Ps 38.6-7 (covenant renewed in a body like this?)

‘I bowed down / I stooped / very low; - I walked / in mourning / all day long, - for my loins / are full of / burning pain – and my flesh / has no soundness.’ The previous verse and these two place us in the real of the visceral. And, indeed, this is perhaps the most visceral of all the psalms we have observed up to this point. The catalogue of bodily ailments is nothing short of astounding; it moves from ‘festering wounds’ that ‘reek’, to burning loins, loss of eyesight and hearing to a palpitating heart. These are the bodily attacks. We also witness his reaction to them: he is ‘bowed down’ and ‘stoops low’; he ‘walks in mourning all day long’ and ‘groans to Yhwh’. Clearly, this is not merely a man who is ‘sick’. The sickness has invaded his psyche in the same totalizing aspect as his body. And this, I think, is the point of these verses. When the psalmist says “I bowed down” and follows it up with what amounts to the same thing—“I stooped very low”—we hear, by way of parallelism, a man who cannot fully convey the tremendous pressure he feels on his psyche due to his sickness. It is only by way of repetition that his words gain the added weight or depth needed to reflect the extreme pressure he feels. Before, we read that his “wicked deeds” were “too weighty for me”. Here, this ‘weightiness’ is understood to be no mere abstract understanding of sin but an actually, physical/physical, burden and sickness that is, in a way, sapping him of strength, like some vampire leaching his blood. From this vantage, the next line makes a good deal of sense: “I walked in mourning all day long.” Time has, for him, become a manifestation of his sickness. Just as his body and mind are consumed, so too does this weight push down on him “all day long”. There is no ray of light—everything has been subjected to the pressure of his sickness. In this we find a very telling manifestation of sin: a force that has the potential to withdraw from man every ‘good’ he has, from the bodily to the psychological to his experience of time. Sickness as sin (and, sin as sickness) is here made very poignant and, as we said before, visceral. It is anything but an abstraction. Clearly, we find here an experience pushing the boundaries of human strength and capacity (both physically and psychologically). This is the total opposite of the heroic; this is man as degradation and frailty, almost a pure object. Is it not telling then that it is into precisely this point of almost annihilation that Christ entered into as he approached and sat upon the cross? Is it not telling that it was in this type of ‘flesh’ that the covenantal faithfulness was maintained such that its power would, in the resurrection, flood the earth? Is it not telling that God chose a vessel such as this to manifest his ‘heroic’ power? A vessel that clearly is aware of its own dissolution? Shocking, that the covenant itself was renewed in a body like this?