Ps. 40.1 (prayer and patience is a form of memory)

“I have / waited patiently / for Yhwh – and he turned / to me / and heard / my cry.” As will be more fleshed out during the course of the reflection, this opening verse serves as a type of ignition to further acts of deliverance by Yhwh. Immediately, the king opens with a statement of relationship that will be repeatedly mirrored and appealed to throughout the psalm. Indeed, this opening verse is a type of formal summary of the entire psalm: I..waited patient….Yhwh…delivered me. What we find here is the king appealing to his ‘readiness’ for Yhwh, or, his manifest understanding that he will be the passive recipient of Yhwh’s active redemption. This type of posture resonates throughout the scriptures from Noah (who simply obeys), to Moses and up through the Suffering Servant of Isaiah whose “ear is always open”. In all of these, they become a ready vessel for Yhwh’s power (in the words of, I believe, psalm 95, they have “not hardened their hearts”). Here, the king understands himself in the same manner; he pours himself out so as to make room for Yhwh’s power. Importantly, by stressing his ‘passivity’ we have the danger of losing sight of the fact that the king’s patience is one full of “cries”. Waiting patiently does not mean being silent. Quite the opposite. As we have stressed throughout many of our psalms, the covenantal bond between Yhwh and his people (and all of creation) is one that is maintained by and through prayer and the drama of call-and-answer. When man falls silent (ceases to “cry out”), so too does the world begin to sink into chaos (as the end of Judges makes clear, as does Jeremiah). What occurs is what we have called the ‘hiatus’ between Yhwh’s ‘hearing’/perception and ‘acting’. When man ceases to call, Yhwh ceases to ‘hear’ and therefore does not act: the breach between ‘right order’ and ‘chaos’ is widened such that the ‘flood of waters’ begins to creep over the land. That which was meant to remain ‘separated’ is mixed together and all becomes ‘unclean’ (as in the times of Noah). Here, by contrast, the king works, through his ‘cries’, to close that hiatus. And Yhwh ‘hears’ him and, in so doing, delivers him. No longer is there a distance between Yhwh’s perception of his ‘son’s’ (Ps. 2) dilemma and his acting for him. And lastly, it is important to note that this psalm occurs between two poles—between the past wherein Yhwh responded to cries and the future where Yhwh will again act for the king. The import of this will become more clear as we proceed. But we need to point out here that the king’s prayer in the present is firmly grounded in his memory of the past and it is in that memory that his cry emerges. Hence, his prayer is not merely ‘present’ but one that finds its power and urgency in the fact that Yhwh has acted for him in the past. Prayer (‘crying out’) is, in this way, always a form of memory.