Ps. 39.6 (the flame of absence)

“Man / walks about / merely an image – and he heaps up wealth / merely vapor – and he knows not / who will gather it.” As we mentioned in our previous reflection, this verse fills out man’s created nature. Verse 5 represented man as man. Verse 6 represents man’s goals and aspirations. Both of them are empty and pointless. Verse 6: This verse represents the culmination of the psalmist’s denunciation of man’s created order. And it is total: it encompasses all of man. There are several important insights in this verse. First, the description of man “walking about” seems to reflect an aimless wandering. This is later confirmed when the psalmist describes himself as an “alien and sojourner”. Man, it seems, is not at home; he has little, to no purpose (or, is not aware of it). Rather, like an animal he simply ‘walks about’. This is compounded by the shocking statement that man is “merely an image”. We briefly alluded to this in a previous reflection but it deserves pause: here the psalmist is almost upending the account of Genesis as man being made “in the image God”. At no time, in Genesis, would “merely” be the description of man as the image of God. Rather, there, man represented the pinnacle and summation of creation. Here, by contrast, man is “merely an image”. He is not “the real thing”; he is a shadow, and his image-nature is as aimless and insubstantial as his wandering. And everything he pursues, all of his ‘wealth’, is not ‘obtained’, ‘won’ or ‘earned’. Rather, it is ‘heaped up’ like so much garbage and of no consequence. We see here that everything (everything) is relativized. Nothing is worthy of any description more than ‘merely’ or ‘heaped up’. Just as the image is “merely an image” so too is all of man’s wealth “merely vapor”. This description was previously applied to “the totality of mankind”. Although we have withheld using the word, this is, in the words of Ecclesiastes, vanity. And all is vanity, an empty wind and a chasing after vapor. We have noted this outlook before, in Psalm 37, were we saw how man’s chasing after goods, when they do not come from God, are mere vanity and subject to the ebb-and-flow of obtainment and loss. They are never obtained in security and perpetuity. However, there, the psalmist was attempting to condition the listener to have hope that, in fact, enduring goods would be provided. Here, there is no hope. This is the state of creation. It is vanity; it is only the ebb-and-flow of obtainment and dispossession. In psalm 37, creation was vanity, but only in so far as it was held by the wicked. Here, there is no qualification. All is vanity. It has been suggested that this, in fact, begins to answer the psalmist’s fury as contained in verses 1-3. That here he is coming to see, as in Psalm 37, that no matter how much the wicked obtain all they are doing is “heaping it up” for someone else to gather. I think there may be some merit in this observation. However, I think the overwhelming sense of these verses is that they do not offer any comfort to the psalmist. He sees this condition as affecting “all of mankind” (not merely the wicked). And he is, to say the least, satisfied with it. This leads to a point we emphasized earlier. I do think there is a hidden answer (or, a beginning) in these verses but it comes from a different vantage point. It is, I think, the fact that the psalmist is so total in his observation as to the futility of creation that we see that he has some sense of a permanence that has been lost. What I mean is this: one could not be so thoroughly convinced of the futility of creation if one was not, simultaneously aware of a standard that creation was not obtaining (i.e, that of permanence and solidity). If this psalmist believes all of creation is ‘vapor’, he must have some sense of its opposite such that it makes him rage against the fact that creation is not more permanent than it is. Anger is aroused due to a perceived injustice, a failing of a certain standard. Here, the psalmist must have within him a very deep sense of a very high standard if, in fact, he can see creation as being, utterly, directionless and vaporous. This is not to say that we have found an ‘answer’. It is to say that this man’s flame of anger points to something of substance that even he is not aware of except in its absence. He knows something has been lost. He is not sure what it is.