Psalms of Lament: Psalm 6 [Lent 2024]

Psalm 6

Wednesday of Invocabit + February 21, 2024

Lamentation doesn’t fit the American religion. We are inculcated to seek success. Prosperity comes from work.

In the Psalter, however, we have genres that do not fit the American mindset. The Psalms address not only thanksgiving and praise, but desolation and grief, guilt and loss.

The Psalms of Lament teach us to see ourselves, in the words of Jürgen Moltmann, “Limping, but blessed.” That’s a reference to Jacob after having his hip put out of joint by the heavenly man with whom he wrestled. He’s limping, but he’s been blessed.

We pray the Psalms of Lament out of faith, a faith that brings our suffering before God. Psalm 118 says, “Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free.” On this text Luther said,

Don’t just sit there by yourself or lie on your belly with your head hanging down and let these thoughts bite into you, and don’t get eaten up worrying over them. Get up, you lazy fellow, and then get down on your knees and hold up your hands to heaven and pray a psalm with the Lord’s Prayer and bring your complaints to God.

“Bring your complaints to God.” We all have complaints. “This hurts; that is unjust. Why does this continue? When will I get relief?”

The Psalms of Lament teach us to bring our complaints to God. We are like children who come to our parents with our pain. Children may cry and lash out, they may even be angry with their parents, but they come and ask for help, and give them thanks.

Now here is a hard word: God allows us to suffer. He may even bring certain sufferings upon us. And He does this because He loves us. If He leaves us smug and feeling self-sufficient, we are consumed by pride and a sense that their is no god but our own mind or belly.

So He sends trials to make us run to Him.

There is anger in the trial. The psalmist feels it, as Psalm 6 opens: “O LORD, rebuke me not in Your anger, nor discipline me in Your wrath.” God deals with the wicked, in the end, out of anger. His punishment is disastrous. By contrast, the rebuke of a father is done in love. The Psalm asks for that kind of rebuke: “Let this trial be one of mercy and gentleness, let it bring me to Your grace.” “O LORD, rebuke me not in Your anger, nor discipline me in Your wrath. Be gracious to me.”

God brings us to nothing so we can expect nothing from ourselves but everything from Him. Luther puts it this way:

Blessed are they who experience this in life, for every man must finally meet his end. When man thus declines and becomes as nothing in all his power, words and being, until there is nothing but a lost, condemned and forsaken sinner, then divine help and strength appear as in Job 11:11–17: “When you think you are devoured, then you shall shine forth as the morning star.”

He profoundly terrifies us so we can pray profoundly. Here doubtless Luther is describing his own terrors in experiencing God’s Law as absolutely damning and unavoidable. Once he saw in Jesus not a greater lawgiver but an Absolver and Savior, Luther saw tribulation as useful in turning us to the Savior.

Whatever the tribulation is in Psalm 6, the psalmist is experiencing a kind of death. He argues with God: “In death there is no remembrance of You; in Sheol who will give You praise?” He is saying, “If You, Lord, send me to Sheol, how can I then praise You?” What does this mean, but that the psalmist retains a good will toward God? Even in suffering, a suffering that feels like hell, he is more concerned about continuing to praise God than about damnation itself.

That means lamentation, complaining to God, is itself an act of faith, when we do it with confidence that somehow—despite how everything appears—God is the deliverer, He is the Savior.

That salvation was distant to the psalmist. For us it is present in Jesus. We remember His passion in Lent to see the outcome of the greatest trial. In Him we also pray, “‘The LORD has heard the sound of my weeping. The LORD has heard my plea,’ and raised up My Jesus from the dead. In Him there will also be an end to the crosses I now feel and experience. My own Easter is coming, and so I wait patiently for it. But please hurry!”