Psalm 145:8-14 Commentary

Psalm 145 occurs twice in each of the Revised Common Lectionary’s Years of A, B, and C.  But it’s never the whole psalm for some reason.  This Year A reading carves out some of the middle of this song while other assigned lections in other years include the first verses, the last verses, the middle verses, or some combination thereof.  This is a unified poem of course but its various sections do contain just enough discrete variations that you can see how you could get a singular focus on the various parts of the psalm and those themes can be seen as semi-distinct from the others.

In any event, this reading focuses on the gracious compassion of God and the faithful ways by which God forgives, restores, and lifts up his people.  Those same people who are the beneficiaries of God’s faithful mercy and compassion turn around to praise God and to tell of God’s faithfulness to anyone who will listen.  God has established an everlasting kingdom of glory and light and it’s our job to invite as many people into that kingdom as we can.

All of that is pretty straightforward.  But I wonder how often we reflect on the notion—taught throughout the Bible and in many psalms—that our God is a compassionate God as we read in verses 8-9.  Let’s pause and linger over that for a bit.

First off let’s review what compassion is.  Compassion and empathy are certain first cousins as we will shortly see.  The word “compassion” includes Latin roots of cum and passio and so literally means “to suffer with” someone. (By the way, “sympathy” is almost identical to compassion but that word is formed from the Greek roots of sym-pathos or “with passion.”)  Empathy is the ability to sense how another person is feeling—as someone who has Empathy as his #1 strength on the Strengthfinders scale, I can tell you that I do have the ability to sense how others around me are feeling.  I know quicker than some when another person is on the verge of tears.  I can also sense the joy or happiness of others but I suppose we tend to think of having empathy for someone more often when it comes to sensing someone’s pain or distress.

It may be that having a sense of empathy is the prerequisite to then move on to compassion.  First you pick up on someone else’s need or pain or distress and then in compassion you move in to try to alleviate the situation or mitigate it at least in some way.  Empathy tells you “Someone is in need” and compassion then responds “And I am going to do something about that.”  We often hear that compassion has three stages: First we see someone in distress.  Second we identify with that person in their distress.  Third we move into the distressing situation in an effort to bring aid, comfort, or support.

But a lot of this is premised on the notion that one of the reasons you can feel another person’s pain is because you have had experience with similar pain in your own life.  When I sense someone near me is on the verge of welling up in tears, my own eyes quickly start to moisten as well.  When I tell my wife about what so-and-so said in a meeting when he or she began to cry a bit, I typically cannot get through telling my wife this story without my own voice breaking and my own tears rolling down my cheeks.  (I also tend to cry at some point during every Pixar movie I have ever watched, much to the distress of my children at times!)

In any event, we have all had experiences like this.  We see someone’s hurt, we hurt for and with that other person, and so we try to help this person.  But all of that is why it should strike us as at least curious that God is hailed as the ultimate compassionate One.  Does God have a backlog of “personal” experience with the kinds of pain or distress that trigger our compassion for another person?  Does God, as it were, well up in sympathetic and compassionate tears the way we may do?

Classically God has been depicted as not having passions like we creatures do.  God has often been seen as being above having emotions, as being apathetic or dispassionate in the sense of not being drive by pathos, by emotions and passions.  Granted, a number of theologians have taken issue with these more Greek conceptions of divinity or deity.  God in the Bible is frequently presented as experiencing various emotions.  In Genesis 6 God is said to “grieve” having made humanity given what a mess they had made of his creation.  God is said to love, to be love, but it is difficult for us to imagine “love” in any sense that does not involve a whole swirl of emotions.  God is also said to sometimes be angry at sin, to despise and feel nauseated by sacrifices offered to him in hollow and empty ways by people only going through the motions without actually having any desire to reform their wicked ways.

Perhaps, however, we have been too quick to chalk all that up to metaphor, to a kind of anthropomorphizing of God in ways not to be taken too literally.  For God to feel compassion, God has to have a sense for what we are feeling and experiencing.  If God has compassion on us when we are feeling acutely guilty about something, God can understand our guilt from the inside even if God has (we must assume) no past experience of feeling guilt himself.  If we are sad and grieving, God must be able to have some sense for what that feels like from the inside and this is what motivates God to move toward us in a compassion aimed at lifting us up to a better, more joyful place.

Jesus was repeatedly presented as seeing harried and harassed crowds, grieving mothers and fathers, deeply distressed and lonely people and then after seeing them, he feels compassion for them.  And as many of us know, the Greek word rendered as “compassion” does not mean as we tend to think of it as “his heart went out to them.”  Rather, it is a visceral action.  In the Greek sense of compassion, you would be more accurate to say “His guts went out to them.”  Jesus felt compassion in his gut and it moved him to alleviating and comforting words and deeds and often miracles.

So perhaps we are saying and taking in more than we know when we read something like Psalm 145 and its words on how compassionate our great God is.  The implications may be profound, perhaps even a little theologically complex.  But what it all adds up to is all the joy and sense of being blessed that Psalm 145 celebrates with great exuberance.

Illustration Idea

Does anyone really want a dispassionate God or Savior?  For sure we do not want the overly impassioned gods and goddesses of things like Roman or Greek mythology.  These are divine figures who seem to be as controlled by their own passions as the average human and not infrequently those passions lead such figures as Zeus or Mars to commit some pretty bad deeds and exhibit some all-too-human behavior inflamed by out-of-control wrath or jealousy or some such.  No one wants such a capricious god.

But to have a passionate—and in Psalm 145 a compassionate—God is a good thing.  This is not a God controlled by those passions but who is in firm control of whatever the divine equivalent is of emotions and the like.

Recently I reflected on some of this from a slightly different angle in pondering the way actor Jonathan Roumie has portrayed Jesus in the TV series The Chosen.  You can read my Reformed Journal blog on this subject here.