Psalm 31:9-16 Commentary

Since the Lectionary each year gives us a psalm each for the Liturgy of the Palms (Psalm 118 most years) and the Liturgy of the Passion (Psalm 31 this year), each year we select just one of them to focus on.  This commentary is on the Psalm 31 lection but if you would like to see a commentary on Psalm 118, you can view last year’s commentary here.

Although Psalm 31 concludes with praises to God for God’s rescue of the psalmist, much of this song is pretty dark, including the center section of verses 9-16 that the RCL carves out for us.  Sometimes I wonder if we are minded to downplay the extremes of rhetoric that we find in many psalms.  Maybe the psalmist is exaggerating a bit, going a bit over the top as a way to get God’s attention.  We’re not always sure what to make of all the “enemies” talk we encounter in a lot of psalms.  Who were these people?  Were they really as bloodthirsty as a lot of psalms depict them?  Were they literally trying to murder the song writer as not a few psalms, including Psalm 31, claim?  Or did it just feel that way?  It reminds me of the Beatles song “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in which John Lennon depicts the couple’s furious attempts to get somebody to marry them as they fled England for Paris and then were redirected to Gibraltar where someone could marry them.  A refrain in the song is “Christ, you know it’s not easy.  You know how hard it can be.  The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me.”

Well, not really.  Lennon just felt put upon and harassed but no one at that time was seeking to crucify him literally.  It was at best a metaphor for the extreme emotions he and Yoko were feeling at the time.  And so, we think, that maybe we need to read the psalms metaphorically as well when we encounter all that talk about being threatened with actual death by the psalmist’s enemies.

Maybe.  And then again (or at least in some instances) maybe not.  But one thing is for certain: the sentiments you read in Psalm 31:9-16 are shot through with true mental and spiritual anguish.  And not a few of us know that when this psalmist says that this anguish has physical manifestations (“my strength fails me because of my affliction, my bones grow weak”), that too is likely no exaggeration.  When our spirits are troubled, our bodies react.  Stress and anxiety raise blood pressure, can affect our breathing, can prevent us from sleeping and just generally can render us anergic.  There is a reason why depressed people often find it hard to get out of bed in the morning: it just requires more energy than they feel they possess at the moment.

So let’s not be too quick to dismiss the thoroughgoing misery we read in something like Psalm 31.  And since on this Fifth Sunday in Lent we are supposed to associate this with what Jesus went through in his final week starting with the entry into Jerusalem, we know that we are to appropriate these words for things like Jesus’s anguish in Gethsemane, with his being mocked and scourged by cruel Roman thugs, with his being lifted up on a spit of wood to die at a place named after a dead skull.  And certainly in that case, we are not to be in the business of minimizing the punch of Psalm 31’s gut-wrenching laments.  For the incarnate Son of God, it really was as bad as the psalmist describes his own agony.  Actually, it was no doubt worse.

But thankfully Psalm 31 does not conclude in agony but in victory.  The psalmist will go on to say that when he hit his lowest point, God heard his cry and worked some kind of deliverance.  God came through.  Enemies were put to flight.  And so the psalm concludes, “Be strong and take heart all you who hope in the Lord.”  Jesus’s story has that kind of ending too.  It’s called resurrection.  But as we have noted in other commentaries in Lent, let’s not rush to Easter in ways that make us in essence brush past the agony of our Lord.  Salvation was costly.  Let’s not let the “happy ending” of it all become a reason to plaster some yellow smiley face sticker over the suffering Jesus endured and that is reflected in these words from Psalm 31.

Years ago in a sermon, the preacher Thomas G. Long recounted once hearing a well-known American TV preacher being interviewed by a reporter from the BBC.  This reporter was sharp, Long noted, and had done her homework.  “Now, you preach a gospel of success, don’t you?  Of positive thinking.”  “Yes, I do” the preacher beamed.  “But how does that square with your Savior Jesus and all that he suffered?”  “Ooooh,” the preacher replied, “like all successful people Jesus had his setbacks.  But on Easter he put all that behind him.”

No, such a dismissive view of the suffering Jesus endured will never do.  It cheapens what Jesus did and accomplished and why he had to accomplish it through death and sacrifice.  It reminds me of a friend of mine who said that although he knows the movie The Shawshank Redemption is an outstanding film that ends with the glorious escape to freedom by the wrongly sentenced man named Andy Dufresne, he just cannot watch the movie.  Because long before Andy successfully escapes Shawshank Prison, he endured long periods of savage beatings by other prisoners, of being raped via sodomy and forced to perform sex acts on other prisoners.  And for my friend it’s just too difficult to watch no matter how happily-ever-after the movie concludes.

We might all be tempted to feel that way.  Maybe that is why we try to treat Palm Sunday or the Triumphal Entry as, well, as so triumphal.  We want this last Lenten Sunday to be a happy spectacle of little children singing and waving palm fronds.  And then in one short week it will be Easter with all things high, light, bright, and clear.  Yes, in between there is that one dark blip called Good Friday followed by the tense sorrow of Holy Saturday but we prefer to focus on the celebrative stuff.  But even Palm Sunday is a dark day and no one picks up on this better than Luke in chapter 19 that shows Jesus weeping and lamenting on that very day and in the midst of his own parade in which he is hailed as King.  We cannot evacuate the darkness of Jesus’s agony even on what we call Palm Sunday.  We have to enter his grief and only then can we properly celebrate this victory over death.  You really cannot have one without the other.

[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 TV series The Chosen has not always depicted every detail from the Gospel accounts accurately but mostly I find it succeeds pretty well.  For considering the kind of agonizing sorrow to which Psalm 31 points us, I think the compilation scene to which there is a YouTube link below does a good job conveying Christ’s agony in Gethsemane.  Actor Jonathan Roumie rightly shows that the spiritual and mental anguish Jesus felt affected his whole body, not unlike how the psalmist describes the physical manifestations of his own sorrow and terror.  This scene hypothesizes that Jesus was in such clear physical pain that the disciples thought to call a doctor to help.  Again, that sounds a lot like what Psalm 31 depicts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDHT-0IFivQ