Ps. 54.2 (O God, hear...)

O God / hear my prayer
give ear / to the words / of my mouth

This is one of the most common phrases we have encountered in the psalms—the desperate appeal to God to hear, for his ear to be ‘open’ to the supplicant in his home (the Temple). From this short petition, however, we witness something important—that God’s act of hearing the prayer effects a change, an enactment of justice. On other contexts we have called this the origin of the ‘hiatus’, that moment between God’s recognition of a injustice (his seeing) and his acting to reconcile it. Here, the petitioner is alluding to this reality: that for God to become aware is for God to rectify. He is no mere passive receptacle, or observer of events. For him to hear is for him to understand and to judge. For clearly, the psalmist is not only asking that God ‘hear’ him. In addition this points to the fact that the psalmist believes his prayers to be spoken into the freedom of the Divine “I”. He is not merely recounting his dilemma but rather believes himself to be delivering that dilemma into the presence of God who can ‘hear’. It would seem that the depth of his dilemma is something that can speak to God, something that can instigate him to act, something that can ‘prick his heart’.