Ps. 6:2-4 (Dissolution and deliverance)

Ps. 6.2-4

Diag.

Be gracious  /  to me  /  O Lord  /  for I have grown  /  feeble

Heal me  /  for my bones  /  have become  /  disturbed

And my soul  /  has become  /  exceedingly disturbed.

“For I have grown feeble”: We had occasion yesterday to comment on this man’s desperate plot. It is apparent his sickness is causing him agony; and it is total. It encompasses both his “bones” and his “soul”. There is the sense here of drowning. In Ps. 3 we experienced something similar, yet very different, in David as his own son was bearing down on him; his anxiety and fear created a feeling of tremendous weight, as if his head was being forced into the dust.

Here, by contrast, we sense a man that is, quite literally, wasting away. What is happening to him is a steady weakening and enfeebling. Perhaps we could describe it no so much as drowning as dissolving into the earth and dust. This is a man who feels that if help is not soon in coming his ability to make a prayer will be robbed from him, and he will become a mute corpse.

“Be gracious…Heal me”: Like a swimmer who has run out of strength and is surrendering to the abyss, this man is casting himself, in a desperate plea, upon the Lord. There is no sense here of the “righteous” man who knows of his own innocence. Even at the end of the psalm, this man’s deliverance from “his enemies” does not appear to be one that is at all grounded upon him being Yhwh’s “chosen vessel”. Rather, this man’s sickness has caused to well up in him a pure cry for help.

“My bones have become disturbed / my soul exceedingly disturbed”: This description is unsettling. One senses here this man’s desperation in a new way. His very being is “not his own”. The unity that the soul endows upon the person (holding all faculties into a single person) is being severed. He senses that his body is, literally, out of joint. The sinews and muscles that hold the human bones together into a ‘body’ are not working; disintegration and chaos are beginning to work its way throughout him. The image of “disturbed bones” is one of a carcass that has been violated, the bones removed from their proper unity and scattered across the ground (one thinks here most acutely of the vision in Ezekiel of the valley of ‘scattered bones’ and how they have all been “jumbled” together in a profoundly sacrilegious manner (and it is to these bones that resurrection words are spoken…)).

And it is cutting to his very core: his soul.

The man of health is not aware of this unity. He is not aware of the intricate ways in which his body is “held together”. His muscles, his sinews and tendons: all of these maintain the integrity of the body, but they are working most properly when they are not noticed. It is only when one becomes sick that one begins to feel the stresses, the tears and the disruption of this unifying power of the body. Like a piece of bread cast upon the water, sickness soaks into the person, and works into him a disunity; parts begin to “float away” and become separated.

And one is never more aware of the body and soul’s unity than when that person becomes sick. The physical ailments are perceived (and are) an ailment of the soul’s powers to hold the body together. The entire person is soaked through and through. The ability to think clearly, to respond appropriately, is lost. The sick man feels this dissolution (properly) as a spiritual reality. Just as one feels as if one’s bones are “out of joint” so too does one steadily begin to realize that the soul, too, is “out of joint”.

And this is the most terrifying moment for man because his very ability to perceive himself and the world around him is dissolving. Every conclusion, every act of perception is tainted. He is most profoundly aware not of the fact that something is wrong, but that he is ‘wrong’. Nothing he does can retrieve his unity because his every action taken to realign himself only serves to further the problem. All he can do is ask for help.

But you  /  O Lord  /  How long?

Return  /  O Lord  /  Save  /  my soul!

Deliver me  /  because of your  /  lovingkindness

“How long…”: We saw this same phrase in Ps. 4, except there it was addressed at the “sons of men”, those “men of repute” that were destroying the righteous man’s reputation. Here, it is addressed to Yhwh himself.

This sick man, who is a world unto himself, is sensing the demise of time itself. This is a crucial point to consider: this man’s separation from Yhwh is not perceived so much, here, as geographical but as ‘chronological’. It is time centered. Just as his body is disintegrating, so does time seem, for this man, to be ‘sick’ in Yhwh’s absence. Man is, in this way, like a clock: made in and for time. In so far as man stands within the realm and presence of Yhwh, time itself enters into Yhwh’s realm and becomes “everlasting” (we will see this in other Psalms, but we can note, for now how in Psalm 1 the tree “planted by running waters” has a foliage that “doesn’t wither” and in Psalm 5 we saw a rejoicing in Yhwh’s presence as “forever”). When man is separated from Yhwh time does not beat on, one dreadful beat after another—Time itself is “disturbed” just as this man’s bones and soul are “disturbed”. Time doesn’t “work properly”; it is dissolving as well.

And, like a wick, time may soon be snuffed out. If Yhwh waits too long, there may be nothing left to save.

“Return…save…Deliver, because of your lovingkindness.”: these are the words of exile. They are the words spoken by man who knows himself to be outside of the presence of life itself and who senses himself to be, in some way, outside of the covenantal bond of Israel.

1)       Return: these are the words that will eventually be spoken by those in Babylon. After the destruction of the Temple, after the disintegration of the kingdom and after the raising of Jerusalem---after the annihilation of almost ever emblem of covenantal unity---these words will emerge, almost dirge-like, from the midst of Babylon.

2)       Deliver me: Yhwh’s coming to this man is seen as his being ‘drawn out’ of the waves of sickness. Peter-like, this man envisions Yhwh reaching out his hand and catching him before he sinks beneath the waves and into the final abyss of Sheol. Likewise, this act of ‘deliverance’ is rooted in a prior deliverance: from Egypt. There is scarcely a passage in the OT that speaks of deliverance that does not have in the back, in whatever echo, the freeing of Israel from the service of Pharaoh. This man’s sickness then, is seen in almost Pharaoh-like service to the darkness. And he cannot, just as Israel could not, extricate himself from its grip. All he could do was “cry out”.

3)       “lovingkindness”: the images now combine and emerge into this one word of covenantal loyalty. Just as Israel was ‘delivered’ by Yhwh’s ‘return’ to them in Egypt and brought out into the wilderness where the covenant was established, in Yhwh’s lovingkindness, so too is this man appealing to same covenantal bond of love to come and rescue him. This man has incorporated, deep within his psyche, the Exodus story and is applying the entire sweep of Israel’s dramatic relationship with Yhwh to himself. The corporate body’s salvation from Pharaoh has now become this individual man’s plea for help.