Opening
Psalm 130 is a great psalm!
It is a Psalm of both doubt and faith, which intertwines, in a very short space, so many themes central to our human condition. The cry of agony from a broken person, desparate for mercy: ‘From the depths of my despair I call to you’. The weight of guilt and shame in the words ‘Who can escape being condemned?’ The awe we feel at a God who can and who would forgive us. The yearning for a new day at the end of a dark and seemingly endless night. The eager and hopeful anticipation that God will hear and help. The dawning realisation that God loves us and that he himself will save us.
This Psalm weaves a tapestry of the human experience from the strands of despair, mercy, forgiveness, patient waiting, hope, love and redemption. Let’s think about how these threads are woven together in our faith.
Out of the Depths
Read v1-2:
Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD;
Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive
to my cry for mercy.
My favourite contemporary Christian song writer, Steve Taylor, has a song called ‘Jesus is for Losers’. A phrase like that is often used negatively to suggest that Christians are weak and that their faith is a crutch. But Taylor turns this into a bold claim about our need to recognise our brokenness before we can approach God. We must be ‘broken at the foot of the cross’, Taylor sings, before we can be redeemed by him.
Those who imagine they can live without God have not yet met with despair. Not just the despair at things going wrong around us, but despair at the whole human tragedy. Despair at the apparent meaninglessness of life.
To put it in more philosophical terms, it is only when we reach the point of existential despair that we can recognise the need of some meaning beyond our mere existence. The point of existential despair can lead either to suicide or to an openness to the meaning which God’s love can add to our lives.
It seems too easy for Australians to relax in our comfortable society and to see no need of God. Our high suicide rate (2500 each year), however, indicates the extent of despair in our ‘Lucky Country’. But here in Psalm 130, the writer feels about to drown under an overwhelming flood and cries to God for help.
Are we bold enough to cry out to God like this?
Mercy and Forgiveness
Read v3:
If you, LORD, kept a record of sins,
Lord, who could stand?
But the Psalmist immediately wonders whether this cry for help will serve any purpose. Is mercy likely to come from God? Is God not the one most likely to condemn us? How could we stand before God without realising the enormity of our guilt and crumbling under the weight of shame?
In a book called ‘Is Human Forgiveness Possible?’ John Patton suggests that the Church has talked too much about guilt and not enough about shame. Guilt, he says, is largely a rational, cognitive concept. It can be reasoned about. We can consider some moral rule, or law or some social norm and think about whether we are guilty of breaking it or not. We can decide whether we (or others) are guilty.
But shame is more personal and emotional. When we are ashamed, it is not the sort of thing we can easily talk ourselves out of. Our pride has been violated. Our self-esteem has been called into question. We have been humiliated or embarrassed: perhaps by our own mistake or perhaps by some betrayal by another. We feel exposed and inadequate.
Patton thinks that people often talk about their guilt when really what they are experiencing is shame. It’s not the objective fact that they might have done something wrong which concerns them so much as the uncontrollable sense of the resulting shame. He believes that shame is a much bigger blockage to forgiveness than guilt.
If we can help people not to hide behind their shame they may realise what the Psalmist writes in verse 4: that in God we don’t find condemnation but forgiveness!
More than any other characteristic of God, the fact that God can and wants to forgive is what makes us so awe-ful. (Now there’s a trick of language for you: does God make you feel awful?!! God’s forgiveness should not make use feel awful in the sense of horrid, but aweful in the sense of wonder-filled amazement and deep respect.)A mother once approached Napoleon seeking a pardon for her son. The emperor replied that the young man had committed a certain offense twice and justice demanded death. ‘But I don’t ask for justice,’ the mother explained. ‘I plead for mercy.’ ‘But your son does not deserve mercy,’ Napoleon replied. ‘Sir,’ the woman cried, ‘it would not be mercy if he deserved it, and mercy is all I ask for.’ ‘Well, then,’ the emperor said, ‘I will have mercy.’ And he spared the woman’s son. (Luis Palau, ‘Experiencing God’s Forgiveness’, Multnomah Press, 1984)
Are we bold enough to seek mercy from God as this mother sought it from Napolean?
I think it is helpful to distinguish mercy from forgiveness. Both are gifts which the wrongdoer does not deserve. But whereas mercy involves an act – the suspension of some punishment – forgiveness involves a change of heart. It is possible to show someone mercy (by not punishing them) and yet not forgive them (by continuing to resent them in our hearts). Mercy is often given in a formal capacity by some official, whereas forgiveness is inherently inter-personal. Only the one who was wronged can forgive. You can’t forgive on someone else behalf.
God is in a unique position because he can offer both mercy and forgiveness to us. In his official capacity as judge, God is consistently merciful to us by treating us better than we deserve. But in a sense, God is also personally offended by our sin and is able to forgive us at that inter-personal level. We betray God when we ignore him, when we rebel against him, when we mistreat other people whom he loves, when we damage the world over which he has made us stewards. Our sin frequently hurts those around us and we stand in need of their forgiveness. But our sin is also an offense against God and we need his forgivenes as well.
Waiting and hoping
Let’s move on to verses 5 and 6:
I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Don’t you just love the poetic repetition there? Waiting … and waiting.
Waiting. Hoping. Trusting.
The Psalmist finds hope in the realisation that his cry for help will not fall on deaf ears. He waits, eagerly, in anticipation that after the long, dark night of despair, there will be a fresh new morning.
In the meantime, while the darkness still surrounds him he waits, and trusts.
I am not trying to present a simplistic form of wishful thinking in which crying to God will disolve all our problems. The tragedy of the world continues and the things which cause our grief and anguish and depression remain. But we can be still. And we can trust.
Some of you may remember a good friend of ours from South Africa called Erica. She visited us here last year after spending some time as an electral monitor in East Timor. We have prayed for her in this church on several occassions. Erica has been deeply depressed for many years, and even more than depressed as she has tried to understand why she should be so depressed. Her depression made work unfulfilling. Her relationship with friends became more and more strained as we all struggled with our powerlessness to help. Her relationship with her husband deteriorated until he left her. We all thought: Why can’t she just snap out of it? Why does she make such hard work of everything? What is she hiding from or supresing that is blocking her enjoyment of anything?
And yet, although she struggled between faith and doubt, she didn’t give up crying out to God.
This year Erica discovered that she had Cushing’s Disease. Suddenly everything is explained: the depresion, the eating problems, the fragile bones. All the result of a growth on the pituitory gland. She has recently had the growth removed and we hope she will return to her old vibrant self soon.
There is no guarantee that we will ever make sense of the tragedies of life. Are we bold enough to wait in hope, trusting that the Lord is on our side?
Redemption
Read v7-8:
Israel, put your hope in the LORD,
for with the LORD is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel
from all their sins.
Paul tells us that ‘love never fails’ and this is never more true than when applied to God’s love for us. God’s love is constant and unconditional.
The notion of saving us from our sins is better described in other versions as ‘redemption’. To redeem something is to pay to get it back. It implies that something was lost or taken away or enslaved, but later regained or freed. As it is used in both the Old and New Testaments, redemption is God’s initiative, motivated by his love.
In this Psalm, the term may apply to Israel in exile: a political promise that God would end their enslavement. But in the New Testament, the promise is deliberately broadened to include the spiritual redemption of all who follow Christ. We have all been enslaved by sin, but God has redeemed us from that slavery.
Notice the Messianic implications of this phrase: God himself will save his people. Various New Testament passages show how this was fulfilled in Jesus. For instance, Titus 2:14 – ‘Our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ … gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness.’ The cost of our redemption was Jesus’ death. ‘He personally bore our sins in his own body on the cross, so that we might be dead to sin and be alive to all that is good’ (1 Peter 2:24, Philips).
Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s love. Look at how lovingly he handled the two healings in today’s Gospel reading. The one woman, weary after 12 years of being socially unclean because of on-going bleeding, tried to hide in the crowd. But Jesus realised that she needed her public acceptance restored just as much as her bleeding stopped. So he made a point of bringing the crowd’s attention to the woman.
And then the young girl whose father had made a public request for Jesus to heal. Delayed by the first healing, the girl has died before Jesus can reach her. Nevertheless, Jesus restores her life and then, surprisingly, swears them all to secrecy. Why didn’t Jesus make this healing public in the way he did for the first woman? It seems to me that just as the public exposure of the first healing showed Jesus sensitivity to the woman’s real need, his privatisation of the second healing shows his sensitivity to the young girl. He wanted to avoid the stress that public attention would cause her. He didn’t want the 60 Minutes team rolling up next day to put the child’s story on national TV; he didn’t want her to be forever labelled as ‘the girl who came back to life’.
Why?
God has the same loving sensitivity to our needs. He wants to forgive and redeem us. But why?
Why is God so generous to us?
I think there are three reasons:
- Firstly, God loves each of us. Not just all of us collectively, but each one of us, individually. He is generous and forgiving like a loving parent. He wants what is best for us.
- Secondly, as the reading from 2 Corinthians implied, God blesses us so that we in turn can bless others. We are shown mercy so that we can show others mercy, forgiven to make it possible for us to forgive others, enriched materially so that we can enrich those in need. This is explicit in 2 Cor 9:11 – ‘You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion.’
- Thirdly, God is generous to us so that all may know his glory. His love is limitless and the mercy and forgiveness which flow from that love are exactly what we need in our times of deepest despair. God is worthy of our awe and devotion far above anything else we ever experience. Through us, God seeks to display his glory to the universe.
Are we bold enough to share the overflowing generosity of God so that all may see that glory?
Let’s consider God’s goodness to us as we sing ‘Be still and know that I am God’.