Seeing the Messiah
The deeper one peers into this psalm the more does the face
of Christ begin to emerge. On some level, this happens during the course of
these reflections. They feel as if their various lines all start bending
towards a common horizon. For me, this occurs through the act of writing and
reflection. The psalm is rather mute in my hands before that.
In part 1, we saw how the curses came from a why-less place.
They were disembodied mouths, which portrayed their grotesque and partial
reality. The curses were traditional curses, for the most part. They were even
insightful. They blamed the psalmist for not blessing the poor and cursing the
lowly. They accused him of essentially creating chaos and death in the
community and through his relationships with others. Therefore, they said, let
his community be destroyed, let his children be fatherless and penniless. Let
his parents’ sins live perpetually before Yhwh so that his entire family line
will be destroyed in a perpetual and enduring curse. This ‘curse’ is not itself
wicked. The righteous often pray it. What is wicked, is that it is a lie. It
mimics righteousness. This is the ‘grotesque’ and partial nature of their
curses—partial in that they do resemble ‘righteous’ curses. Those who prey on
the downtrodden would deserve this (and many psalms request it). The voice of
serpent speaks so clearly through this. Taking what is valid, what is generally
harnessed for righteousness, but then turning it effectively into its opposite.
Recall, the effect of the serpent’s words were a curse upon the serpent, upon the
world, and upon Adam and Eve. More deeply still is the fact that these words,
beginning with the serpent, flowed directly into Christ’s trial (and beyond,
into the life of Church and Spirit). The serpent’s words didn’t stop after he
uttered them. God warned Cain that “sin lies at the door and its desire was for
him.” The river flows. This psalm capture one of its eddies.
It is for this reason, I think, why it is so difficult to
pin down exactly what charge precipitated Christ’s death—was it his claim to be
the Messiah, his cleansing of the Temple, his claim to be king in contrast to Ceaser?
Did he even claim these things? The more we peer into the darkness surrounding
his trial the less certain we become. It should be this way. As in this psalm,
and as with the serpent in the garden, evil and lies cannot be directly seen.
They mimic the why-lessness of God’s grace. This why, I think, the psalmist’s
gaze remains fixed on Yhwh and not on ‘sourcing’ the evil and lies.
The trial—so much of what was testified against Christ was
this mixture of utter nonsense but also the ‘ring’ of truth. The healing on the
Sabbath, the cleansing of the Temple, the claim to be the Messiah and King—all disembodied
mouths, and hired witnesses, surrounding Christ at every turn, encasing him
within their accusations. And their accusations do “seep into him like oil”,
they cloth him and “surround him like a belt”. They begin a process that
appears, and in some sense is, a curse—his physical frailty, the abandonment of
his closest disciples, the betrayal, his tortured prayers for deliverance and
obedience, his eventual hanging upon a tree.
What this psalm casts a light on is that the trial, the
deprivations, the ‘becoming a curse’, is all in service of the trial. In other
words, as the Messiah is more and more consumed by the trial, as he more and more
wears the clothes of the curse(s), the more is he, in fact, overcoming. Jesus himself
is the trial, so to speak. And when he is judged as needing death, and when he
dies, the verdict is rendered but not against him, but for him. As in this
psalm, a party is covered in shame, a party is declared guilty—the world, sin,
flesh, the devil. All of that dies in Christ and is, thereby, clothed with
shame. The age of flesh, the ‘elements’, the archons, is disgraced. So much
goes down into the Pit with him. As with this psalm, Paul will speak about how
the wise are “confused” by the Messiah; how he is a ‘stumbling-block’; how is
redemption and his being declared innocent utterly turns the world on its head.
And why? The gospel of John emphasizes that the Messiah’s “witness”
is the Father. He glorifies him. He testifies on his behalf. He “stands on his
right”. His entire life was a trial in which the Father, at every step, was his
advocate, his witness, and his glory. He didn’t need anyone else to testify on
his behalf. The ‘deeper’ trial being waged in Christ’s life and flesh, was a
trial against this world, this age, the elements, the satan, and sin and death
itself. Every ‘sign’ was a sign of the Father’s witness—including the fulfillment
of all signs, the Resurrection.
The Resurrection—the public event of exposing the justified
and glorified body of Christ. The psalmist and Christ, their bodies themselves
become the revelation of Yhwh’s ‘handiwork’. Their redeemed bodies become the
publicity of Yhwh, the glorification of Yhwh and his covenant partner. They display,
and are, the verdict—the explosive sign of the Father. In a sense, they are the
appeal from the earthly trial court, where the verdict is overturned. Where the
age of infancy under Torah is declared over, and the children can now come into
their inheritance, through and in the Messiah.
And now the ‘advocacy’ of the Father becomes the Advocate of
the Holy Spirit, who is sent by the Anointed into his Body, to now ‘stand at
their right hand’, to enable them to live in the new age, while witnessing to
the old.
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