Psalm 40:1-11 Commentary

Psalm 40 is certainly one of the more curious of the psalms.  The first 11 verses (which is all the Lectionary is directing us to) comprise an upbeat song of thanksgiving and praise to God.  The psalmist claims to have waited patiently for God to come through for him and then God did.  He lifted him out of some slimy, muddy pit (whether literal or metaphorical) and set his feet back on solid ground.  This gracious rescue then elicits from the songwriter here gales of praise and promise upon promise that he will tell anyone who will listen how great Israel’s God is.  He will tell it so often and so expansively that many more people will come to follow Yahweh as also their great God and King.

That’s the first half of the psalm.

But then comes Part 2 and it is almost disorienting to read.  Because suddenly the psalmist’s feet no longer seem to be on that solid ground as mentioned in verse 2.  Instead we get swift and dire descriptions of being surrounded by enemies, about how troubles are stacking up like cord wood on every side of the psalmist’s life.  He claims his sins are too numerous to count and maybe they are catching up with him.  He calls upon the Lord to shame his enemies and set them to flight.  And then the song that began with a lyric description of being rescued and restored by God concludes on a plaintive note about how poor and needy the writer is and how he needs God to come through for him without further delay.

So what gives in Psalm 40?  Yes, we can stick to the 11 verses assigned by the RCL and not be troubled by the confusing turn of events in the balance of the song.  But that feels a little hermeneutically underhanded.  If we want to embrace the psalm as a unity, what options do we preachers have to help people make sense of this?

One option would be to suggest that taken as a whole, perhaps Psalm 40 is a reflection of something most all of us already know: this is just how the life of faith goes sometimes.  We endure some kind of crisis.  It really does feel for all the world like we are sunk chest-deep in some muddy pit of pain and uncertainty.  We pray.  Others pray for us.  And then it seems that God comes through.  A sickness is healed.  A wandering child returns to the faith.  A job that seemed imperiled wasn’t and in fact we get a promotion.  A relationship we feared was too far gone to save gets restored in ways we find both wonderful and mysterious.

And we respond by pouring out our thanksgiving to God.  We tell others about what happened.  We bear witness.  We tell the story.  Many people in our congregation hear our testimony and join us in thanking and praising God for all God’s mercies.  Someone says “God is good” and we respond “All the time.”  And we mean it.

But then . . . at some point down the line, things appear to fall apart for us yet again.  Critics of ours we thought had gone quiet pipe back up on social media and besmirch our name and reputation.  Or the cancer we thought we’d beaten reappears somewhere else in our body.  Perhaps the relationship that got restored in the past remains solid but then suddenly our connection to someone else we hold dear gets ruptured and we’ve got the pain of dysfunction all over again.  And so in the “Shampoo-Rinse-Repeat” cycle of life we’re right back to begging God to come through for us all over again.  We start to wonder what we did to deserve this (maybe it’s punishment for my sins).  We feel desperate.  We feel poor and needy all over again and so beg God to show up in our lives as God has done in the past.  We hope it will happen again.  We hope.  But we don’t know for sure.

The life of faith does not always proceed in a straight line, and neither did Jesus ever tell us otherwise.  In fact, a lot of what Jesus taught his disciples boils down to, “Expect trouble in your lives.”  Not a real happy thought but give Jesus credit for his realism.  The path of discipleship has its share of zig-zagging.  Highs and lows.  Peaks and valleys.  Perhaps Psalm 40 is a reflection of this reality.  Probably few if any of us have ever met a Christian believer who could ever in all honesty say, “I had one bad patch in my life that God helped me through but since then it’s been clear sailing every day.  I have not needed to ask God for a blessed thing for decades now.”  Maybe some people really could claim that.  But most of us would be skeptical if we heard such a thing.

Yet here is another thing to which Psalm 40 testifies: Yes, God hears us when we praise and thank him in the good times.  But God equally hears us when we are poor and desperate and are yawping out pleas for help, when we pass through those times when, think of Romans 8, our sighs are too deep for words and we have to let the Holy Spirit intercede for us.  God is with us on those mountain peaks but also in those desert valleys or in those slimy mud pits.  God is not present in only the first 11 verses of Psalm 40 but in the whole song.

If we preach that message from Psalm 40, one suspects most everyone in the congregation will lean in to hear it.  They will long to hear it because they too know that this is just how life goes a lot of the time.

Illustration Idea

Years ago in a sermon preached at the Festival of Homiletics, the renowned preacher Fred Craddock preached on John 20 and in particular the verse in that chapter that claims that if everything Jesus had ever said and done were actually written down, “the world could not contain the books that would be written.”

“That’s ridiculous” was the opening line of the sermon.  Craddock then engaged the hyperbole of that verse with some hyperbole of his own.  “Can you imagine,” he said, “going to Colorado to ski except you could not get down the mountain because of all the books that would be in the way.”  The Library of Congress, Craddock noted, has 5,000 miles of running shelf space.  “I bet we could cram the books about Jesus in there” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

But through many clever twists and turns as the sermon unfolded, Craddock made clear in the end that there is a spiritual truth behind John 20’s hyperbole.  The Gospel and the Christ Jesus at the center of it really are bigger than the whole wide world, than the whole wide cosmos.  There really is no bottom to the telling of the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

Psalm 40:5 reminded me of this with its declaration that if the psalmist even tried to recount the goodness and the works of God, he could not even make a small dent in the actual amount of things that could be shared.  God really is that big.  Or as the old spiritual would have it, God is so high you can’t get over him; so wide you can’t get around him; so deep you can’t get under him.