Ps. 44,23-26 (why do you sleep?)

“Wake up! – Why do you sleep, / O Yhwh? – Awake! / don’t reject us / forever. – Why / do you hide / your face – and forget / our affliction and / our oppression? – For we have been prostrated / in the dust – our belly / clings to the earth. – Arise! / Help us! – And redeem us / because of / your lovingkindness.”  How do these concluding lines, clearly the most important to the entire psalm, work within the psalm’s context? A few observations: the directive to God to “wake up” and “arise” generally carry military overtones (Judges 5.12 and Numbers 10.35). The fact, however, that this occurs in the midst of war, rather than prior to their engagement with the enemy, creates a slightly different picture. In other words, Israel has already suffered devastating losses, been plundered, scattered, slaughtered like sheep and enslaved—while their God ‘slept’. Hence, when these commands are followed by the question of “Why do you sleep?” or “Why do you hide your face?” there is clearly the sense of betrayal and urgency in the appeal. Likewise, the opening of the psalm found God ‘wide awake’ not only driving out the nations but also ‘planting’ Israel in the land. And finally, this final image of ‘sleeping’ is a type of ‘summation’ of God’s activity throughout: he sold Israel, but in a seemingly absent-minded manner (“for cheap”). The overriding sense of the psalm has been not of active punishment but of negligent disregard. To ‘sleep’, therefore, while battle rages operates like a stinging rebuke to God. Yet, again, this ‘rebuke’ must be understood with the purpose of its goal: to awaken God’s deliverance. This is not anger without a goal. Rather, it is to re-ignite the covenant, that kinship relationship between God and his people. In a sense, then, this whole psalm is spoken within the confines of covenant and could be rather severely misread if not understood in that manner (the sense of covenantal negligence is what inspires it and covenantal integrity is what it aspires to).  Everything is aimed at this goal: from the starkness of the opening (and the negating of man’s involvement in the conquest) to man’s assertion of faithfulness in the middle, to the appeal of the inappropriate application of covenantal curses. A betrayed partner always appeals to hyperbole in attempting to reconcile with their beloved, and this appeal contains its own internal logic (as oriented to concretely healing the present situation—bringing back covenantal integrity). This brings me to a final concluding thought: Christ in the garden prays “not my will but yours be done” and yet on the cross cries out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”. I think, within the dramatic tension of these two statements, we find the angst of the king suffering defeat and appealing to God that he would heal the rift between Himself and his people. Just as in this psalm, we see the assertion of covenant faithfulness (“not my will but yours be done”) and, at the moment of death, the appeal to God to, in a sense, ‘wake up!’ (‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’). By dying with this petition on his lips, he took that power with him into death and thereby destroyed it. But, it was dying with these words on his lips that this was accomplished. And it is therefore, in these words that we still find the “faith of Jesus Christ” that we are baptized into. These words did not cease on the Cross but have been handed over to his body to be perpetuated in an attempt to bring to conclusion the war and this side of his return will/should find us echoing them. In other words, he opened up a dramatic space within which we should all fit ourselves.