Ps. 69.19 ("be who you are")

You know / my reproach
my shame / and my humiliation
all my foes / are before you. 

This is an important verse as it relates to the presence of God in the preceding lines. There, we saw the steadily ‘turning’ presence of God toward the servant (or, rather, the plea for that turning). We noted how this presence of God, his face, was the enactment of his saving power; his presence and his power are one. This points, I think, to the reason why, in times of suffering, God’s face is understood to be turned away—there is no conception of a person apart from the presence/power imparted by their presence. In these verses, however, a dilemma to this understanding is introduced—the preceding lines were in the form of petition, a requesting of something that is not currently happening. Here, by contrast, the psalmist asserts that his “shame, disgrace and humiliation” are known and is before God. These lines largely mirror verse 5: “O God, you know my folly, my guilty deeds are not hidden from you”. We see the problem—it is as if everything causing the psalmist’s destruction is before God and in his presence while he is not. It (the chaos) is “known by him” and “before him”, while he must petition for God to “turn to him”, to “answer him”, to “turn not his face away from” him and to “come close”. It is as if God is divided against himself, or, rather, that what should be unified (presence and power) are not: what is in his presence should not be (the chaos) while what should be isn’t (the psalmist). It is this, I believe, that this psalm is attempting to rectify. This passage inaugurates a change in the psalm to calls for destruction. Just as the psalmist asked for the presence/power of God to “come close” to him in his righteous innocence, so too now will he begin to ask that God ‘activate’ his presence/power against what he “knows” and is “before him” (the chaos). The psalmist is, in a way, asking God to “be who you are; right now, you are not your name (I am who I am)”.