Psalm 32 Commentary

According to the old saying, “Confession is good for the soul.”  The psalmist who penned Psalm 32 would agree but would also add that not confessing is bad for soul and body.  The psalmist here famously declares that for that season of his life when he refused to own up to and acknowledge the sins he had committed, his dishonesty tortured him.  He did not feel well spiritually but also apparently this had physical manifestations as well.  His inability to come clean before God became a kind of torture for him.  It tore him up on the inside.  It cost him sleep.  Relief only finally arrived when he spilled his guts, as it were, and confessed to God the truth of who he was and what he had done.

Maybe we could all wish this were always true for all people.  But the facts on the ground seem to indicate that there are lots of people walking around in the world today who all things being equal have boatloads of sin they ought to confess to God but who never do so.  Among such people we are not talking merely about those whose sins are more commonplace like flirting with an attractive coworker even though you are married or cutting a corner on your taxes or using at times foul language.  We are talking about people whose crimes are large and sometimes terrible.  We are talking about people who commit acts of violence, leaders of whole nations who indiscriminately drop bombs onto the heads of women and children.  Yet these people manage to cruise along in life with nary a worry.  Not only are they not torn up on the inside the way the psalmist describes himself, they feel happy and satisfied and feel no compulsion either to confess their sins or to change their ways.

So what accounts for the difference between all those people and someone like the psalmist or, one hopes, most of us consulting this sermon commentary?  Maybe a clue to this can be discovered in the closing line of Psalm 32 when the psalmist invites a certain group to rejoice in the Lord.  And who is this group receiving this invitation?  The righteous.  The upright in heart.  Now, assuming the psalmist is in this group, it is clear that being righteous and upright in heart does not mean one never messes up and sins.  If that were the case, the majority of the verses in this psalm would not exist.  The psalmist would never have been tortured by unconfessed sin since he would not have sinned in the first place.

But that is not what it means to be righteous or upright in heart as a number of psalms make clear.  So what does it mean?  And what does it give someone like the psalmist that all those in society who are totally unbothered by their unconfessed sins lack?  Well, at minimum it means the righteous know that God exists.  Some who do not confess their sins may be atheists or very strong agnostics.  They don’t confess their sins because at some level they believe there is no one to receive such a confession.

A second thing someone like the psalmist has as a righteous and upright person is not just a bare minimal belief in the existence of God but more than this is the belief that the God who exists is holy and good and is properly offended by sin.  Third and as a close corollary to this, someone like the psalmist as a righteous person further believes that the good and holy God who exists also pays close attention to human life.

These beliefs would be very different, then, from the person who does not believe in God at all but also this is significantly different from someone who may entertain the notion that some god exists somewhere but the character of this god is open to question.  Maybe they envision the proverbial kind “old man upstairs” who is rather indulgent and not easily upset by human foibles.  Or they may land closer to the Deist camp that says that no matter what the character of God may be, he long ago stopped paying attention to life on earth so when it comes to our sins, no worries.  No one is watching anyway.

But the righteous and upright in heart know better.  They know God.  They love God.  They know God is loaded with lovingkindness and grace.  This is a God prone to forgive and so when we grieve this God, we feel bad.  We feel guilty.  We know God expects and wants better from us and the righteous further know God can equip us to be better than this as well.  The ability to be in a healthy and loving relationship with the Almighty Creator God of the galaxies is all right there in front of us at every moment of our lives.

These, then, are the kinds of people who can feel torn up over unconfessed sin.  But if that experience is singularly painful and unpleasant (to put it mildly) the good news is that also we are the kind of people who can feel the rush of joy when God once more unleashes his grace unto forgiveness upon us.  So if it’s lousy to feel riddled with guilt, it is wonderful to get to the other side of confession and discover once more the joy of God’s delight in us as creatures made in the divine image.

Psalm 32 closes by noting that “many are the woes of the wicked.”  And that is true even if most of the woes coming their way are unknown to them and are surely not popping up and bothering them on any average day.  The wicked may not know their woes.  But also in closing is the wonderful fact that the righteous do know the chesed, the never-failing lovingkindness and grace of God.  And even in the Season of Lent, that is a great thing to know and experience indeed!

[Note: In addition to these weekly sermon commentaries on the CEP website, we also have a resource page for Lent and Easter with more preaching and worship ideas as well as sample sermons on this year’s Year C Lectionary texts.  So visit our Lent and Easter resource page!]

Illustration Idea

In past sermon commentaries on Psalm 32 I have referred to the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors.  The closing scene can (and should) be viewed on YouTube here.  But if you have not seen the film, let me set this up briefly.

In the film Martin Landau plays a highly successful and wealthy ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal.  But he has been carrying on an extramarital affair for some while and then life gets dicey when his lover begins to threaten to reveal the whole thing to Judah’s wife in the hopes of getting Judah all to herself.  Judah consults with his mob-connected shady brother and, long story short, Judah arranges to have his lover murdered.  But he is tortured and wracked by guilt and at one point late in the film, it appears he is going to go insane over it all.  But then suddenly we flash forward in time to a wedding reception for a family friend of the Rosenthals.  And that is when we witness this closing scene as Judah essentially shares his true story with the hapless filmmaker Cliff Rhodes, played by Woody Allen.  Cliff had not done anything seriously wrong in the film—just a few little moral misdemeanors at best.  Yet his life unravels in sad ways while Judah’s life . . . well, watch the scene.  It is in some ways a scary inversion of Psalm 32.