Ps. 74.5 (like a lamb to slaughter)

It seemed like men / bringing up axes
into / a thicket of trees. 

We noted in conclusion yesterday that what disturbs the psalmist the most as he contemplates the destruction of the Temple is the fact that God seemed so indifferent to the flagrant mockery of the wicked. There is no question for the psalmist but that God had and has the power to vindicate his name. There is no sense that God is too weak to defend himself. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, he allows himself to be humiliated. Here, that wonder is deepened by the fact that God’s foes seemed to attack the Temple with as much ease as men chopping down trees in a thicket. There was no battle; there was no defense. There simply mute acceptance. It was almost like an invitation, like a lamb being led to the slaughter. We must emphasize again, however, that this attack on the Temple is, for the psalmist, as intimate an attack upon God as could be imagined. Even more so, perhaps, than his ‘flock’ or his ‘tribe’, the Temple manifested God; Psalm 48 says, upon looking at the Temple, that “this is our God”. The point to this is that the destruction of the Temple is understood as a direct attack upon God himself. For that reason I want to propose a speculative reading at this point: it seems that what we see here is the Temple being treated in much the same way as Christ will later be treated at the crucifixion. As with the Temple, he is directly and flagrantly mocked, shamed and “defiled to the ground” (vs. 7). And, as with the Temple, there is resounding divine silence in the face of this humiliation. Likewise, there it was the Temple, here it is the Son (who call himself the Temple in John). The speculation: that the destruction of the Temple in the OT was a type of participation within the ‘divine silence’ of the Cross, that in some mysterious fashion God was preparing his people for the Cross by introducing them into this silence, his silence at his own (effortless) humiliation. Furthermore, and something we will see as we progress in the psalm, this ‘divine silence’ is, in Christ, understood to be a forging, a supremely creative act—a sacrifice rather than a murder. In this psalm, something like that can be sensed later in the psalm as he (re)turns to images of creation. However, the point here is that the removal of every divine sign in a divine silence, along with the erection of mocking signs by the foes—points us toward the time when the Word would be silence in death and humiliation.