Ps. 77.10 (the soil of sorrow)

And so I say, / “My sorrow is this:
the changing / of the right hand / of the Most High!” 

Sorrow is probably the dominant note of this entire psalm. In my opinion it begins and pushes through all the way to the end of the psalm. The first half strikes this note often and emphatically: “…I cry out….cry out to God”; “day of my distress…but my soul has not been comforted”; “I remember God and I groan; I ponder and my spirit grows weak”; “I am so distraught I cannot speak”. This sorrow then becomes focused into the several questions of verses 7-9. Here, in verse 10, we come to the actual ‘release’ of sorrow, the final and concentrated expression. This is the soil of his sorrow. We must recall here that the psalmist began the psalm with his ‘giving voice’—which pointed to God’s lack of speaking. Further, he then went on to say that in his pondering of God, the pain is so intense it that he cannot speak. We called this the ‘crying silence’—the sense of a profound division within the psalmist as the silence of God begins to become his own silence; he folds in on himself in pain and terror. He is both ‘crying out’ and ‘silent’ at the same time. Now, that silence is broken once again. “And so I say…”. This ‘saying’ stands at the center of the psalm and represents its heart, perhaps more so than the questions. Another thing deserving of note is how brief the statement is. The deeply troubling questions poured forth from the psalmist. They fell over themselves, one-after-another. Here, by contrast, the psalmist can only speak one phrase: “the changing of the right hand of the Most High!” In its brevity and restraint, we hear a tremendous shout. It is shot out like some painful confession. The content is important as the psalmist focuses on the “right hand” of the Most High. The “right hand” was what brought the Israelites out of Egypt. It is the hand of power and deliverance. In this way it is the hand of the covenant. For the “right hand” to change is then to signal not simply ‘change’ but abandonment. Lastly, we must point out that what undergirds this sorrow is the sense of the abandoned constancy of the Most High. In other words, as the questions make clear, the covenantal bond (the familial bond) is enacted by way of “loyal-love”, “compassion”, “favor”, “promises” and “graciousness”. It the sense that these constant covenantal powers of favor are changing that so distresses the psalmist.