Ps. 80.4-5 (tragic absurdity)

O Yhwh / God Sabaoth
how long / will you fume
at your holy people’s prayers?
You have fed them / tears for food,
even made them drink / tears by the keg. 

Yhwh Sabaoth. We are, again, presented with a type of formal designation of Yhwh: God Sabaoth. It is important to see how the psalmist has been offering God a continuous stream of these: “Shepherd of Israel” (vs. 1); “Cherubim-Enthroned-One” (vs. 1b). They all point in a general direction: God’s powerful, covenantal concern for his people. Here, the desination is similar to the “cherubim-enthroned-one” in that it specifically situates God within the midst of other powerful heavenly beings. Here, he is the “Lord of hosts”. What we find in these images is the fact that God’s power is being highlighted specifically by surrounding him with, and showing his lordship over, other heavenly beings. It is not the case that God is called upon in his isolation and superiority. Rather, his dominion and power are more fully expressed by placing him within a host of other beings. The fact that he is their “lord” itself reveals his greater lordship over all. This is key, in this verse in particular, because God is, in fact, surrounded by two parties: the heavenly beings, of which he is “lord” and y his “holy people”. The difference, however, is that the heavenly beings are in his presence and able to commune with him, while “his people” are shut off from him by his “fumes”/smoke. Their prayers cannot reach him. There is a barrier. The objective of this verse is to move God to remove the “fumes” that prevent his hearing their petitions. The question of “how long” is clearly not a question seeking information; the psalmist is not asking for a date when God will cease being angry. It is, rather, a petition. It asking God to cease the terrible present, to part the clouds that surround him and to, with the heavenly beings, descend to earth and rectify the problem. In other words—heaven and earth have been separated. Those who are “holy” (the divine host and the earthly people) are not in communion. That is the experience of injustice and exile. And the psalmist and his people experience their alienation not simply from God but from this divine assembly. The heavenly and the earthly liturgy are not united (and they should be). When the present time is overcome—when the Lord of Hosts again listens to his ‘holy’ people—heaven and earth will, once again, be in communion as they are clearly supposed to be. At that point is when God’s face will truly “shine”. The publicity of his glory will cover not just heaven but earth as well. And this ‘covering’ will be one, specifically, of liturgy—of his hearing his people’s prayer. There will be no barrier between them. Heaven and earth are like a bride and bridegroom, made for each other, yearning for each other’s well-being and unity. And, in their unity, they become greater than their parts (1+1=3). This points back to our observation of yesterday: that the joy of God’s people in his presence is, itself, a manifestation of God (a theophany). (We might even venture to say that rather than beginning with the ‘objective’ we should, first, begin with the ‘subjective’ experience of God’s people in order to situate ourselves in the light of his ‘face’.) 

Feeding on tears. The second image of the people’s exile is potent. It focuses not on their inability to be heard but on their feeding. There are several layers to this image that need to be explored. On one level, we have argued that many of the petitions in verse 1-3 focus on Israel’s desire to be rejoined to the primordial blessing of God in his perpetuating Israel down through Jacob’s children. They have sensed the fracturing, the dissolving, of that blessing power such that they are in danger of becoming merely a group of tribes and not Israel. Furthermore, an aspect of that unity focused on the military experience in the wilderness when God actually forged their unity by being their Warrior God who went into battle with the nations (by and through the arc; vs. 1-2). Here, in this image of ‘food and drink’ what we see is a reversal of the wilderness experiences. There, they were sent prodigal life-giving water from a rock and manna from heaven. Now, by contrast, they are fed on and drink salt water that comes, only, from themselves. When heaven and earth are separated by the fumes of God’s wrath the prodigal power of the wilderness is turned into, simply, a dessert. On a second level, it is key to recognize the fact that when God’s people are separated from him they fall into a horrible image of almost cannibalism. They feed on themselves and their misery. In the wilderness, the water came from a rock; here, it comes from their own eyes. There is a sense here of an enfolding deprivation, of a type of implosion of grief. Everything becomes reversed into something grotesque. Tears become consumed; water is imaged as “food”; and the prodigal abundance of the wilderness is turned into tears “by the keg”. One cannot, in the end, make sense of this and the psalmist is at pains, by the confusion of these categories, to show how their situation is, ultimately, a tragic absurdity. Severed from God they do not operate ‘according to nature’. Rather, they dwell in world of horrors and nonsense. Perhaps most troubling (but also hopeful, strangely) is the fact that they are convinced that above the clouds of God’s wrath are the divine beings (his ‘hosts’) that are basking in the glory of his face. (It is key to realize that  this is not a type of objective description; the psalmist has employed this image of the heavenly hosts in order to petition for their power to redeem the present situation. It is petition, not description. We must never forget this dramatic sense of petition or we can fall into the danger of envisioning the situation as a type of ‘principal’. That, however, goes against the entire grain of the psalm. The present is, in a sense, ‘unreal’ because of the reality of God’s presence. The present is measured by God’s presence, not the other way around. If that is forgotten, the drama ceases and we have turned the psalm almost into a type of demonic liturgy rather than it being the “prayer of God’s holy people” (vs. 4).)