Psalm 26:1-8 Commentary

Probably it is the Calvinism that is fairly well ingrained into my being that makes me hesitate over parts of Psalm 26.  I mean, I just cannot imagine coming before my God in Christ and saying, “I have led a blameless life.”  Were I to pray along the lines of saying to God, “I wash my hands in innocence” even as I claim to have never wavered from God’s ways, I cannot help but imagine God’s smirking a bit.  Is it possible to make Jesus giggle in response to a prayer?  If he did, I could not blame him.  I mean, if anyone I knew came up even to me to claim they have led a life free of all blame and sin, I for sure would laugh and likely reply along the lines of, “Yeah, right.  Sure you have!  Do you have any ocean-front property in Arizona you want to try to sell me while you’re at it?”

By the way, the Lectionary shaves off verses 9-12 for no obvious reason so we may as well preach on the entire psalm.  This is of course hardly the only psalm that makes claims to spiritual perfection and innocence.  But it may be the most relentless of such songs.  The writer does not let this alleged veil of moral perfection slip even for a half second.  God is asked to come through for him in the face of some kind of opposition—the poem begins with a plea to be vindicated after all—and the basis of the request is that God kind of owes it to this person since he is a shining exemplar of exactly the kind of person God desires.

Again, we’ve all asked for God’s help in our lives and fairly often at that.  But if I thought the main reason to have hope that my prayers would be answered were rooted in claims of being a morally pristine person, I would not have any hope at all as it turns out.  I cannot imagine asking God to go right ahead and examine my heart top to bottom because I just know God will find nothing amiss there.  Again, however, from verse 1 through to verse 12, this is what the psalmist claims for himself.

The middle of the song may be the easiest to accept.  It is doubtless true that this person did not associate with wicked and evil people.  No doubt this psalmist did abhor the goings-on of lousy people and steadfastly did not participate in their plans and schemes and did not adopt their posture in life.  And probably claims that this psalmist instead loves the Temple of God and spends time there singing praises to God are also valid.  You can believe that part readily enough.  But for the rest . . . well, what do we do with that?  Unless this Jesus is the one who is talking here, the literal truth of the psalmist’s claims simply cannot be true.

So how can we understand this?  Well, it is possible that these claims and sentiments stemmed from a kind of “all things being equal” point of view.  “Compared to any number of other people, I am doing quite well with keeping God’s ways.”  Maybe.  But that’s not really the claim here.  There is no caveat or nuance to the words of Psalm 26.  You don’t get the sense that the writer is saying that compared to the really big crimes and sins of some people, he is relatively innocent.  I mean, no murders, no adulteries, not violent acts, no abuse of a spouse or children, no thefts, no embezzlement schemes, no cheating on taxes, no lying under oath.  On the big-ticket moral items, he’s doing quite well.  And perhaps we need not then ponder more penny-ante stuff, the minor moral picadilloes, the misdemeanors of life, the occasional flair of anger or envy in the heart, the sight of an attractive person bringing about a wee bit of lust.  None of those things hurt anybody after all.

Again, though, that’s not quite the claims of the 26^th psalm either.  “Examine my heart” the psalmist says.  Give me your most accurate spiritual MRI and you won’t find anything remotely concerning.  Hmmm.

One cannot help but think of the Rich Young Man whose encounter with Jesus was deemed significant enough that it occurs in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.  If ever Jesus had run across a Psalm 26 kind of person, this earnest young man was it.  Jesus reels of a list of God’s commandments and without hesitation the man responds, “Nailed it!  Anything else?”  But of course Jesus knows there will always be something else.  Every time for every one of us.  For this person it was an undue attachment to wealth that he was either unaware of or deemed to be of no concern since it did not obviously violate any of the Ten Commandments and the like.  But for you or for me it would probably be something different.  But if you ask Jesus to examine your heart, he will and he’ll find something.  Every time.

Of course the purpose of Jesus’s interaction with that man was to remind us that all we can do at the end of the day is throw ourselves on grace alone.  The young man went away sad and no doubt that pained Jesus but he was hoping it was a sadness that would be productive of something good; viz., an end to self-reliance and a beginning of God-alone-reliance because as Jesus will say to the disciples, when it comes to getting eternal life, “With people this is impossible but with God all things are possible.”

So perhaps if we want to adopt the language of Psalm 26, we can do so only because the Gospel teaches us that by grace alone we have been credited with the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ our Lord.  We have been justified by grace alone.  And if it’s a little too cheeky by half to make “justified” morph into “just-as-if-I’d never sinned,” theologically that is correct.  God looks at us and sees the innocence and blamelessness of our Savior.

I don’t know pre-Christ how God regarded a prayer like Psalm 26.  What we can know, however, is that now in Christ we can stand before our holy God and say, “I lead a blameless life” and God will respond, “You know, through my Son Jesus, you actually do.”  And that is amazing grace indeed.

Illustration Idea

Flannery O’Connor had a habit of depicting self-righteous characters and then causing them to come to a bad end, which seemed to be her way of casting judgment on moral prigs who are so wrapped up in their own alleged moral innocence that they cannot see the unloving and critical persons that stance had created in them.  The very thing they were most proud about—being better than other people—made them actually quite a lot worse than a lot of other people.

She did it with Mrs. Ruby Turpin in the short story Revelation.  Only at the end when she receives a vision of all the “wrong” people going up to heaven ahead of Mrs. Turpin and her ilk did she begin to perceive who she really was.  O’Connor did it with Mrs. May in the short story Greenleaf.  After spending most of the story looking down her nose at most everyone else, in the end she is gored to death by a bull but as she dies, it is as though she was “whispering some last discovery into the animal’s ear.”  What was that discovery?  Maybe seeing herself for who she had been all along.  O’Connor did it with the grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find.  After a long encounter with the seemingly sociopathic character of The Misfit, the grandmother is shot dead by him.  And the bottom line was “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

O’Connor did not have much use for the self-righteous of the world.  And if we’re honest, when we meet such people, we cringe too.  But we also need to know that those stories are like a mirror held up before our own faces.  That is why Christ alone is our hope by the grace only God can give.