Ps. 74.3 (move toward what you know)

Stride forth / to a total ruin
to all the damage / in the sanctuary / done by an enemy. 

We noted yesterday the probably intensification of imagery in verse 2 as it moved from the acquired congregation to the redeemed patrimony to the Temple dwelling. Here, the final imagery of the Temple is picked up and placed before God. It seems important for us to pause over this fact, for it will be the primary focus of the remaining verses of the first portion of the psalm. More than the ‘flock’, the ‘congregation’ and the ‘patrimony’, it is the destruction wrought against the Temple that the psalmist finds so alarming and, more important, what he will place before God in order to rouse him.  It is important, then, to pay attention as to how the psalmist goes about describing the Temple’s destruction. First, he petitions for God to “stride forth to a total ruin.” This ‘striding forth’ is paralleled to God’s “remember” of vs. 2. There, the remembrance involved a recognition of past actions and the call for the re-igniting of those past moments of genesis. Here, by contrast, the psalmist moves into the present. He wants God to come and inspect (“stride forth”) what has occurred to the Temple. The memory was focused on moments of powerful, creative holiness. The ‘striding forth’ is aimed at God becoming aware of the present state of “ruin”, shame and desecration. This points to an important insight: the psalmist is convinced that God’s visitation to the Temple and its shame will be a cause for God to move into action. Again, we see the tension in the psalmist. There is no question but that God is aware of the destruction of his Temple. Verse 1 makes that clear. However, there is equally strong in the psalmist the sense that God is in some manner absent from the situation, that God is simultaneously present and absent, aware and aloof, conscious of yet forgetful. And, it is the destruction of the Temple that engenders this dual conviction. Here, just as in verse 2, the psalmist is convinced of an underlying unity in God—that his ‘absence’ or his ‘forgetfulness’ is something that can and should be rectified. That if God were to merely ‘remember’ or ‘visit’, the present would be healed. This is the ‘hiatus’ we have noted in many other psalms, the hiatus between God’s knowing/perceiving and his acting. In times of chaos and injustice what is (or, should be) unified in God (perceiving and acting) is divided; there is a hiatus between the two. A gulf opens up and history seems to stall and sputter. Within this space is what we find here: the Temple as “total ruin”. This ‘total ruin’ points us back to verse 1 and the ‘unrelenting anger’. As there, we see here a sense of magnitude beyond the normal, the sense of terrible and potential finality. We come to find out that this haunting suspicion has a source, and it is in the terrible finality of the Temple itself, its “total ruin”. The destruction of the Temple lends itself to these questions of finality: “Why are you unrelenting in anger? (vs. 1); Will the enemy scorn your name forever? (vs. 10)”. The terrible conclusion is this: that as perpetual as the Temple was will be the perpetual shame and embarrassment of God (vs. 10, 23). In other words, the destruction of the Temple seems to cleave God in two for the psalmist, whereas in the place of his ‘face’ there is nothing but perpetual ‘shame’. And this is clearly something impossible to the psalmist, although he cannot fathom where the unifying force will emerge. A final, tentative note: we should be aware of the fact that the unity the psalmist desires for God to enact is, in some way, enacted by and through this petition. The prayer is itself the petition for unity, and therefore embodies that unity. It seems to be profoundly important that in some mysterious way God’s image seems to embody a unity that is absent in God, that God would create a covenant partner that would ‘call him back to himself’. And that prayer-petition is, in that way, the force of history, what pulls the hiatus back together; that God would, in himself, respond to his covenant partner and ‘remember’ and ‘stride forth’. This is neither demiurgic nor magical. The psalmist clearly knows that the act of unity will come from within the will of God. However, he is also equally convinced that his petition, however mysteriously, plays a crucial role in that movement toward unity.