Psalm 32 Commentary

Although like most Woody Allen films the movie Crimes and Misdemeanors has more than a few comedic moments, in the end the movie is also quite chilling.  The more comedic moments in the film involve a hapless documentary filmmaker named Cliff Stern (played by Allen).  Cliff’s life is in some ways falling apart.  His marriage appears to be finished.  A documentary he has been trying to make on a Jewish philosopher ends in disaster when the philosopher commits suicide.  He falls in love with a woman after he is forced to make a promotional film for a vainglorious man named Lester.  But Lester is someone Cliff finds to be utterly vapid and self-involved.  After completing a cut of the film in which Cliff makes fun of Lester and gets pilloried and fired for it, he also discovers that the woman he had fallen in love with has not only chosen not to pursue Cliff but gets involved with the vapid Lester instead.  Cliff does nothing seriously wrong in this story—his sins represent at best the “misdemeanors” part of the movie’s title.  But he’s miserable.

But the sobering serious parts of this movie follow a well-to-do ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau).  Judah has a loving wife and family but for some while had been carrying on an adulterous affair with a woman named Dolores.  When it becomes clear to Dolores that Judah has no intention of ever leaving his wife for her, she threatens to reveal their relationship to Judah’s wife.  Judah thinks he has dissuaded her from doing so when in the mail one day he intercepts a letter Dolores had actually sent and mailed to Judah’s wife.  Judah becomes desperate to save his life, reputation, family, and marriage.  He confesses his sins/crimes to his shady brother Jack.  Jack clearly has some mafia connections and arranges for the murder of Dolores.  Jack assures Judah no one will ever know who did it and certainly no one will ever connect it back to Judah.  And Delores is murdered.  But Judah is horrified at what he has done and at one point in the movie we see he is going nearly insane with guilt.  He is sure he will never be the same.  At one point we see him running out into a field as though trying to escape the guilt nipping at his heels.

Except then flash forward many months and the movie concludes at the splendid and lavish wedding of Judah’s daughter.  At one point Judah stops at a bar in the hotel where the reception is being held only to encounter Cliff, who has some shirttail relation to the wider family.  The two had never met.  Cliff is clearly glum.  But as they talk, Judah reveals a remarkable thing.  Without telling Cliff what he had done or even that he was talking about himself, Judah relates the story of a man who did a terrible thing, who was wracked with guilt over it and who nearly went crazy because of it.  Until one fine Spring morning when he woke up only to discover that the guilt was gone.  He realized he’d gotten away with it and suddenly life was wonderful again and so he just goes on.  Cliff did nothing terribly wrong and is ruined and lonely.  Judah did horrific things and is still happily married and reveling in his daughter’s wedding day.

And in the background of all this was a rabbi, a family friend of the Rosenthal family, who throughout the film is going progressively blind.  In the film’s final scene, we see the now totally blind rabbi dancing with his wife at the wedding reception.  The rabbi is blind.  So, Woody Allen is clearly saying, is God.

Psalm 32 famously claims that unconfessed sin is a torment.  The sinful person will never have a moment’s rest until they come clean before God.  And once they do, they will be forgiven and enter a state of beatitude, of blessed bliss before God’s face.  The wicked are filled with many woes, verse 10 claims.  But though we’d like to be able to say with confidence that this is how the world works, we also know that the scenario sketched by Crimes and Misdemeanors really does happen.  Worse, there are some who are guilty of genuinely terrible sins who never pass through even the guilt-laden season we see Judah Rosenthal enduring until one morning that all magically evaporated like the morning mist.  Some people never get to the guilt at all.  Ever.  It reminds you of the line in the Frank Sinatra song “My Way.”  “Regrets.  I’ve had a few.  But then again, too few to mention.”

For this first Sunday of Lent in the Lectionary’s Year A we are confronted with a psalm that waxes eloquent on the healing power of confession and repentance and penitence.  And we believe everything this song says is true.  Above all we acknowledge that the psalm’s claims about God’s gracious and merciful disposition are all true.  God’s default setting is a desire to forgive and to restore us, his wayward people.  Perhaps God by God’s Spirit is also the force behind stoking proper feelings of guilt over the wrongdoing we’ve committed in our lives.  Maybe the Spirit is the ants in the pants of moving us to come clean before God.  If so, such guilt is a gift after all because it opens the door to a grace that is always more than a match for our sins and our concomitant guilt over our sin.

Certainly, most of us shake our heads in both sorrow and wonder over people who commit terrible atrocities and seem to feel nary a twinge of discomfort over such deeds.  Or we startle a bit to hear that maybe sometimes even a one-time intense season of guilt can just go away.  We can be sad this is so sometimes.  But rather than let this spectacle be merely something we lament where other people are concerned, perhaps the reality that some people manage to live guilt-free becomes a sobering reminder for all of us that we are none of us immune to being able to ignore the sins we commit.

Maybe we are not guilty of an adultery covered up by murder, but are there other things in our lives that we find easier to ignore than to confess?  At the head of the Season of Lent, this may be a vital bit of soul-searching in which we can all fruitfully engage before the face of God.  No, a sermon on Psalm 32 need not come down to some waving of a bony finger in people’s faces.  Even a sermon on this psalm needs to be about God’s grace from first to last.  But grace does not have to cut off honest self-examination.

Some of the psalms sometimes ask God to deliver us from our “hidden faults” or hidden sins.  That, too, can be a reminder that we need to throw ourselves onto the loving grace of God at all times as we seek to gain ever greater conformity to Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord.  If there are things in our spiritual lives that even we are overlooking or are unable to see for whatever the reason, we ask God to reveal also that to us.  It’s an act of grace when God does so.

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]

Illustration Idea

The rather extended summary of the film Crimes and Misdemeanors functions as this sermon commentary’s illustration idea.  So let me share another thought here.  In the film a man is guilty of adultery and the arranging of a murder to cover it up.  The guilt drives him mad for a season but then just mysteriously goes away.  He got away with it so why not enjoy the fruits of his marriage, family, and career, the protection of which led him to arranging his ex-lover’s murder in the first place.  Now that is just a movie.  And maybe some who have seen the film or read the above synopsis of the story find it a little extreme.

And yet . . .  there is someone rather well known in the history of salvation who did precisely these identical actions and this is of course King David.  He had an illicit affair with Bathsheba and when covering it up using her altogether too virtuous husband Uriah failed over and over, David ordered the killing of Uriah.  This allowed him to take Bathsheba as his wife and then the child they had conceived via adultery would appear to be David’s legitimate child.  He’d gotten away it.

How long was it before the prophet Nathan showed up to convict him of his horrible sins?  How long did David, like Judah Rosenthal in the movie, find it possible just to pick up his life and go on as if nothing had ever happened?  Weeks?  Months?  And had God not sent Nathan, would David have found it somehow possible to live out the rest of his days with his crime and sin receding into the background like some terrible fire that grows ever smaller in your car’s rearview mirror as you drive away from it?

These are not comfortable questions.  Not where David is concerned.  Not where any of us is concerned.