Psalm 102

"You have picked me up and thrown me aside"

As I have described in this series, in most of the lament psalms the direct cause of pain is "the enemy." If there is an accusation being leveled at God it concerns passivity. God is implored to act and wake up, to do something.

But some psalms take greater risks. In these psalms God is the source of the suffering and the origin of the torment. To be sure, enemies are present in Psalm 102: "My enemies taunt me all day long; they ridicule and use my name as a curse." But the poet of Psalm 102 is willing to point the finger directly at God: "You have picked me up and thrown me aside."

Unlike Psalm 88, however, Psalm 102 mixes these direct accusations with praise. And what is so interesting to me about Jewish praise is how it focuses upon God's eternal nature. This quality alone--God's everlastingness--makes Him worthy of praise:

Long ago you established the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you will endure;
all of them will wear out like clothing.
You will change them like a garment,
and they will pass away.
But you are the same,
and your years will never end.

It has often been noted how there is no strong vision of the afterlife in the Psalms. The rewards and blessings concern this life, here and now. As the Psalmist says, the dead cannot praise God from the grave. Only the living can sing. So life--this life--is the prize.

And yet, no matter what happens to us, live or die, God is worthy of praise simply for being the Eternal One. We will wear out like clothing. We will fade like flowers. We shall pass away like grass. But God remains. And for that, He is praised and exulted. God was praised simply for being God, for God's own intrinsic Self. To be sure, the Hebrews offered up their petitions for happiness, well-being, and blessing. But their praise was never dependent or contingent upon these outcomes.

What strikes me in all this is how the ancient Hebrews appeared to have grasped the extremity of our transitoriness in ways we moderns have not. The Hebrews recognized the vast contrast between ourselves and the Eternal. Beholding that ontological chasm was all that was needed to bend the knee in doxological acknowledgement.

But us? We've somehow convinced ourselves that we are made of sturdier stuff. We've come to feel entitled to the next breath and heartbeat. We believe that continued existence is our due, and that death can be put off indefinitely. But this, of course, is madness.

We have lost ontological humility, and with the loss of that humility a primordial capacity for worship, especially when we don't get what we want. Our praise is conditional, our worship contingent. We don't praise God for being God, we praise God for getting what we want. And because of this, we struggle to get inside the experience of Psalm 102, the hot lament mixed with durable praise.