Ps. 38.11 (the rags of alienation)

‘My companions / and those that love me / stood back from / my plague, - and my neighbors / stood / at a distance.’ It seems pertinent to note that the psalmist is not blaming his ‘companions’ and ‘loved ones’ for their distance; this is not an accusation. Rather, just as this section parallels the first, so too does this social alienation mirror the bodily rebellion the psalmist detailed in vs. 3-8. We might, alluding to the first section, paraphrase here saying, “My companions and loved ones stood far off because of my folly.’ (vs. 5). This seems like a crucial observation due to the fact that a typical reading, in light of the good Samaritan parable, is that this man’s companions should in fact be coming to his aid. That may be the case (or, it may not). It is not, however, the pslamist’s perspective. This man is not merely ‘sick’; he is unholy and unclean. Just as any animal that would have such sickness would not be permitted to be sacrificed, so too does this man’s sickness make him ‘contagious’, not merely in the biological manner but in the spiritual and communal manner as well. He is, in a very real way, in his sickness, a manifestation of sin. So, just as sin is to be avoided and protected against, so too is this man. This is not some naïve view of the world, nor is it something that has been completely abrogated by the New Testament (the Tower of Siloam and the healing of the paralytic (Jesus explicitly forgives his sin)). Rather, it points to the fact that for the psalmist, ‘sin’ is all encompassing: it digs down into the biological, social, communal, psychological and spiritual. It is not, in other words, something ‘invisible’. It operates like a force of ‘anti-creation’, and, just as pervasive as creation is, so is sin. And here I want to propose a way of reading this in light of the New Testament that, hopefully, retains the meaning outlined above as well as the parable of the good Samaritan—we have alluded to this before, but in this psalm we are given an insight into the body of Christ that renewed the covenant and, in the resurrection, unleashed the covenantal power of Yhwh. In this portion of the psalm we also come to see the fact that Christ became the ‘abandoned one’, the one who, in addition to the bodily manifestations of sin, also took upon himself the social and communal ones as well. In other words, on the cross, he became the man in the ditch that everyone passed by and they did so, in some manner, without blame (as here). He had become, as Paul later says, the ‘curse’. However, once this is grasped, one can’t simply hear these parables as pre-Easter teachings divorced from the resurrection; John explicitly says that much of Christ’s teaching made no sense apart from his death and resurrection. Here is one reason why this is so important to emphasize: if Christ’s teaching are divorced from his life then any statement he makes about those held to be impure are seen to be universal teachings that downplay (or entirely relativize) Old Testament concerns regarding well-being, health and sin. On the other hand, when all of these ventures into the ‘impure’ are understood as foreshadowings of the resurrection itself, something entirely different emerges—that Christ was (and the Old Testament) laying the foundation for the power of resurrection to be understood as the great reversal and conquering of the power of sin (that the king would have fully plundered his enemy). The point as to these verses? Just as the psalmist does not cast blame on those who abandon him, so does Christ, without sin, enter into the curse of sin and is abandoned. It is as if Christ puts on all the filthy rags of this psalmist so as to, in his death, take them down into Sheol. In his resurrection, they are cleansed and he offers them back to the world so that, in the power of the resurrection, they can, like him, venture into the realm of curse and bring healing. It is not that they have simply learned how to be more enlightened. Rather, it is because this very real curse has been overcome.