripture and to God’s creation. “I bind unto myself today, the strong name of the Trinity,” it begins, and proceeds to rehearse the creedal essentials of redemption:
by power of faith, Christ’s incarnation,
his baptism in the Jordan river,
his death on cross for my salvation,
his bursting from the spiced tomb,
his riding up the heavenly way,
his coming at the day of doom.
Then it turns to creation:
bind[ing] unto myself today,
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling winds tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the eternal rocks.
In all of the events of our world and day, prayer seeks God’s embracing love:
the power of God to hold and lead,
God’s eye to watch, God’s might to stay,
God’s ear to hearken to my need,
the wisdom of my God to teach,
God’s hand to guide, God’s shield to ward,
the word of God to give me speech,
God’s heavenly host to be my guard.
These wonderful words sound the depths of the praying soul to God in ways which echo and draw upon the Psalms.
The voices of the Penitential Psalms are the voices of our hearts in prayer. Our Lenten project is to pray these Psalms in our hearts on the Way of the Cross. We began with Psalm 51 as sounding in a symphony all the heart-notes of repentance, harmonizing into one heart-song all the voices of penitence. Psalm 6 was then considered as the entrance Psalm into the Penitential Psalms precisely as a Psalm of Confession in the moment of the soul’s deep sense of its own opposition to God’s righteousness, known and experienced as the wrath of God.
Psalm 6 and Psalm 38 begin with the same words, Domine ne furore, “Put me not to rebuke, O Lord, in thine anger/O Lord, rebuke me not in thine indignation.” They frame Psalm 32 which is the Psalm which is before us tonight. But I want to say something first about Psalm 38. While it begins with the same words as Psalm 6 and expresses the soul’s same sensibility to its self-willed distance from God and the consequent effects of dissolution, it does so in a more heightened and more extreme way. It is really a question of degree. “O Lord, I am weak,/O Lord, my bones are vexed” in Psalm 6 extends to “There is no health in my flesh because of thy displeasure,/ neither is there any rest in my bones, by reason of my sin,” words which shape the Prayer of General Confession, “And there is no health in us” (BCP, p. 5).
The righteousness of God standing over and against the sinner in the consciousness of sin is experienced as wrath, as antagonism, as war and extreme opposition. “For thine arrows stick fast in me,/ and thy hand presseth me sore.” Such are the realities of sin, as the poet George Herbert in his poem, The Agonie, so clearly shows. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” The images of presse and vice play on the idea of the cider or wine press and the moral idea of virtue’s opposite – vice – as well as the carpenter’s vice.
Thus the greater intensity of that experience as voiced in Psalm 38 impells the greater supplication to the God of that self-same righteousness against whom we have turned. “Forsake me not, O Lord,/O my God, be not thou far from me./ Haste thee to help me,/O Lord God of my salvation.” Our salvation is God’s righteousness not as standing against us but as imparted to us, placed upon us, near to us in the very flesh of our humanity in order that it may live in us. Such is the theological point of justification. Christ is our righteousness; he in us and we in him, at once by grace imputed and by grace infused. And that is the segue to Psalm 32, Beati quorum, in the idea of blessedness found in and through the vale of misery.
Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven/ and whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth no sin/and in whose spirit there is no guile.
This sounds an altogether different note than Psalm 6 and 38. It sings of blessedness and yet such a prayer-song belongs equally to the Psalms of Penitence. Such is the nature of the dialectical interplay of their opposing yet complementary notes. The confession of our sins is not just the sense of opposition to God’s will; it is equally the sense of the motion of his righteousness and truth towards us. The confession of sins is equally and more profoundly the confession of God. Confessio peccati est confessio laudis.
Sin itself is really atheism for it means acting as if there was no God. Atheism, too, might be best understood as a kind of negative theology in the confession of the God who is indeed nothing, no thing comparable in any way shape or form to anything in creation. The confession of sin acknowledges God in the moment of our sense of separation from God. There can be no confession of sin apart from the confession of God. As Augustine puts it, “whosoever acknowledges God, acknowledges a Remission of sins and whosoever acknowledges a Remission of sins, acknowledges a God.” Penitence is equally the praise of God.
Psalm 32 brings out its greater depth of meaning. God is acknowledged not negatively but positively as the righteousness which is the truth of our lives. His will is for us in the bond of the eternal Trinity of his love and that will must be in us. “I bind unto myself the strong name of the Trinity.” In our sins, we experience his will as against us. In our confession, we desire the overcoming of that opposition in us. To know his righteousness as for us and in us is our blessedness. Thus Psalm 32 begins with the repeated word, “blessed”. The confession of sins seeks nothing less than the forgiveness of sins, seeking it from God who alone can forgive sins, against whom alone we have sinned. “Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven and whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth no sin and in whose spirit there is no guile.”
Blessed is he. So the Psalm begins even as the whole book of the Psalms begins. “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners,/ and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord;/ and in his law doth he meditate day and night” (Ps. 1.1,2). This Psalm ends in our joy in the Lord for his righteousness in us even as the whole Psalter ends in the joyous praise of the Lord. “O be glad, O ye righteous, and rejoice in the Lord;/ and be joyful, all ye that are true of heart” (Ps. 32. 12). “Let every thing that hath breath/ praise the Lord” (Ps. 150.6).
In a way, the whole Psalter contracts into this Psalm, as it does in other psalms, too, but here the whole contracts into confession, into the context of the Penitential Psalms. This Psalm is a little treatise on confession. “It is David’s Catechism,” John Donne explains, “for it provides instruction in fundamental things and so we must take it to heart that it may teach us and encourage us to confession, for therein, shall we be blessed.”
“Beatus qui habet quicquid vult et nihil malo vult” (Augustine). Blessed is he who only has whatsoever he wishes yet wishes for nothing evil. Our blessedness derives from our desiring nothing but that which is good, good for us and absolutely good. “Thy will be done.” Here in this Psalm blessedness is found through penitence, for in confession we seek God’s goodness to overcome the wickedness of ourselves. This Penitential Psalm teaches us the blessedness of our reconciliation to God. The blessedness is threefold: the forgiveness of our unrighteousness; the covering of our sins; and the not-imputing of our iniquity to us.
In confession we seek forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we pray. In the traditional prayer of General Confession, there was the recognition that “the burden of our sins is intolerable.” We still acknowledge at least that “there is no health in us.” The point is that we feel sin as a weight, as a burden, even an intolerable burden that is more than we can bear and so cannot overcome. We cannot unburden ourselves. “Come unto me all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me”(Mt. 11.28,29). But what is forgiveness? It is not the mere forgetting of our sins either by us or by others or by God as if we can simply ignore what has been thought, said, or done. But it changes the weight of the remembrance. “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11.30). Something changes. Forgiveness is the change, the transformation. As Prospero says to Alonzo in the Tempest, “Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that’s gone” (V. 1.).
Forgiveness ultimately means nothing less than the power of God’s essential goodness transforming our evil, our sins, our wilful opposition to all that is good and holy, our will to nothingness, into something good and holy. It signals, we may say, “a sea-change into something rich and strange”(Tempest, I.12). In the Christian understanding, the forgiveness of sins means the Passion of Christ whose whole life is the confession of God manifest most wondrously on the Cross. The first and last words of Christ crucified are the words of the Son to the Father. “Father, forgive them … Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
The Lenten Way of the Cross is the whole life of Christ contracted into a span. It is concentrated on the Passion, in Christ’s willingness to take upon himself the burden of all sin. There we “behold the Lamb of God” – the ancient sacrificial means of atonement. The being-at-one-with God appears here in the sinless humanity of Christ crucified, having been made sin for us.
We see him in our sins, yes, but we see something more. We see the Son’s worship of the Father. “Father, forgive them… Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Our sins are forgiven because they have been transformed into the worship of God by the love of the Son for the Father. Even our sins become the occasion of the confession of God’s greater glory. Our confession is our worship of God.
The Cross shows us the true and ultimate forgiveness of sins. In the language of the Psalm, our sins are covered up. They are not hidden in the closets of our minds nor buried in the dust of our lives, but washed in the blood of the Lamb of God by whose blood we have the forgiveness of our sins and the power of new life. Such are the lessons of Passion Sunday. Our sins are not held against us; they do not finally define us; they are not imputed to us. Rather God wills to see us not as sinners but to see us in the righteousness of Christ. This is the great insight of Luther. God sees not us but Christ in us. His righteousness, not our sins, are imputed to us. Such, too, is the Christocentric emphasis of St. Patrick’s great hymn.
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Such forgiveness, such covering, and such non-imputing of sin can only be a blessing if we confess. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us: but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1.8). Qui tegi vult, detegant. “He that will have his sin covered, let him uncover them” (Augustine).
For that one is blessed in whose spirit there is no guile, no deceit, no treachery, no double-mindedness. Such a one confesses God whole-heartedly, with a single mind and a willing spirit. True confession restores us to the truth of ourselves in God.
Such is our felicity in confession. But there is as usual our reluctance, our holding back, our hesitation, our turning back. “Love bade me welcome,” as Herbert puts it, “but my soul drew back, guiltie of dust and sinne.” “For while I held my tongue,/my bones consumed away through my daily complaining. For thy hand was heavy upon me day and night,/and my moisture was changed as with the drought of summer.” Such imagery captures the dry, lifeless nature of clinging to our sins unconfessed. Confession, on the other hand, is life and refreshment, like the spring rains. The Psalmist envisions the moment of turning, the sinner as turning from the dust of guilt and sin. “I acknowledged by sin unto thee,/ and mine unrighteousness have I not hid. I said, ‘I will confess my sins unto the Lord,’/ and so thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin.” The Psalm shows the dynamic of confession itself.
“Sins are not confessed if they be not confessed to him.” From such confession flows the life of prayer. We seek our good from him who is our good. The prayer here is the forgiveness of sins. It is open to hear the voice of God. That voice now sounds. The voice of the Psalm now changes from our voice to God’s voice. The Lord speaks.
I will inform thee, and teach thee in the way wherein thou shalt go;/ and I will guide thee with mine eye upon thee.
The prayer of confession seeks the goodness of the Lord in forgiveness and in the amendment of life by walking in the ways of the Lord. He is our teacher and guide. We are, of course, poor students, stubborn and resistant, needing constantly to be prodded and encouraged, exhorted and awakened.
Be ye not like to horse and mule, which have no understanding; / whose mouths must be held with bit and bridle, else they will not come nigh thee.
Yet God would draw us to himself through the free agency of our wills and not by some external force. He would teach us that all our good is found in him. Not to confess our sins here is to be like unto horse and mule. It means to contradict our very rationality, to deny our humanity. We further obscure the image of God in us. Thus “great plagues remain for the ungodly but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord, mercy embraceth him on every side.”
Faith. Confession of sin is our trust in the Lord. As John Donne observes, “the mystery of the kingdom of heaven is, that only the declaring, the publishing, the notifying and confessing of my sins, possesses me of the Kingdome of heaven.” His mercy embraces us in the confession of Him whose heart is the heart of all mercy. We are blessed in the receiving of the Sacrament of the Altar and we are blessed in confessing Him who is all our blessing and all our joy. The Psalm ends on such a note of joy. “Be glad, O ye righteous, and rejoice in the Lord; and be joyful, all ye that are true of heart.” It ends even as it begins with our being blessed.
Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven,/ and whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth no sin, and in whose spirit there is no guile.
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Meditation # 3
March 16th, 2021
Eve of St. Patrick
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/03/16/lenten-meditation-3-the-penitential-psalms-in-the-pilgrimage-of-lent/
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