Ps. 38.11 (craters in our existence)

“My companions /and those that love me / stood back from / my plague – and my neighbors / stood / at a distance.” These verses only seem to confirm our insights from yesterday regarding the fact that this psalmist does not accuse these ‘companions’ for their actions. If we look at the progression this becomes clear: his lover/wife (due to impotence)àhis ‘companions and those that love me’, my neighbors à his enemies (who, perhaps, are the only ones who engage him). What we see is that the psalmist is steadily moving from the most intimate (his wife), to his immediate confidants, and only then to his enemies. Clearly, the first two categories of people represent those who the psalmist is most intimately involved with and who could offer help in his time of sickness. These, however, do not (or cannot) approach him. The first, due to impotence, the second, due to his bodily ‘plague’. Importantly, when the psalm ‘shifts gears’ in verses 16-20, the deliverance envisioned is from his enemies. Nowhere does he mention his loved ones now ‘coming close’. It would seem as if their absence is due to the fact that they would naturally return to his side. What is important about their absence, then, for our purposes, is that the psalmist nowhere sees their ‘standing far off’ as in need to of an “answer” from Yhwh; he is not seeking their punishment. Again, they are not to blame in his eyes. Their distance is fully justified and perhaps we might say even expected by the psalmist (something he would do if he was in their position). Seen from this perspective we might wonder: is the psalmist here acknowledging that his sin has consequences that he is not shirking or attempting to deflect? His sickness, he believes, is due to his sin. That same sickness is why his friends will not approach him and why he is impotent. It seems, then, that it is very likely the psalmist knows that he is the cause of their alienation. While many would see the psalmist as the victim to his friends and ‘companion’s’ callousness, he see himself as the perpetrator and they as the victim. He has become, due to his own sinfulness, a walking plague, able, by way of contagion, to infect those around him. Of course they stand far off. Importantly, and this resonates deeply with what we said yesterday about Christ’s dawning of these ‘rags of alienation’, the psalmist will implore Yhwh to “come close”. He sees himself as still able to be ‘answered’ by Yhwh (even if he himself is deaf and mute). There is, here, a profound realization about Yhwh’s ability to move into a contagion and heal it without himself becoming impure in the process. It may be there is  a realm of impurity that man himself cannot enter (and is rightfully hesitant to approach) and is something that only Yhwh himself can approach, that once one crosses this line of demarcation the only possible source of deliverance would be Yhwh himself. Again, is this hint of the Cross and Resurrection? Of the fact that Christ became ‘sin’, entering into this realm wherein man cannot approach (and, man rightfully stands ‘far off’)? That there are craters in man’s existence that cannot be scaled by man’s power and only a ‘leap’ by Yhwh can bring the individual back into the created order? Are the miracles of Christ (and of the Old Testament) but participations within the final leap of the resurrection?