The darkest psalm

 

Original Meaning. Psalm 87 is often called the darkest psalm in Scripture. It presents the unrelenting lament of one who has known only pain and trial in life and now faces death itself, named as the grave, the tomb, the depths, the shades, the dark, the land of oblivion.

 

It is not only impending death however that grieves the author, but his utter isolation. No one stands at his side to accompany him or give him help. He accuses God: “You have taken away my friends and made me hateful in their sight.” Perhaps he is stricken by leprosy which, in ancient Israel, meant banishment from the community; but any serious disease could be understood as a curse from God and lead to isolation.

 

Confronting this terrible death, abandoned by his friends, the poet also feels betrayed by God. Three times he reminds God: “I call to you for help”, yet, there is no answer. In the middle section, he launches rhetorical questions at God: “Will you work wonders for the dead? Will the shades stand and praise you?” Everyone knows the answers are “no”; everyone, it seems, but God. Why does God not act? The psalm ends on a tone of utter despair: “My one companion is darkness”.

 

In the light of the Gospel.  Christians cannot read this psalm without thinking of Jesus’ agony in the garden ofGethsemani: betrayed by Judas, facing a horrible death, his only companions a few disciples who can do nothing better than fall asleep, Jesus cries out his lament to God, his Father. If we imagine this dark psalm on Jesus’ own lips, we can perhaps glimpse something of the terrible reality he faced. The author of the letter to the Hebrews sensed the depth of Jesus’ pain and struggle: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears… he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb 5:7-8).

 

Application to Christian living. Still today, when death ceases to be an abstract reality for us and becomes a terrible inevitability, particularly at the end of a long, drawn out disease, we can feel isolated from our friends and cut off from God. Saint James invited his readers then to call for the elders of the Church: “Have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up” (James 5:14-15). “Save the sick” does not necessarily mean restoring their health, nor does “raise them up” imply getting them back on their feet. James is referring here to “salvation” and “resurrection”, the ultimate victory of God over death. In the Catholic sacrament known as “the anointing of the sick”, we remember that we can pass through death with Christ and know eternal life.

 

The big picture. Why was this bleak, hopeless psalm left in the Bible? There is nothing of human reality which is foreign to God, nothing of our experience that cannot be taken up in prayer, including deep anxiety and despair. The fact that this lament is written as a prayer is itself a sign of hope. Perhaps God seems absent, yet the psalmist cries out to God. And so should we: “Let my prayer come into your presence. O turn your ear to my cry.”

Psalm 87 (88)