Ps. 69.7-9 (the Idiot)

On your account / I endure reproach
humiliation / covers my face
I have become a stranger / to my brothers
and an alien / to my mother’s children.
On account of / zeal for your house / I am consumed
and the reproach / of those who reproach you / has fallen on me. 

Arguably, these verses are the centerpiece of the psalm. It is here where we come to see why the waters have arisen and why the maw of the depths is about the close over the king: zeal for God’s house. There are many points that need to be made about these verses. The first is its relation to the previous verses and the theme of mediated reproach and shame. As we saw there, the king was desperate to forestall the spilling over of his ‘guilt and folly’ onto his people. The key was that shame and humiliation was/is about to cover his people “through me”. The same emphasis is found here in a profound shift of perspective: now, the king suffers shame and humiliation on account of God. In other words, just as the king was concerned that his actions would lead to shame and humiliation so now is God’s (in)activity portrayed as the mediation of shame and humiliation. This is shocking in its implication: the king has used his desire to avoid humiliation on his people as a type of mirror to God, as if saying, “Now you do likewise, and cease being the cause of my shame and humiliation; I am taking the brunt of your inactivity.” This is the crux of the psalm: to get God moving into action (just as the opening verse implied) through, it seems, a type of shaming. This leads into the second point: what we see here is that in the hiatus of God’s inactivity the king’s zeal has remained constant and that his constancy has called forth the dangers he is now experiencing. It is as if the king and his zeal for God’s house has, in a way, maintained the zeal of God without the power of God. Or, in a similar image, the zeal of God is present even though God is “hiding his face from his servant” (vs. 17). Zeal without power is the genesis of shame and humiliation. It opens a yawning gap between desire and the power to fulfill that desire. Applied to the king, he appears to be an impotent fool; one who is remaining constant to a god that either does not share his zeal or cannot honor it. Within this gap that has been created stands the king, and he is forced to stand as the flood-waters of shame and humiliation come pouring in. As God’s servant (vs. 17) this should have initiated God’s ‘loving-kindness’, his covenantal power of redemption. Instead, he is forced to swim in this flooding god-reproach. What should have ‘fallen on God’ has ‘fallen on me’. This ‘flood’ is the flood of death as manifested by “alienation” and “becoming a stranger”. In a way, this flood is a flood of a profound absence, a severing of all communal bonds, even the familial. He has become the idiot of God. Third, there is a very specific reason for this flood of shame: the Temple. This is no generalized ‘zeal for God’; it is a zeal that is directly related to God’s dwelling. It may be that what we see here is that this psalm has been composed following the destruction of the Temple; this would cohere with the concluding lines referring to God’s “saving Zion”. If this is the case then it is probably the king’s zeal for its rebuilding that has made him the idiot. On the other hand it may be that his zeal for God’s Temple is simply seen as a ridiculous and futile effort. Whichever it is, what is clear is that the psalmist/king is thoroughly convinced that God and God’s house are intimately wed. Indeed, so much so that they are interchangeable in these lines: “…zeal for you…zeal for your house…”. The king’s very life is bottomed on this conviction and he will suffer no interruption between the two. Indeed, rather than simply letting go of his zeal and swimming to shore (of acceptance), he will sink beneath the waves—convinced his zeal is not in vain and is the only real source of a petition for God’s power. How much easier it would be to simply affirm that the Temple is, really, only a building.