Ps. 39.7 (not answers, deliverance)

“And now / what have I hoped for / O Yhwh – My hope / is for you.” This verse represents a sudden shift in the psalm. We have indicated in previous reflections that, in the face of the vanity of the created order of man, the psalmist’s question has, itself, been something solid. In his ability to perceive how fleeting everything is, and to be so tortured by it, he must have some sense of solidity that would open up this chasm inside of him. Here we begin to catch a glimpse of what that hidden sense of solidity entails. In fact, this verse is, arguably, the source and cause of the flame of anger. Focusing on the language here will flesh this out further. “And now”: this marks the turn to the present for the psalmist. Throughout the psalm the psalmist has been focused on, for lack of a better word, the ‘epic’: he has contemplated the entirety of man’s created order and found it utterly lacking. It is true he did issue a prayer to Yhwh but it was not for immediate deliverance but rather he was seeking “understanding” and “an explanation.” Here, by contrast, the psalmist focuses his attention on Yhwh, in the present moment. He draws up all of his conclusions about the vanity of the world and places them in front of Yhwh. With dust in his hands he turns to him says, “And now…”. “What have I hoped for”: If everything is only ‘merely vapor’ the psalmist has now turned to Yhwh asking him what can redeem this utter transitory nature of everything, this continuous and (apparently) unresolvable to-and-fro of gathering-and-dispossession. Man is a created thing and finds his bearings within the created order. And yet, Yhwh “has made my days mere handbreaths and my lifetime is as nothing.” Is this simply a cruel riddle? Why would you have made me such with the awareness and desire for something solid and permanent? I don’t think what we find here is the psalmist moving ‘beyond creation’. I think this is a genuine and unanswered question of his. This is crucial to understand because of two potential interpretations of this verse: on the one hand one could find in this the psalmist moving “into Yhwh alone” and seeing in him the “source of all hope” because he is, more than creation, the only permanent source of power/hope; this would tend to cultivate an interior attitude of detachment from the created order and the focusing of attention on Yhwh. This is tempting, but, I think mistaken. The second interpretation is this: that this question posed to Yhwh is a genuine puzzlement. The psalmist does not abandon the fact that any ‘hope’ he is to experience will be one that engages him in his created being. He is not side-stepping creation, or attempting to transcend it, in a flight to Yhwh. This is confirmed by the final verse of the psalm where he asks Yhwh to ‘turn from him so that he can be happy’. The psalmist is not looking to find his hope in something other than the world that he has been created for (in this way, he remains Adam made from adamah). This complicates things in one way but makes them much more intuitive in another: for the psalmist to claim his hope is in Yhwh is to assert that Yhwh is the only one who can heal the vanity of the created order (not, again, to help them move beyond it). Here we see this ‘hidden flame’, and it is clearly something the psalmist cannot resolve although he holds seemingly irreconcilable extremes together within himself. On the one hand, the psalmist furor points toward a desire for, as we said in psalm 37, goods to be granted “in perpetuity and in safety”. On the other hand, the psalmist perceives the actual created order as being vanity and not merely so because of the wicked but because that is the way Yhwh has made it. How then can he assert both? How can he perceive and be aware of a permanence that is, itself, not created by Yhwh? This is a tension that, I believe, is not resolved in the psalm and one that finds its deepest expression in the concluding line where he asks Yhwh to turn from him so he can be happy. And here is the massively important point: one finds here an anticipation of Resurrection. Within this psalmist the unanticipated (and unanticipatable) ‘answer’ to his question is the Cross and Resurrection: for there, the Word becomes the flesh of this vanity, dies, and is resurrected, bodily, into the “hope of Yhwh” in permanence and in security. This answer allows the psalmist’s question to be, in fact, a conundrum, a true question with an answer he cannot anticipate. It refuses to resolves itself without the answer actually coming from Yhwh and not cobbled together from reflections based, sheerly, on the worldly order. And this is what every psalm we have seen asks for: not answers but deliverance.