Ps. 102.8 (name, curse and redemption)

All day long
my enemies insult me
they use my name / as a curse. 

The psalmist now moves from the ‘night of abandonment’ to the ‘day of the curse’. What we find is that while the night exhibited social isolation, loneliness and ‘ruin’, the psalmist’s existence ‘in the day’ is simply the reverse pole. Now, he is surrounded by people but is subjected to their curses. So, in the night he was a ‘forgotten person’ whose name would have mirrored the abandoned ruins he lived in; in the day, however, his name is not forgotten but it is horribly employed against him. The psalmist, in other words, has no escape. In the night, he dwells in loneliness; in the day, he lives in social scorn. What we see here is, again, the oscillation of Yhwh’s wrath that we described previously—darkness and light, yet both serving to destroy the psalmist. Both serving to utterly untether the psalmist, preventing any type of rest or security. In a sense, everywhere he looks he sees Yhwh’s absence. 

The use of ‘the name’ as a curse. When we move into our ‘second level’, where the psalmist and Zion are so closely aligned, we read in verse 15: “Then the nations will revere Yhwh’s name, all the kings on earth, your glory.” This revering of Yhwh’s name follows the redemption of Zion, which, as we have seen, is aligned with the psalmist’s redemption. Moreover, these ‘kings of the earth’ are, in other psalms, almost always Yhwh’s enemies (see Psalm 2). They are, in other words, the enemy of Yhwh in the same way as, in our verse today, the psalmist ‘enemies’ use “his name” as a curse. So, the psalmist’s “name-that-is-now-a-curse” partakes of the same scandal that Yhwh’s name is held in by “the king’s of the earth”.  Likewise, when the psalmist is redeemed his name will likewise be redeemed, just as when Zion is redeemed so too with Yhwh’s name be redeemed (glorified) among the nations. I think what we are to see in this is that the fate of the psalmist’s name is intimately, or, ultimately, tied to Yhwh’s name, not in some chronological fashion, but in a theological fashion. In other words, the psalmist’s redemption will partake in Zion’s redemption, and his name’s redemption will partake in the glorification of Yhwh’s name “among the kings of the earth”. His redemption, then, is not an isolated event, but one that speaks to, of and through, Zion’s redemption and, hence, the world’s (the nations) redemption. 

As an aside—I have often wondered when contemplating this psalm if we could not find in the psalmist’s voice the ‘voice of Zion’. Meaning, that he is speaking-as-Zion. I do not think, in the end, that the psalmist can be equated with Zion, but the close relationship between the two does allow for this ‘bleeding together’. That said, in Christ, they can in fact be read in this fashion because he is both the psalmist and Zion/Temple. If one takes the reflections above and reflects on the “Philippian hymn” one enters into a deeply profound reality regarding the ‘name’ of Christ.