Ps. 102 (the geography of wrath)

because of your anger and wrath
you have picked me up / and thrown me away. 

If we assume verses 1-2 are introduction with the psalm ‘beginning’ in verse 3, then, up to now, the psalmist’s condition has been almost entirely personal, with not a single reference to Yhwh. This ‘bracketing’ of verse 1-2 would be like bracketing the introductory portion of Job with the Satan-God dialogue. Here, however, what we come to see is that the entire drama thus far has been a divine drama as well. The psalmist’s ‘implosion’ has been also the enactment of Yhwh’s anger and wrath. What, on one level, is his own conflagration is, on another level, his being “thrown away” by Yhwh. This is not two realities, but one event described in two different ways. The psalmist drama is contained within a divine one. His life ‘reaches’ into the realm of divine action and intention (or, perhaps we should say, the divine realm ‘reaches’ into realm of the psalmist; or, perhaps we should not even speak of different realms at all). The point is that the psalmist does not, in fact, see his plight in purely personal terms but understands it to be also a divine reality; there arguably is no ‘purely personal’ reality to speak of. Rather, the divine realm exceeds and contains the psalmist’s life. His life is not more expansive that Yhwh’s governance and control. This verse is an ‘echo’ of verses 1-2. It serves to show that the psalmist life is actually ‘embedded’ in Yhwh’s will. It is at this point that we need to see how seemingly incongruous the images are though. We have already noted this in the psalmist own description of his suffering—he chaotically moves from images of intense light to darkness, from images of feeding mixed with images of death. All of these, though, are portrayed as emanating from within him. He is being destroyed from the inside out. But here, the reverse is true. Here, his plight is one of being ‘picked up and thrown away’. There is nothing ‘internal’ about this destruction. He is being ‘cast out’ of God’s presence. However, what we find important about this image is the fact that it does not entail any direct destruction. Rather, it is simply an act of removal. In other words, the psalmist seems to see in his suffering an internal active destruction that results from his being removed from Yhwh’s presence. This is, interestingly, similar to something we see in Job: Yhwh’s ‘removes his protection’, while the actual onslaught comes from the Satan. It is here that we might find an additional depth to the image of the psalmist as a dessert owl who lives in abandoned places—this is the ‘realm’ that Yhwh has thrown the psalmist, out into the place of demons and terrors, without any protection. What Yhwh has ‘done’ is made him vulnerable to attack and entropy (and death).  There is a significant point to be made from this in the context of this psalm—Yhwh’s ‘wrath and anger’ are manifest by a removal from his presence; his gracious act of kindness, by contrast, will be by way of his ‘rising’ from his enthroned seat in the heavens and coming to ‘rebuild’ Zion. What we see, on this level, is that Yhwh’s ‘return’ to Zion to rebuild it, will be the analogous to Yhwh’s ‘returning’ of the psalmist to himself for ‘rebuilding’. This dynamic is something seen in other places—that Yhwh’s removal of his glory from the Temple was his making it susceptible to ‘corruption’ and, more importantly, his ‘return’ to the Temple was to be the peole’s ‘return’ from exile.