Psalm 42-43 is an individual lament. Some think the psalm has a pre-exilic date. Although currently divided in the English (and Hebrew) Psalter, Psalms 42 and 43 display several features that suggest they were originally one psalm. First, we have the absence of a superscription for Psalm 43 (recognizing that not all psalms have superscriptions). Second, the presence of the refrain beginning “Why are you cast down, O my soul,” that carries across the psalms (42:5, 11; 43:5). Third, we have the repetition of 42:9b in 43:2b. Fourth, we find the common theme of distress at the experience of separation from God and relief coming from the temple sanctuary.
The two psalms open Book II of the Psalter (Psalms 42–72), which includes a small collection of psalms (42–48) from the Korahite, one of the temple songbooks that was edited into the current Psalter. The superscription says To the leader. A Maskil of the Korahites. If, as II Chronicles 20:19 suggests, the Korahites were temple singers, it should come as no surprise that this Korahite psalm has as its central idea the healing and revivifying power of worship in the temple sanctuary.
The psalmist lives in exile. He lives around southern Syria, near Mt. Herman. He is deprived of happiness because he cannot be in Jerusalem. A counterpart to "Dark Night of the Soul," his soul is mortally wounded. He contends for God, who he fears to lose. The psalmist focuses on what he has in God, not what he can get out of God.
The psalm gives us an insight into depression. We nourish depression with ungrieved and unforgiven hurts.[1] We can lose our faith in deliverance and ultimate restoration. The pain is unrelenting. What makes the condition intolerable is our perspective that no remedy will come. The loss of hope crushes the soul more than pain does.[2] Depression is the inability to construct a future.[3] Death is not the greatest loss of life. We will die. The greatest loss is when life dies inside us while we live.[4]
In Psalm 42: 1-6a, he yearns for God and a sad recollection. 1 As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. It expresses grief as a thirsting for God, presently being in a dried up river bed, seeking to quench thirst, but not finding water. In the Bible, deer were commonly used to represent fleetness or sureness of foot (e.g., II Samuel 22:34 = Psalm 18:33 = Habakkuk 3:19; Isaiah 35:6), furtiveness (e.g., Job 39:1) or beauty (e.g., Proverbs 5:19). Only here does the thirst of the deer for cool flowing streams become a symbol for the desire for God. 2 My soul thirsts for God. We can consider the biblical notion of the personal unity of body and soul at this point. A human being as soul is a being of desires oriented to things that might meet the desires, and one that is searching for them. Hence, an ensouled body does not have life of itself but by the Spirit of God who breathes life into it. This corresponds to the teleological description of living creatures in Aristotelian philosophy. God alone can satisfy the desire for life that constitutes the life of the soul. From the biblical standpoint to desire God is of the very nature of creaturely life as such, transcendent and unattainable though the divine reality may be to living creatures.[5] His soul thirsts for the living God. The point is not that God is alive as are other living creatures. Rather, God is effectual and has an impact upon the life of the psalmist. The same distinction applies to other celestial beings, such as the living creatures in Ezekiel’s visions. The ability of God to act, especially on Israel’s behalf, was, for the biblical theologians, the sign of God’s living nature. The ontological reality of God was not an issue of much concern to most of the biblical tradition. The idea of a God who does not act but simply “is” would have been perplexing to the point of incomprehensibility to the Bible’s theologians, whose theology was eminently practical. For them, the proof of God’s existence was God’s care — demonstrated in saving acts — for the chosen people. That was the living God of the Bible. When shall I come and behold the face of God? He simply seeks the presence of God. 3 My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?” The pagan asks where his God is. Not only was God’s care for Israel necessary for practical belief, but God would show such care to the individual believer. The apparent absence of such care provoked the crisis of faith expressed by the writer. 4 These things I remember, focusing upon the nearness of God, as I now pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God,[6] with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. This memory relieves his distress for a while. The writer leaves the details of the distress unspecified. W What is clear is that the psalmist was once a part of the worshiping community of the temple. He may have been a leader of that community. However, something has now cut him off from that community. Has the psalmist done something for which leaders of the community have banished him? Was there a change in temple leadership that resulted in a purge of cult personnel? Is a debilitating (or ritually defiling) condition preventing the psalmist from participating in the ritual life of the temple? Has some rule of the community forced the psalmist to retire due to age or infirmity? Has an enemy destroyed the temple and the people exiled? The exact cause of the psalmist’s separation is impossible to specify.[7] 5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help6 and my God. The writer talks with himself. He realizes that the suffering of his soul must end. He rebukes and encourages himself.
In Psalm 42: 6b-11, he expresses separation from God and scorn of the enemies. My soul is cast down within me. A profound admission. The comfort mentioned above relapses into a gloom. Therefore, I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. His homesickness is brought back with renewed force. He suffers in Mt. Herman, separated from home, and feeling separated from God. The mention of the land of Jordan and of Hermon is the only suggestion of a geographical setting for the psalm (apart from the temple in Jerusalem itself). Associating Jordan with Mount Hermon suggests the region of northern Syria-Palestine, where both Mount Hermon and the headwaters of the Jordan are located. (Mount Mizar is unknown but would be located somewhere in the same general region.) This may be the locale to which the psalmist has fled, been banished, or otherwise been forced to relocate. 7 Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me. Thus, he does not see the beauty of his surrounding, but the calamity of his own soul. 8 By day, the Lord commands steadfast love, and at night, the song of the Lord is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. Thus, he reaches out to God, whom he imagines having forsaken him. 9 I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”Thus, one God can deliver him. 10 As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?” He faces both his doubts about God and his longing for God. If we think in broader terms of the attribute of God as infinite, the inescapability of the presence of God by the Spirit means that God is present even with those who turn from God, even though it might seem to those who do so that God is absent from them, as this psalmist expresses.[8] 11 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. Thus, we find a last super-human effort of the soul.
I have been pondering how life can just be too much sometimes. It is all too much. I find myself emotionally battered. Weary. Burdened. Exhausted. Do you ever feel like that? The author of Psalms 42 and 43 did. There is a certain help that comes to us when we recognize that the pages of the Bible are populated with people not unlike us, people for whom life became “too much” long before that vocabulary was around. But this is not merely a case of misery liking company. There is also help in seeing what else the biblical writers had to say about their circumstances.
Rationalists (including Christian rationalists) want explanations; Romantics (including Christian romantics) want to be given a sigh of relief. But what we need more than either is to recover the biblical tradition of lament. Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and do not get an answer. It is where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world. It is no part of the Christian vocation to be able to explain what is happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain — and to lament instead. As the Spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope.[9]
The psalmist recognizes that problems call forth our courage and wisdom. We might even say that problems create our courage and our wisdom. Problems have the potential of helping us grow mentally and spiritually. If we are to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we must challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems.[10]We come to the point of wisdom and courage when we recognize that while the world breaks all of us, the opportunity is that we become strong in the broken places.[11]
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS[12]
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
[1] Penelope Sweet
[2] William Styron
[3] Rollo May
[4] Norman Cousins
[5] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 185.
[6] One linguistic clue that this psalm dates from the late (postexilic) period of the Bible’s composition is its use of the phrase “the house of God” to refer to the temple. Of the roughly 80 occurrences of that expression in the OT, the overwhelming majority of them occur in the late books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. The phrase is a circumlocution (for, in this case, the temple), a linguistic and theological development characteristic of the postexilic period, when attributes associated with the Divine (such as the temple) took on a deeper sense of holiness by their very lack of physical presence.
[7] Some scholars think that part of the redacting process of the Psalms was unhooking them from their historical moorings in order to allow them to function more freely across time and differing circumstances.
[8]
[9] N.T. Wright, “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It’s Not Supposed To,” TIME, March 29, 2020.
[10] M. Scott Peck
[11] Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms
[12] Wendell Berry
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