Ps. 38.1-2 (sickness, Yhwh and sin)

‘O Yhwh / do not rebuke me / in you wrath – or / discipline me / in your anger – for / your arrows / have pierced me – and your hand / has come down / heavily upon me.’ It seems important to highlight the fact the psalm opens with words of an imploring intimacy: “O Yhwh”. The psalmist calls God by name. This is not a ‘prayer to God’ but a ‘prayer to Yhwh’, to one from whom the ‘name’ has issued. For that reason, the psalm begins within a sphere of covenantal communion; we might say, it begins from within a familial bond. This is the prayer of a ‘first son’ to his ‘father’, which means that, prior to any plea for withholding of discipline/wrath, there is the enveloping womb of covenantal love. It is from within that prior electing love that this plea and prayer comes from. One can begin to see the evidence of this by the fact the psalmist parallels ‘wrath’/’anger’ with ‘rebuke’/’discipline’. It is the psalmist’s disobedience that has caused this response. It is not the case that his sickness is evidence of a merely arbitrary act by ‘God’. Rather, it is the rebuking and disciplining hand of Yhwh. We can see this, formally, by the following transition from “your …” to “my …”: Your wrath; Your anger; Your arrows; Your hand; Your indignation; My sin; My wicked deeds; (my wicked deeds) are too weighty for me; My wounds; My folly. Five times the psalmist mentions Yhwh’s action and five times he mentions his own. This is not merely formal mirroring: the psalmist is intensely aware of the fact that his own sin/wicked deeds/folly, themselves create this punishment. Notice the parallels: “your arrows have pierced me” (meaning, pestilence)—“my wounds reeked and festered because of my folly”; “my flesh has no soundness because of your indignation”—again, “my wounds reeked and festered because of my folly” and “my bones have no health because of my sin”; “your hand has come down heavily upon me”—“(my deeds) like a heavy burden, they are too weighty for me”. It is not the case, as it may appear on first reading, that the psalmist is simply attributing to Yhwh his sickness. There is much more at work here. We can even tentatively say that the ‘my’ portion of the psalm mirrors the ‘your’ portion as a type of recapitulation, a restating of the original from a different, valid, perspective. From the ‘my’ perspective, his sin, itself, is just as much the ‘cause’ of his sickness as Yhwh. In a very real sense, he has, in and through his own sin, punished himself, and inflicted disease upon his body. With this in mind, what can we say, though, about how he envisions Yhwh’s action? The first is the traditional image of arrows of pestilence being shot at him by Yhwh; this is a stock image in the Mediterranean world (even Apollo is seen doing this, apart from the other Canaanite deities). Regardless of its prevalence, the image is disturbing and points to the psalmist sense that he is under attack from Yhwh; that he is an object of Yhwh’s anger, like some animal to a hunter. Second, he describes Yhwh’s hand as “coming down heavily upon me”. Later, we will see how the psalmist comes to describe his sin in much the same way. Here, however, we find that it is Yhwh’s oppressive hand that is crushing the psalmist to the ground. While the arrows ‘pierced’ him, the hand, externally, crushes him. It may be that we have here both the bodily attack as well as the psychological/social attack as well. Both images find Yhwh as ‘over’ the psalmist; he is not ‘pulling him down’ but ‘pushing him down’. He is not a god of the earth, dragging him into his ‘home’ in the ground (i.e. Sheol); but a kingly god who, on high, comes to his own. Yhwh’s presence is felt as encompassing the psalmist. One final thought: what are we to make of the relation between sin and sickness?  Initially, we can make the observation, based on what we have already seen, that, from a certain vantage point, sickness is not so much sin’s punishment as the manifestation of sin. We have seen this image before in reference to the ‘weight of sin’. In other contexts, we saw how sin often becomes oppressive and crushing; the individual who labors under its weight is aware of the fact that he cannot remove it, that he has somehow foisted upon himself something beyond his strength to remove. And here we come to an important point: one can lift sin onto one’s shoulders, but one cannot lift it off; it is light when it is being courted, but it is monstrous when one wants to remove it. In this way we see how sin is always greater than the act performed; it consumes or, in the words of our psalm, it crushes. Once committed it expands beyond the power of the individual to remove.