Ps 130 (out of depths)

Out of the depths / I invoke you / Lord

                Lord / listen to my cry

May your ears / be attentive

                To my imploring cry

If you were to take iniquities / into account / Yhwh

                Lord, / who could stand

But with you / there is forgiveness

                So that you may be revered

I wait for Yhwh

                I wait with longing

                And in his word / I put my hope

My longing / is for the Lord

                More intent than that / of watchmen for the morning

                Watching for the morning

Put your hope / Israel / in Yhwh

                For with Yhwh / there is loyal love

                And redemption / with him in abundance

And he it is / who will redeem Israel

                From all their iniquities

The psalmists begins from “the depths” and invokes the Lord. At first, these depths appear to be chaos waters and the border of Sheol. The psalmist is drowning into death. It is from this place of darkness that he asks for the Lord to “listen to my cry”. As we have seen before, a psalmist cannot “remember Yhwh” in Sheol or call upon his name. As he gets closer to the edge of Sheol and of death, therefore he can still call out to him, he can still seek redemption “from the depths.” What the psalm makes clear in the second stanza is that his iniquities have placed him in these depths.

The psalmist’s iniquities bar him from being redeemed from the depths and prevent him from “standing” in Yhwh’s presence. They are like sins that prevent a pilgrim from entering the Temple and being in Yhwh’s presence. For the psalmist, if Yhwh retains iniquities no one can be redeemed and everyone will drown into death. But with Yhwh there is forgiveness. Yhwh removes that barrier to redemption through forgiveness.

Importantly, the goal is not simply redemption. It is not simply to be taken from the maw of Sheol. It is not be simply forgiven. It is, rather, so that Yhwh can be revered. This is the purpose. For both the psalmist and Yhwh, the “delight” of man, standing in life, is reverence of Yhwh. Just as with the image of “standing” so too here we see the imagery of liturgy—of seeing the life of the psalmist being moved from the depths to the living as one of moving toward reverence and liturgy.

For the psalmist, he then places himself within a position of hopeful waiting. His language of waiting on Yhwh’s word is reminiscent of Psalm 119, which repeatedly returns to the idea of finding one’s hope in Yhwh’s word and promises. Interestingly, and importantly, the psalmist now sees the coming dawn of Yhwh’s deliverance as the dawn of forgiveness. He looks forward to a ‘new day’, and he looks toward with the same intense longing as those who look forward to the day of Yhwh’s redemption. It is key to see that here that day is tied to forgiveness, of the removal of the barrier between Yhwh and his psalmist who stands in the “depths” and unable to revere Yhwh. It is the close relationship between forgiveness and liturgy that is important.

The final stanza shifts from the seemingly individual petition to a national petition. It is now seen to be Israel that stands in the depths. It is Israel who looks forward to this new day of forgiveness. It is Israel who trusts in Yhwh’s loyal love and that with him mercy overcomes the accounting of iniquities. Yhwh is now not simply going to redeem the single individual psalmist. He will lift the entire nation out of the depths and redeem the entire nation from its iniquities.

When understood through Christ this psalm takes on a great deal of depth. First, the shift from the personal to the communal, from the individual to Israel, is key. Christ would have prayed this psalm. His longing would have been “for the Lord; more intent than that of watchmen for the morning, watching for the morning.” He would have known the depths of the iniquities that Israel found itself in and, as Israel’s messiah and representative, he would have spoken from those depths in the same fashion as when he plunged down into the depths in his baptism, thus identifying himself with Israel and her need for redemption. For Christ, the arrival of the day of forgiveness—that longed for morning—would coincide with his crucifixion. That was the ‘hour’ when the great act of mercy is wrought by God through Christ, whereby Israel is raised up from the depths because her iniquities are now forgiven in Christ’s crucifixion. This is, on one level, how the individual and the communal become identified in Christ. When his life is not simply heading toward the new day of forgiveness and redemption but is itself that new day, then he is both the individual and the communal. He is both the innocent one, free from iniquity, and the representative of Israel weighed down by her iniquities.

On a deeper level is the fact that the sacrifice that will accomplish this new day of forgiveness will be one that is both individual and communal. Christ’s sacrifice could have been a holocaust, one that does not involve the people in it. Instead, he chose the Passover sacrifice which required for its completion the eating of the flesh of the lamb. This point cannot be stressed enough in the context of this psalm—although Christ is the sacrificial victim, the lamb that is slain, his sacrifice is not complete unless and until it is eaten by Israel. In other words, here we find a deeper level to the individual and communal aspect to this psalm. On the one hand, Jesus is both the individual and the communal because he is Jesus and also the messiah-representative. On the other hand, he literally brings his people into the act whereby they will be forgiven when he institutes the sacrifice of their redemption in and through their participation. In this way, the Eucharist becomes this ongoing ‘day of redemption’ every time it is celebrated and perpetuated. It is the ongoing Passover.