This is the fourth in a series of four Lenten meditations. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.
The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
Christ Church, Lent 2021
Lenten Meditation # 4: “But there is forgiveness with thee; /
therefore shalt thou be feared” (Psalm 130. 4)
Our Lenten evening meditations upon the Penitential Psalms bring us to Passiontide and end upon the beginning of the course of human redemption with the Annunciation of The Blessed Virgin Mary which falls this year in the week of Passion Sunday. Christ comes and goes, we might say with John Donne who noted the coincidence of the Passion, meaning Good Friday, falling upon the Annunciation in 1608. It prompted a profound reflection upon “th’ Abridgement of Christs story, which makes one … Of the’ Angels Ave, ‘and Consummatum est” of Christ crucified (The Annuntiation [sic] and Passion, 1608/9).
The Annunciation marks the beginning in time of Christ’s Incarnation. It celebrates his conception in the womb of Mary. In an elaborate and intense poem entitled the Annunciation in La Corona, a circle of seven sonnets, Donne explores all the paradoxes of relationship that belong to the event of the Annunciation through the role of Mary in the economy of human salvation. It is a literary and theological tour-de-force that focuses on the interplay of the human and the divine through Mary; incarnation and redemption are inescapably united. “Ere by the spheares time was created,” Donne says of Mary, “thou wast in his minde,”… “whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d”… “thou art now thy Makers maker.” Language is stretched to the uttermost to conceive of the inconceivable; “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb”, the sonnet concludes, as the expression beyond expression of the wonder of the salvation that is near “to all that will.” “Salvation to all that will is nigh.” It is just that interplay of the human and the divine which speaks to our Lenten programme on the Penitential Psalms in the interplay of voices belonging to the mysteries of human redemption.
Christ’s coming on the way of his going belongs to the inner movement of God’s love and that love as turned outwards to us. Such is the deeper meaning of the way of the Cross. Passiontide sets the Cross before us as veiled, at once seen and unseen, as “in a glass darkly.” Such is the problematic of human sin and ignorance about the very purpose of the Incarnation – to reveal God to man and to redeem man to God. We glimpse but in an enigma. Yet central to what we glimpse is Mary, the chosen vessel of our Lord’s appearing which is nothing less than the reality that is the love of God. Mary is the pure source of the pure humanity of Jesus. She is, to speak in the tones of orthodox devotion and doctrine, the Mother of God because she hears and bears the Word and Son of God into the world. Through her, God becomes man; through her all the graces of God flow forth upon the world. Mary, the Mother of God, is the Mother of grace but only because she is the Mother of humility. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” she says, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
Humility is at the heart of these songs of penitential adoration. It is at the heart of all prayer and praise. Humility alone counters our demonic pride and opens out to us the will of God and thereby all the graces of God. Humility yields freely and fully to the Word of God and magnifies not herself but the God of all grace and glory. In Mary we see what that yielding and openness mean: the active willing of the will of God. Such are the essential notes of prayer and praise, the notes that belong to the Penitential Psalms. In this sense, we may say that the Penitential Psalms are the voice of our true humanity, at once the voice of Mary and the voice of Christ.
It belongs to our Lenten discipline and project to consider tonight the last three of the seven Penitential Psalms: Psalms 102, 130 and 143. I want to begin with Psalm 102 but by way of a passage from Augustine that will help you to pray both this Psalm as well as Psalms 130 and 143. Consider the opening two verses of Psalm 102.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the time of my trouble:
Incline thine ear unto me; O hear me when I call, and that right soon.
It is, as Augustine suggests, “the prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the Lord.” All prayer calls upon the Lord. All prayer acknowledges God as the ultimate and only source of help and succour, of goodness and truth. Here is a Psalm about prayer itself. It calls out to God not simply from the sense of opposition to God’s truth and righteousness which is wrath (as we saw in Psalms 6 and 38) but from a general sense of the on-going effects of sin in our weariness, our sense of the passing character of things, our sense of the same-old, same-old. This Psalm contrasts the fading, passing character of our lives and our world with the abiding, eternal nature of God. The imagery is universal.
For my days consume away like smoke, and my bones are burnt up as it were a fire-brand (vs. 3).
And that because of thine indignation and wrath; for thou hast taken me up and cast me down (vs. 10).
My days are gone like a shadow; and I am withered like grass (vs. 11).
It is the cry of humility not presumption and in that humility, in that seeking of God’s goodness and grace, there is the sweet praise of the Lord. Therein is our sure abiding.
Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the work of thy hands.
They shall perish, but thou shalt endure:
They all shall wax old as doth a garment;
And as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed;
But thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.
The children of thy servants shall continue,
And their seed shall stand fast in thy sight. (Psalm 102. 25-28).
The Psalm joins us with God in prayer and praise. The Psalms in the most radical sense are the Psalms of the Lord especially through the Incarnation by which Christ joins himself to us. Through the pure humanity of Mary “he takes to himself our flesh and by His incarnation making it His own flesh, He had now of His own although from us what to offer unto God for us” as Richard Hooker clearly states. We are joined to him and he to us.
Augustine teaches us about the Christ of the Psalms.
“Now you,” says the Apostle, “are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.” If then he is the head and we the body, one human person speaks. Whether it is the head that speaks or the member, it is the one Christ who speaks. And it is normal for the head to speak also for the members of the body …”I have called unto thee, O Lord; Lord hear my voice.” This is something we can all say. I do not say this by myself. The whole Christ says it. But it is more particularly said in the name of the body. For when he was here and bore our flesh he prayed, and prayed to the Father in the name of the body and, while he prayed, drops of blood flowed from his whole body. So it stands in the gospel. Jesus prayed an urgent prayer and sweated blood. What is this flow of blood from the whole body if it is not the suffering of the martyrs of the entire Church? “I have called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.” “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee.” You supposed the business of crying out was over when you were saying, “I have called unto thee.” You have called. Do not yet be too reassured. If the trouble of the Church and the body of Christ continues until the end of the world, it not only says, “I have called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice,” but also, “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee…”
For as the day was drawing towards evening our Lord on the cross laid down his life to take it again; he did not lose it against his will. And yet we too are symbolized here. For what was it that hung upon the tree but what he took from us? And how could it ever come about that the Father should leave and abandon his only Son, who was indeed one God with him? Yet still, fastening our weakness to the cross, where, as the Apostle says, “our old self was crucified with him,” with the voice of our own human nature he cried out, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This then is the evening sacrifice, the passion of the Lord, the Lord’s cross, the offering of the saving victim, the sacrifice pleasing to God. In his resurrection he made the evening sacrifice into a morning oblation.
Such reflections contain much of what will inform all of the various aspects of the theology of the atonement which necessarily centers on the Passion of Christ. The Penitential Psalms in the devotional traditions of the Church are a way of participating in our Lord’s Passion. There the humility which belongs to the truth of our humanity meets with the humility of God, the infinite condescension of God who “did not abhor the virgin’s womb”(Te Deum, BCP, p. 8) to become incarnate and who goes to the death of the Cross.
The Penitential Psalms belong to our preparations to enter into the Passion of Christ. They are the way in which Christ carries us into his Passion for us. They are, after all, at least in this Christian way of thinking, the Psalms of the Lord. Everything converges upon the Passion. These Psalms are part of that convergence. The Word of the Lord draws us into the Lord’s Word. As Hans Urs Von Balthasar observes, “we enter into the inner being of God through the wounded side of the Father’s Son and Word.”
The point as suggested by John Donne is that the Cross is present at the Annunciation; it is implicit in the idea of the Incarnation, in the nexus between revelation and redemption. And of course it is always present and before us in the liturgy and thus in all our lives. Donne reminds us that:
The whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion,
his birth and his death were but one continuall act
and his Christmas-day and his Good-Friday are but
the evening and the morning of one and the same day.
Christian life is a constant meditation upon that “continuall Passion.” The Psalms, especially the Penitential Psalms, belong to that continual meditation upon the Passion in the way in which the voices of our hearts in hope and despair, the voice of God in compassion and judgement, and the voice of Christ in saving grace are all intertwined.
The Psalms contribute to the ways in which our thinking and our willing, in short, our living are conformed to Christ but only in and through his Passion. To pray these Psalms is to pray them in the humility of Mary for such is also the humility of Christ who in the flesh he takes from her goes the way of the Cross. Through Lent, the interplay of Incarnation and Redemption have been before us in the way in which our hearts are revealed to us in the revelation of God’s good will towards us in redemption. In the traditional Gospel (in its longer and more complete form) for The Third Sunday in Lent, a woman in the crowd calls out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps which gave thee suck.” Blessed indeed and truly blessed, to which Christ concurs but adds most tellingly another blessing: “rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.” Mary hears and thereby bears. That is our vocation and challenge as well.
The Psalter is the prayer book of Jews and Christians but it is also a book of praise. It is not a matter of either/or: either prayer or praise, but rather both/and: both prayer and praise. They are interrelated. The prayer of penitence is integral to the song of praise and vice-versa. Repentance acknowledges God. The confession of sin confesses God.
John Donne shows this interrelation of prayer and praise as belonging to the whole Psalter. “The Book is Praise, the parts are Prayer. The name changes not the nature; Prayer and Praise is the same thing.” Indeed “prayer and praise accompany one another … they meet like two waters and make the streame of devotion the fuller.”
And so it is with Psalm 130 and 143. They make the stream of devotion all the fuller.
Psalm 130 is one of the Songs of Ascents. It belongs to a group of Psalms, Psalms 120-134, which are entitled Songs of Ascents in both the Jewish and Christian understanding, the one referring to the ritual pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem, the other to that Jerusalem which is above. The Psalm is essentially a Psalm of the pilgrimage of the soul to God in the journey of salvation. The songs of the ancient pilgrim people going up every year to Jerusalem to commemorate the Passover is taken up in the Christian understanding of the Passover as intensified in the Passion of Christ. “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast” as Paul says, and as we sing at Easter (Easter Day Anthems, BCP, p. 182).
Psalm 130 contributes to the intensity of the Passion for us. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.” The Passion means going up into the heart of God opened out to us, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, going up out of the depths of the human soul in its fatal distance and separation from the goodness of God. Such an ascent, such a going up, means repentance. It is a turning around, a turning away from sin which turns us from God and a turning back to God. Augustine calls attention to the emotional intensity of this opening phrase. “Greatly distressed by his sinfulness, the psalmist humbly and trustfully requests forgiveness for both himself and the community.” Note the emphasis upon humility and community. Prayer and praise are never solitary endeavours; they connect us always to one another.
“Out of the deep.” It is a profound image. That “deep” is at once the confusion and chaos of our lives but, more concretely, it is the very deep well of human sin in the infinite separation between us and God. It signals both our sense of dependence upon God for all our being and all our good, and our sense of how we have utterly separated ourselves from him in sin. Such is the depth, the abyss, of sin.
“O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint.” It is our voice, the voice of our recognition of the abyss between us and God, and yet a cry to God. These verses voice a cry for forgiveness from the depths of sin and death, from all that is turned away from God. But the cry turns to God who is the forgiveness of sin. This is a profound moment that belongs to the Judeo-Christian understanding of God.
If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord,
who may abide it?
But there is forgiveness with thee; therefore shalt thou be feared.
Such a cry emerges from humility. Humility implies a trustfulness, not in ourselves, but in God and as such trust gives place to mercy. It is all the strong sense of the Lord’s goodness. That underlies God’s forgiveness which comes as a gift to those who fear him, to those who honour and praise him.
For “in his word is my trust.” It is what Mary says at the Annunciation. “Be it unto me according to thy word.” The Word of the Lord is our forgiveness. That Word is the uttered being, the express will of the Father, which indwells the womb of Mary. He goes forth from “that royal home of purity” to run in the flesh of our pure humanity the way of the Cross. The Word of the Lord incarnate, the Word made flesh, is our forgiveness. We look to him. We seek to live in his will. Such is true humility. Not my will but thine be done. Such is the humility of Mary.
“My soul looketh for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning.” Prayer is our watching, our hearing the Word that we might keep it. Our liturgy is constantly about this kind of watching and hearing. Humility is the key. It means our patient attentiveness to the operation of the Word all around us. It requires an openness of our hearts and minds to its own operation in accord with the freedom of its own mode of acting. Such watching is trusting.
O Israel, trust in the Lord for with the Lord there is mercy,
and with him is plenteous redemption.
And he shall redeem Israel from all his sins.
Our trust is in him in whom there is only mercy and forgiveness.
Just as Psalm 6 and Psalm 38 begin with the same opening words and bracket Psalm 32, so Psalm 102 and Psalm 143 bracket Psalm 130 and begin with the same opening words, Domine, exaudi. “Hear my prayer, O Lord”. But as with the Psalm 6 and Psalm 38, there is a deeper intensity to the third Psalm in these two triplets. Psalm 102 begins with “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee.” Psalm 143 strikes a different note of intensity of prayer. “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire: hearken unto me for thy truth and righteousness’ sake.”
The heart of human redemption is the pure will and absolute righteousness of God for the sake of which and on account of which he wills the way of our salvation through the Cross of Christ and not for our deservings. We acknowledge our sins and in so doing we fall upon the grace of God. Psalm 143 presents our cry for mercy out of the experience of affliction within and without in the course of our lives. It signals the profound and pious idea that the experience of afflictions ought not to discourage us but to encourage us to pray and to pray unceasingly; in short, to pray with urgence and with persistence, not altogether unlike the Canaanite woman in the Gospel for the Second Sunday in Lent.
Hear me, O Lord, and that soon, for my spirit waxeth faint:
Hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit.
Such are the greater depths of the soul in its cry to God but this cry of desperation turns to a profound awareness of the God to whom we turn in prayer.
O let me hear thy loving-kindness in the morning, for in thee is my trust:
Show thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto thee.
All prayer reposes upon the loving-kindness of God in whom alone we have confidence to turn and to whom to turn is all our life and all our prayer. The Penitential Psalms are about that turning and trust. Their voices shape the prayers of our liturgy.
Almighty and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility; Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
For “there is forgiveness with thee; /therefore shalt thou be feared.”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Meditation # 4, March 23rd, 2021, Annunciation (transf.)