Ps. 102.3-4a (consumed in flame)

For my life / is vanishing in smoke
my bones / burn like embers
my heart / has been seared like grass / and is shriveled up. 

As the psalmist turns to describing his trouble he appeals to images of smoke, fire and a scorching sun. He moves from ‘life’ (smoke) to ‘bones’ (flame) to ‘heart’ (scorching sun). All of these are subjected to a deadly heat. In a grotesque description, he alludes to his bones being the flame that causes the ‘smoke’ that consumes and vanishes his life. He is, in other words, burning from the inside out; his own body is the fuel to the flame that is consuming him. This sense of complete self-consumption will continue in the following verses where he says he ‘drinks his own tears’. What we see here is that his destruction is very intimate to him; it not so much something imposed from outside of him, or ‘attacking’ him, but it is beneath his own skin. As such, he is utterly incapable of escape. The image of his ‘seared heart’ is also a troubling description. There are other psalms that mention the effect of Yhwh’s wrath as similar to a withering sun, and of life as being ‘like grass’. Here, those two images are combined. He is, quite literally, burning. And his heart, that source and seat of his reason and his ‘self’, is shriveling up. It is either an incredibly delicate thing or the heat is so massive and intense that it dwarfs him (or, both). 

The psalmist will later return to this image when he says: “my life is like a lengthening shadow, I am shriveled up like grass”. Interestingly, the psalmist previously described his life as “vanishing in smoke” whereas now it is beginning to enter into a “night” (lengthening shadow). Furthermore, as this night approaches, it (not a scorching sun) causes him to ‘shrivel like grass’. What we see here is a very powerful mixing of images: in the first part his life is subjected to an unbearable light and heat; in the second, it is a profound darkness that ‘consumes’ him. He is emanating (and dwelling within) both light and darkness and both are clearly in the form of destruction. What is happening to him is entirely unstable, or, unable to be adequately formulated without resort to these conflicting images and experiences. For the psalmist, this is not merely a ‘worldly experience’. It is suffused with a divine reality: this is Yhwh’s “hidden face”, his “anger and wrath” and his picking him up and throwing him away (vs. 10). What is clear, though, is that this reality is not something easily grasped nor easily described, which is very typical of a psalmist’s experience of Yhwh’s wrath. It is only in the light of Yhwh’s face that the psalmist emerges into an unadulterated light, a light without confusion and ‘without turning’, a light of pure blessing and grace, a light that ‘consumes but does not destroy’. We have emphasized this throughout—that Yhwh’s wrath is always penultimate to his blessing. As such, it does not partake of the clarity of his Face and his blessing. It is, by its very nature, an unresolved, and unresolvable, reality. If one ‘resolves’ Yhwh’s wrath one has, in a sense, misapprehended it. 

It is perhaps here that we can suggest a second level to the psalmist’s sickness. As we saw in the previous reflection the psalmist and Zion/Temple are intimately associated. What happens to the psalmist is mirrored in Zion. Perhaps it is no coincidence then that when the Temple was destroyed it was burned to the ground. It, like the psalmist, was ‘consumed in flame’. 

This, of course, may be a stretch. But, regardless, there is a clear parallel in the psalm between the psalmist and Zion. More to the point, it is not, I think, a ‘stretch’ when it is placed within the context of revelation. What I mean is this—when this psalm is spoken by the Church, as the Body of Christ, and his Temple, then the ‘distance’ between the psalmist and Temple (or, Zion) is clearly lessened. In Christ, the ‘body’ of the psalmist is the ‘body’ of the (new) Temple. When Christ enters his suffering, the (true) Temple is entering into its collapse as well; it is being ‘torn down’ (in order to be ‘raised up’). This is the ‘third level’ of the psalm.