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Psalm 88

Lord my God, I call for help day by day;
I cry at night before you.
Let my prayer come into your presence.
O turn your ear to my cry.

For my soul is filled with evils;
my life is on the brink of the grave.
I am reckoned as one in the tomb:
I have reached the end of my strength

like one among the dead;
like the slain lying in their graves;
like those you remember  no more,
cut off, as they are, from your hand.

You have laid me in the depths of the tomb,
in places that are dark, in the depths.
Your anger weighs down upon me:
I am drowned beneath your waves.

You have taken away my friends
and made me hateful in their sight.
Imprisoned I cannot escape;
my eyes are sunken with grief.

I call to you, Lord, all the day long;
to you I stretch out my hands.
Will you work your wonders for the dead?
Will the shades stand and praise you?

Will your love be told in the grave
or your faithfulness among the dead?
Will your wonders be known in the dark
or your justice in the land of oblivion?

As for me, Lord, I call to you for help:
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Lord, why do you reject me?
Why do you hide your face from me?

Wretched, close to death from my youth,
I have borne your trials; I am numb.
Your fury has swept down upon me;
your terrors have utterly destroyed me.

They surround me all the day like a flood,
they assail me all together,
Friend and neighbour you have taken away:
my one companion is darkness.

Commentary


Psalm 88 is probably the saddest prayer in the Psalter. It is a lament which offers not a ray of hope or comfort, written by a man whose life was marked by suffering from his youth. It has a double title; it was composed by one of the sons of Korah, and dedicated to Heman the Ezrahite, who was the founder of the Temple choir known as the Sons of Korah, a man famed for his wisdom (see 1 Chronicles 6:33, 37; 1 Kings 4:31). It is a deeply moving testimony to the great temptation which follows an incomprehensible tragedy, when God seems deaf to prayer, leaving the sufferer to cope with naked and apparently unsupported faith.

Lord my God, I call for help day by day;
I cry at night before you.
Let my prayer come into your presence.
O turn your ear to my cry.

For my soul is filled with evils;
my life is on the brink of the grave.
I am reckoned as one in the tomb:
I have reached the end of my strength
                                         (vv. 1-4).

This sufferer, in the depths of pain, turns to God as he has done all his life, for we die as we live. For him faith was the centre of his life, and his relationship with God the meaning of his existence, so even though God appears to have abandoned him now, he turns to prayer anyway, for God is his only source of hope and salvation. His prayer is the unremitting prayer of one who refuses to give up, either on God or on a solution to his problem. It demonstrates a very mature faith that does not need signs and wonders to support it. This is triumphant faith that can cry out across the black darkness of near despair, and refuse not to believe. It cannot fail to touch God, yet no easy answer is given. In fact the psalm gives the distinct impression that this man went to his death in this dark faith, for God asks us, in the end, to face Him as mystery and utterly other. It is the beginner in faith who needs the signs and wonders to bolster his shaky belief in the presence and love of God. The mature are treated differently; their dark faith, and fidelity to their belief that God remains loving no matter what we experience of Him, is the triumph for us and gives real glory to God.

Disregarding God’s silence, the poet tells God his troubles as he has always done, and in this shows his child-like trust. He is approaching death, with no strength left. Death was a dreadful thought because people of his day had no revelation regarding the after-life, and so they felt that death cut them off from communion with God.

like one among the dead;
like the slain lying in their graves;
like those you remember  no more,
cut off, as they are, from your hand.

You have laid me in the depths of the tomb,
in places that are dark, in the depths.
Your anger weighs down upon me:
I am drowned beneath your waves.

You have taken away my friends
and made me hateful in their sight.
Imprisoned I cannot escape;
my eyes are sunken with grief.

I call to you, Lord, all the day long;
to you I stretch out my hands.
Will you work your wonders for the dead?
Will the shades stand and praise you?

Will your love be told in the grave
or your faithfulness among the dead?
Will your wonders be known in the dark
or your justice in the land of oblivion?

As for me, Lord, I call to you for help:
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Lord, why do you reject me?
Why do you hide your face from me?

Wretched, close to death from my youth,
I have borne your trials; I am numb.
Your fury has swept down upon me;
your terrors have utterly destroyed me.

They surround me all the day like a flood,
they assail me all together,
Friend and neighbour you have taken away:
my one companion is darkness.
                                      (vv. 5-18).

The Sons of Korah had been demoted from their Temple duties (explained in Psalms 42-43), and they were banished. Here this dying man fears an even greater banishment if he is cut off from God for ever by being thrown into the pit (v. 4). This is a more accurate translation than our “tomb” in this version. To be thrown into the pit is to be treated like the wicked who will never see the face of God. Imprisoned in his sickness, which is worsening, he remembers the look of revulsion on the faces of his friends, and knows that he has lost them too. He is being stripped of everything he holds dear, and life itself is beginning to slip away too.

Somehow the sick man sees the hand of God in it all. He repeatedly says: “You have . . . ” He sees that God has permitted that which is so crushing to him, yet his love for God is shown even in the expression that he uses. In fact his greatest suffering is not the loss of friends, health, success or even of life; it is the loss of the presence of God, and the sense of His nearness. It is the fact that he apparently cannot get through to God in this crucial moment of his life.

From the standpoint of God’s people on earth, and the worshipping community in the Temple, what is said here in verses 9-12 is true. It is on earth that God’s miracles are performed, that His Word is preached, that His praise is sung, that His faithfulness is demonstrated, and, since they had no idea what happened after death, they feared they would be cut off from God. Death was seen as an enemy of all that was good (see 1 Corinthians 15:26). It was silence, inactivity, the severing of all ties with loved ones, corruption, gloom, darkness and oblivion. The psalmist got no answer from God to this dreadful dilemma. He was left with the mystery of suffering and death unanswered, for the time had not yet come for this revelation.

Even though we live in the fullness of time when Jesus overcame death in His glorious resurrection, and revealed to us that our Father has a place prepared for us in Heaven, where we will experience the joy, not only of God’s presence for ever, but also the joy of our loved ones with us there, yet each of us must, at some stage in our lives, face the almost incomprehensible mystery of suffering, maybe in a lingering sickness, or in a tragedy that appears meaningless. We must face the futility of it all, and be ready to go through the “dark valley”, refusing to give up on our faith and trust in God. History tells us that the saints were all tested this way to purify their faith. Witness the case of St Thérèse of Lisieux, who was so tested in her faith that she felt that there was no heaven, and could only cling on in desperate hope to the revelation of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. She had to persevere in this dark faith to the moment of her death, just like the sufferer in the psalm.

Jesus has clothed our suffering and death with meaning so that we do not grieve like the unbelievers who have no hope (see 1 Thessalonians 4:13). He has conquered death and has removed its sting, which was sin (see 1 Corinthians 15:54-57). We see that He chose suffering as the most perfect way to redeem us, so we can unite our suffering, our loneliness and our darkness with His in His Passion, and so clothe our experience with redemptive meaning. For those who do not have this faith, let us lovingly bring them the light we have, to lighten their darkness.

The poor sufferer in this psalm had no idea just how greatly God would use his words of desperate faith and love. He did not know that another sufferer would be able to express His distress to His Father in exactly the same words! On the night that Jesus suffered His agony in Gethsemane, which drained Him of all strength, He was deserted by His close friends and sold by a disciple for the price of a slave. He was dragged before an unjust judge, in the person of the high priest, and accused by false witnesses, after which He was thrown into a dungeon for very dangerous prisoners to await crucifixion the following morning. This dungeon, or pit, was two floors below the house of Caiaphas, and can still be visited in Jerusalem. There, with darkness as His only companion, Jesus prayed all night to His Father, who maintained a dreadful silence during the whole Passion. Jesus was left to face the terror alone, bereft of all help. The psalm expresses His trust in God, but also His frustration at being cut off from
the ministry given to Him. Through this ministry He was to reveal God’s marvels to the people in His healing miracles, and also to preach the Word of God so that the people would know God’s ways, and worship Him properly in spirit and in truth. He was left to face the darkness and terror of death and Hell – which is the experience of being cut off from God, so feared by the psalmist – but it was not deliverance from death that Jesus cried out for. It was deliverance through death, and it was not for Himself, but for all mankind. He had to walk through the dark corridors of death and Hell to remove its terrors from us. The awesome darkness remained to the very end with Jesus too, as He cried out to His Father from the Cross the same desperate “Why?” of the psalmist. He was not spared the mystery of suffering, with its sense of futility. He had to experience it like the rest of men, but He redeemed it, gave it meaning, purpose and direction for the rest of us.

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