Ps. 94.18-19 (the future-fountain, now present)

Though I said, / “My foot is slipping”
your loyal-love / O Yhwh / sustained me
when my cares / were great within me
your comforts / brought joy / to my soul. 

If we continue the theme that we picked up in the last reflection about this portion of the psalm being the ‘personal’, lament, in contrast to the first sections more abstract and wisdom response to evil, then here we move inward into the experience of being cared for by Yhwh. In the words of the first portion of the psalm, this is the inner experience of Yhwh “giving them assurance because of evil days” (vs. 13). In the first portion, the description is more detached, more broad in scope. Here, when psalmist recounts his own experience, we find “loyal-love”, “comfort” and “joy”. These verses strike me as almost intensely personal, and this ‘intensity’ affords us a greater insight into the ‘intensity’ of the experience of Yhwh when he reaches out to his people. This is significant for what it says about the time when the ‘digging will be done’ and the wicked will be judged—just as we argued before that the personal experience of the psalmist functioned like a type of sacrament of Yhwh’s later act of judgment and redemption, so too can we now see that this ‘joy’ and ‘comfort’ operate in the same way. In other words, when Yhwh enacts his judgment—when the ‘time is ripe’—then this personal joy will flood all of the righteous and will be experienced in much deeper and more profound manner. 

This ‘joy’, then, is a sacramental (an ‘already-but-not-yet’ participation), and points toward the real ‘beginning of the beginning’ of joy that will follow Yhwh’s judgment and when he ‘renders upon the righteous’ what they have earned (vs. 15).  What we might venture to say is that the psalmist, in these ‘evil days’ (vs. 13), experiences within himself both light and darkness (‘cares’ and ‘joy’). That experience is the experience of ‘assurance’ (vs. 13). Yet, when the judgment is rendered and the evil are delivered to the Pit, the psalmist will, along with all the righteous, enter into a state of unadulterated ‘joy’; the ‘time of light’; the ‘Sabbath of sabbaths’, as the day that, internally and externally, begins and begins in light. This is when the anxiety caused by the wicked will be ‘buried’, removed from the earth, and cast into the pit of its own making. This is when the righteous will be “free(d) from all anxiety”. 

In a profound fashion, this psalm can be heard as being sung by Christ in the heavenly liturgy. It encapsulates his life and, as we have argued, it is through his participating in (or, more accurately, enacting) this psalm, that we can also participate in the ‘expansive’ vision of the first part of the psalm, as we pattern ourselves after his life-to-resurrection. In this regard, the first portion of the psalm should be seen as an anticipation of, a participation in, and an enactment, of resurrection-through-suffering. Further, we should see Christ as inhabiting already this state of “Sabbath” joy. For his disciples, that he already lives within this ‘beginning-of-the-beginning’ is the source of greatest joy; if he is the fountainhead, we drink from the realm that he now abides in. He is the future-fountain, now present.