Contend, O Lord, with those
who contend with me;
fight against those who fight
against me!..
Say to my soul, “I am your
salvation!”
Let them be put to shame and dishonour
who seek after my life!
Let them be turned back and
disappointed who devise evil against me!
Let them be like chaff before
the wind, with the angel of the Lord driving them away!..
But I, when they were sick—I
wore sackcloth;
I afflicted myself with
fasting; I prayed with head bowed on my chest.
I went about as though I
grieved for my friend or my brother;
as one who laments his
mother, I bowed down in mourning.
But at my stumbling they
rejoiced and gathered; they gathered together against me;
wretches whom I did not know tore
at me without ceasing;
like profane mockers at a
feast, they gnash at me with their teeth.
How long, O Lord, will you
look on?
Rescue me from their destruction, my precious
life from the lions!
I will thank you in the great
congregation; in the mighty throng I will praise you.
Let not those rejoice over me
who are wrongfully my foes,
and let not those wink the
eye who hate me without cause…
You have seen, O Lord; be not
silent! O Lord, be not far from me!
Awake and rouse yourself for
my vindication, for my cause, my God and my Lord!
Vindicate me, O Lord, my God,
according to your righteousness,
and let them not rejoice over
me!..
Then my tongue shall tell of
your righteousness
and of your praise all the
day long.
Psalm 35
Reflection – The Monday Psalter has
brought us to this psalm, not perhaps one of the top ten favourite psalms of
all time (or the top fifty… or perhaps even the top hundred!). It is
considerably longer than this—I have given excerpts to communicate the general
sense of it.
So it is a
psalm prayed by the one who is, simply, in big trouble. As always with the
psalms, we don’t have any specific details, but this person is being attacked,
maligned, reviled, mocked, generally hounded and harried. And we do see in the
psalm the response of faith to that difficult and painful experience.
Thanks be to
God, we don’t all constantly experience what this person is experiencing. But…
it does happen, from time to time, doesn’t it? Sometimes it happens in a big way—we
think of people like those poor pizza makers in Indiana who received death
threats and cyber-abuse for simply expressing the same opinion about gay
‘marriage’ that is shared by most people in the world and was until about ten
minutes ago the opinion of President Obama and Hilary Clinton, among others.
More often
than not it is on a smaller scale—a hostile work environment, malicious gossip,
that kind of thing. While we always hope for the best from human nature, and in
fact most people most of the time are mostly trying to be sort of good (how’s
that for a qualified endorsement of humanity!), let’s face it—sometimes people
can be really mean to one another. The movie Mean Girls was not too far off from the mark in its depiction of
petty and nasty behaviour (and, yes, there are mean guys aplenty as well).
And this
psalm is, in a sense, about the faith response to this. The human tendency in
the face of this kind of malicious thing—gossip, etc.—is to either defend
oneself or to hit back twice as hard.
Defending oneself against mean spirited
gossip is a fool’s game, for the most part—the reality of gossip is that it is
cowardly, only hitting at the person when his or her back is turned. Lashing
back—getting twice as mean in response to the meanness, is always tempting, but
of course does not exactly make the world a better place.
The faith
response is, well, faith. Turning to the Lord for deliverance, for vindication,
for help. Knowing oneself to be ultimately judged, not by the wagging tongues
and malicious hearts of the worst people in the world, but by the merciful gaze
and all-knowing Heart of the Father. Finding one’s life not in the approval of
the crowd but in the love of the Trinity.
This, in our
Christian praying of the psalm, is what all this ‘vindication’ talk is about.
We may or may not experience justice in this world – there are no guarantees to
that effect. And when human justice fails or falls short, when genuinely
unfair, untrue, and unkind things happen to us, it is ultimately an invitation
to lift our eyes to heaven and to the judgment seat of God, the final court of
appeal, where the books are laid open and the truth of things are made known.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.