Psalm 13

Psalm 13 (NRSV)

¹ How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

² How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³ Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

⁴ and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;

my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵ But I trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

⁶ I will sing to the Lord,

because he has dealt bountifully with me. 

            Psalm 13 is an individual lament, the prayer of a sick person, uttered in the sanctuary where the psalmist presumes the Lord is present.  It has the theme of a person on the verge of death and harboring doubts about the goodness and presence of the Lord. We learn again that doubt is not the enemy of faith. In fact, doubt and questioning can lead us deeper. Too many people of faith want to believe in things that are “beyond the shadow of a doubt.” Problem is, the Bible itself is willing to go into those shadows and ask the hard questions of the Lord. In such individual laments, we have an expression of individuality that we do not usually find in the Old Testament, given its usual communal context. We find literature that expresses personal and private hope, fear, anguish, confusion and rage. In this case, the Lord seems to turn a blind eye and refuse to do anything about evil. His repeated attempts to get the Lord to do something have gone for nothing. The Lord simply does not answer. The Lord is not on trial here; the absence of the Lord is on trial. Such psalms express the perennial misery of life. His prayer is that the Lord will restore life and vitality. The alternative is the sleep of death. However, in the end, the psalmist reaffirms his confidence in the Lord and promises to praise the Lord for the assured deliverance.  In the biblical text, when people cry out in loneliness and pain, when the enemy lurks outside in the darkness, God does not respond with lengthy explanations about theodicy or provide a bulleted list of ways to get around the problem. Instead, God chooses to simply come alongside humanity with trustworthy love, taking on our suffering and redeeming it. Such an “answer” to the question of suffering, evil, and divine absence is admittedly frustrating. For the person of faith, it offers profound comfort that some will find mystifying. Thus, having remembered the evidence of the trustworthy love of God in his own life, the psalmist quickly drops his lament, turning his diatribe into a song of praise. His meditation and prayer have lifted the burdened caused by the experience of divine absence in the midst of suffering, evil, and enemies. Madeleine L’Engel in Two-Part Intervention wrote,

“I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.”