Psalm 43 Commentary

If you rounded up some Old Testament scholars and especially those who are experts on the Book of Psalms, you would likely find consensus among most of those people that Psalms 42 and 43 belong together such that you really cannot look at one without the other.  Some might contend this had originally been a single psalm that at some point got split up into two discrete poems.  Others might claim they were written separately but as companion songs such that Psalm 43 concludes what Psalm 42 began.

In any event, the Lectionary is giving us just Psalm 43 on a Sunday that in 2026 coincides with All Saints Day on November 1.   But when we preach on this, it is likely a good idea to suggest people at least review Psalm 42 or we can summarize Psalm 42 inside the sermon.  They are clearly cognate songs with the ending of Psalm 43 in verse 5 featuring a word-for-word repetition of the refrain in Psalm 42 that occurs twice, including as the conclusion of also the 42nd psalm.

Of course, most of the time in the Year A Lectionary Proper 25 / the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost does not coincide with All Saints Day.  But when it does, it perhaps creates the opportunity to remind ourselves that although it is right to celebrate all the saints in the faith that have gone before us in history, we need to also remember that many of those saints suffered the kind of dark night of the soul reflected in these two psalms.  

People are not born saints nor does their having achieved sainthood even within the span of their natural lives on this earth mean that they were spared hardships, doubts, struggles, and sorrows.  Quite the contrary.  We can recall these harrowing words from the end of Hebrews 11 and its litany of all the saints who had come before:

36 Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— 38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.

39 These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, 40 since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Whoever wrote Psalms 42 and 43 would have little trouble seeing themselves inside this picture.  Both psalms lament the seeming absence of God in the psalmist’s life of late.  It had not always been that way as in Psalm 42 the memory of better times somehow serves as a kind of salve on the wounding of this present moment of seeming divine inactivity if not inattention.  But for the moment, things are sufficiently painful that the psalmist’s soul is downcast and deeply troubled.  Between the two songs that hard question “Why are you so downcast within me, O my soul?” gets asked three times.  Yes, each time concludes with “put your hope in God” and then the fervent hope and wish that God will return in some way one day soon.  But for the moment, the tears rolling down the psalmist’s cheeks are not being dried.

All in all, these two psalms are a bracing reminder that it’s not weak faith that leads to this kind of crisis but rather robust faith.  This kind of lament does not come from someone who does not expect much of God in the first place but rather from someone whose faith tells them that they should expect God to come through for God’s people.  There should be justice for the corrupt.  There should be a silencing of those who tell lies night and day.  There should be signs that God is on the side of those who try to live in righteous ways.  Life before God really ought to look like all of these things.  And so when life appears to be, if not the total opposite of all that at least something approaching the opposite of all that, we are right to rue and lament and complain about it.

This is what saints do.  This is how saints react to a world where so much of the time a whole lot of things seem to be out of joint.  Recently I was reminded of the story in 2 Kings when King Hezekiah receives a terrifyingly threatening letter from the Assyrians.  So the king goes to God’s Temple and quite literally spreads out the letter on the altar.  It was as though Hezekiah was saying to God, “Have you read this yet?”  Sometimes we essentially do this with the news of the day.  “Lord, did you read this morning’s paper?  Do you see the ‘Breaking News’ item on CNN that once more shows corrupt people getting away with their crimes?”  It’s like we want to call God’s attention to what is troubling us as a prelude to asking, “And just what are you going to do about all this, Lord?”

In the short run we may not be at all sure just how or when God might show us some encouraging sign that God is present and is at work to bring justice and peace.  In the long run, though, we try to join the psalmist in expressing the fond hope that God will do something to right this world’s wrongs and to bring us comfort in the face of people who one way or another count as our enemies.  When that happens, like the psalmist, we know we will give all praise to God; we know that as Psalm 43:4 says, God will be our joy and our delight.   As Christians we believe that this ultimate triumph of God will happen, because in a real sense it has already happened in the resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead.

A friend of mine once told me that her pastor, at the end of every worship service, sends people out the doors and back out into their weeks with these words: “Remember that you live in a world where a resurrection happened.”

And because of that we can all say, “I will yet praise you, my Savior and my God.”

Illustration Idea

“Imagine setting out consciously to write a novel about a saint,” Frederick Buechner once mused.  “How could you avoid falling flat on your face?  Nothing is harder to make real than holiness.  Certainly nothing is harder to make appealing or attractive.  The danger, I suppose, is that you start out with the idea that sainthood is something people achieve, that you get to be more holy more or less the way you get to be an Eagle Scout.  To create a saint from that point of view would be to end up with something on the order of Little Nell.  The truth is of course that holiness is not a human quality like virtue.  If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something that God does in them . . . It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with” (The Clown in the Belfry, San Francisco: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1992, p. 18).

This is something the Bible knows too.  Saints aren’t people different from you or me or who are made out of plastic.  Saints suffer, saints doubt, saints have Psalm 42-43 experiences same as everybody else.  Saints in the Bible are warts-and-all people with foibles and failures in whom and through whom God manages to do amazing things despite the long odds of it being otherwise.