Ps. 73.14-16 (torment of silence)

I was plagued / all during the day
and my punishment / began each morning.
If I had said / “I will speak thus”
Behold / I would have betrayed / your children
When I tried / to understand this
it was torment / in my eyes. 

These are profoundly moving verses. The psalmist experience as contrasted with the wicked, and his need to be a priest to the people creates a tension within in that, in the end, becomes a ‘torment’. If the concluding description of the wicked was one of unified wickedness that loomed as large and as powerful as heaven, then these concluding lines of the psalmist paint a picture of a priest who is severed not only from himself but also existing in a duality with God’s children. The overwhelming sense of these verses is of pain. He describes his life as one filled with “plague” and “punishment”. This clearly alludes to the life of the wicked who “have no pains” nor are they plagued. (vs. 5) And whereas they move through life, until the end, in a type of divine lack of suffering, the psalmist’s time is full—“all during the day” and “beginning each morning” he experiences plague and punishment. In addition, the wicked were able to “wear their evil” without anxiety and without shame. Their exterior expression of themselves was consistent with the treachery of their hearts. They had no need to hide or be divided. Here, by contrast, the psalmist’s pain and suffering is something he cannot speak about without that expression being an act of betrayal. The desire on his part for unity between his experience of suffering and his proclamation of that suffering cannot occur. He must remain divided. The reason we have said, but it is important to note the description: “your children”. God is here understood to be the Divine Kinsman (which is what it means to enter into covenant with God). The psalmist then, as a Levitical priest, must inhabit a realm of division for the sake of the covenantal bond between God and his people. His lack of understanding cannot be resolved in a verbal act of unity (by proclaiming his suffering and the clear collision between his life and the opening proverb). His silence maintains that covenantal bond and it is one that he must endure for their sake. It is this lack of understanding, coinciding with his inability to express his conundrum (his silence), that leads to “torment”. Here we come to an important insight: the psalmist must resolve his dilemma. The ‘torment’ must come to an end. He cannot remain open and divided. Either the wicked are the divine beings everyone “beholds” and God “knows nothing”, or….(and this is the problem, there is nothing to fill in this blank, except a proverbial statement that contradicts what is manifest). The problem is not that the psalmist does not believe the opening proverb (there is nothing existential about this). The problem is that the opening proverb is not actually happening. The wicked have grown to the size of heaven; the wicked do not experience suffering and plague; and, the pure in heart, do exist in a realm of nothing. In other words, history is not so much false as terribly divided. The opening proverb is making time a torment, and a torment that cannot, of itself, resolve itself because that which exists should not (wicked), that that which does not exist should (the righteous who are ‘nothing’).