Ps. 102.13 (favor its rubble)

For your servants / value its stones
and its rubble / they regard with favor. 

These are significant lines in the context of the psalm, although at first glance they may seem saccharine. I would first back up and quote briefly from Psalm 48: “Walk around Zion, and go all the way around it; count its towers. Consider its fortress, traverse its citadels, so that you may describe it to the next generation. For this is God, our God, eternal and everlasting; he will guide us eternally.” What we see here is a loving, almost lavish, attention to Zion. The focus on its details—on ‘counting its towers’—and the command to ‘commit it to memory’, are the words of a people in the presence of a consuming beauty. This is the radiance of Zion established. By contrast, in our psalm Zion is apparently “in rubble”. And yet, Yhwh’s servants still regard Zion with the same devotion as those in Psalm 48. In fact, we might venture to say that their regarding of Zion’s rubble “with favor” reveals a love of Zion that is even more profound than that in Psalm 48. Moreover, in the context of the psalm, these lines resonate very deeply. Recall that the psalmist’s plight is one of essentially be the ‘rubble’ of a man. His degradation and the collapse of Zion are closely paralleled in many ways. For him, however, his situation only results in social alienation and loneliness.  No one ‘favors him’. I think what we see here is that the psalmist’s sickness and deterioration are manifestations of Yhwh’s abandonment. Curiously, the destruction of Zion was often seen, also, as Yhwh’s abandonment; of the ‘removal’ of his glory and his allowing it to be overrun. And yet, for Zion, even in the wake of Yhwh’s abandonment, it’s rubble is ‘favored’. This remaining love for Zion is clear also in the book of Lamentations. For Israel and Yhwh’s ‘servants’, in other words, Yhwh’s abandonment of Zion and/or the Temple does not result in their abandonment of Zion and/or the Temple. They continue to properly desire Yhwh’s re-inhabitance of both. In other words, they approach Yhwh’s abandonment as an expression of his ‘wrath’ that is always in service of his healing redemption. This is why they never lose sight of his return and why they can regard its ‘rubble’ with favor. This seems to me to be tremendously important—that devotion to the ‘rubble’ of Yhwh is the precondition to its redemption and is an act very worthy of admiration and piety. It is a profound statement of their certainty in Yhwh’s power to redeem. In a sense, the closer they get to ‘the rubble’ the closer Yhwh gets to initiating his ‘rising’ to Zion in mercy. And it is here where we need to point out the use of the word “favor”. The immediately preceding verse describes Yhwh’s action toward Zion as “showing her favor”. Here, Yhwh’s servants do the exact same thing; they “regard Zion with favor”. Their devotion to Zion is an implicit petition to which Yhwh now responds. It is an abiding and underlying prayer that forms the basis for Yhwh’s now ‘arising’ to redeem Zion.