Ps. 51.9 (embarrassment)

Hide your face / from my sins
and all the guilt / of my wayward acts / blot out.

The first line here is shocking in (at least) two ways. First, God's 'hiding of his face' is not at all uncommon, especially in the psalms. However, when it has been used it has always been in the context of the individual suffering because God is not paying attention to him (either through sickness or through enemies). It has not ever been used (that I can recall) as the act of grace that we find here. What David is saying is that God enact a gracious self-alienation not from him, but from his sins. Again, there is this sense that David's sins (his rebellion and wayward acts) are 'things' that can be turned from. This leads to the second shocking point: until this point David's act of confession has been one of ever greater exposure and ownership in the presence of God. He has been, as we argued before, making of himself into an object of judgment so as to (hopefully) make of himself an object of mercy. The emphasis has been on placing his rebellion directly in front of God so that God can remove it/destroy/cleanse it. Here, by contrast, the opposite movement is sought. Rather than having God directly address his rebellion, he asks that God turn from it. It is clearly an act of mercy on God's part (a gracious act of 'self-alienation') but it does invert the order that has been previously discribed. And, furthermore, it seems to stand at odds with the very next request: "all the guilt of my wayward acts blot out". On the one hand he wants God to turn from his sin; on the other he wants God to directly address it and "blot it out" (or, break the tablet of curse and sin).

The point is not to be found in the literal description, obviously, but in the intimate sense of shame that David feels in the presence of God. The request that God 'turn his face' is, in reality, a very tender request, a sense of permeated shame at his acts. This counterbalances the previous desire on David's part to utterly expose his sin and reveals the duality inherent in one's approach to sin and how both desires (utter exposure and shameful hiding) are true and good responses to sin/rebellion. What we see here, I think, is the sense that David knows the depth of pain he has caused to God in his sin, the sense that he has failed him. This particular response does not emerge from the first half of the psalm and it reveals an aspect of David that is very tender, intimate and almost child-like in its vulnerability to the suffering he has caused. David is embarrassed. As much as  his honor compels him to force the issue to the point of maximal ownership and exposure, his shame at what he has done also compels him to ask God to retreat from it. There is nothing contradictory about this. Guilt is this dual momentum: the desire to conceal and to expose. And, therefore, confession will manifest this duality as well.