April 15thPsalm 143
So free, so infinite God's grace
Psalm 143 is the final of the great penitential psalms – psalms the church has set aside to weigh the gravity of our brokenness and set our minds on the immense mercy of God.
Verses 1 and 2 set the agenda for the psalm: The psalmist does not cry for justice; what she needs is mercy! And then verse 2 states things bluntly: Human beings are in a plight from which we cannot save ourselves. Paul quotes this verse in Romans 3…
‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one;
11 there is no one who has understanding,
there is no one who seeks God.
20For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
What then shall we do? The image of parched land (vs.6) is very suggestive. The land can do nothing to bring the rain. We at least can pray!
With hindsight we are aware of two gospel truths: (1) that God did finally act against evil in a manner most unexpected – in the cross of Christ, and (2) The individual who is a member of the covenant community learns what is required of them to be totally obedient, as a servant must be, to the revealed will of God. That is why when we celebrate the sacrament of baptism we ask the candidates some important questions:
Do you believe in God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, and in the Holy Spirit, the giver of life?
Do you renounce the evil powers in this world and turn to Jesus Christ as your Saviour, trusting in God’s grace and love and promising to obey Jesus as your Lord?
Do you accept the word of God as guide and authority for your life?
Will you live without giving in to violence – resisting what is evil and taking risks for what is good?
To be ‘God’s servant’ (v.10) is to profess to live finally by the grace of the Master.
Psalm 143 is often read during the Easter vigil (a rite celebrated by many Christians, though not so much in Mennonite churches. This psalmist’s example of suffering servanthood is a powerful reminder in this Lenten/Easter season of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Francis Spufford in his book, Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity can still make Surprising Emotional Sense, writes powerfully about Jesus, the suffering servant:
“Here it’s important that Jesus’ death was an obscure one, when it happened. He’s not … a Prince Hamlet, someone falling from greatness. His death belongs beside the early cutting-short of the millions of lives of people too poor or too unimportant ever to have been recorded in the misleading story we call history; people only mourned by others as brief as themselves, and therefore gone from human memory as if they had never been.
“Jesus dies like a migrant worker who suffocates in a freight container, like a garbage-picker caught in a slide, like a child with an infected finger, like a beggar a bus reverses over. Or, of course, like all the other slaves ever punished by crucifixion, a fate so low, said the Roman philosopher, Cicero, that no well-bred person should ever even mention it.
“Christians believe Jesus’s death is, among other things, a way for God to mention it, loudly and with no good breeding at all, a declaration by the maker of the world, in pain and solidarity, that to Him the measure of the waste of history is not the occasional tragedies of kings but the routine losses of every day. It is not an accident that Christianity began as a religion “for slaves and women.” It is not an accident that, wherever it travels, it appeals first to untouchables. The last shall be first and the first shall be last, said Jesus. You’d have to turn the world upside down to do justice to God’s sense of the tragedy of it.
“And when the story does turn the world upside down, or the order of nature anyway, by telling us that Jesus lives again, it isn’t suggesting that he didn’t really die, or that we won’t really die. The happy ending makes a promise sized to the utmost extent of our darkest convictions. It says, ‘Yes, and . . . ” to tragedy. It promises bizarrely enough, that love is stronger than death. But it does not promise that death is imaginary, that death is avoidable, that death is temporary. To have death, this once, be reversed is to let us feel the depth of our ordinary loss in it, not to pretend it away.
“Some people ask nowadays what kind of religion it is that chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol, as if the cross on churches must represent some kind of endorsement. The answer is: one that takes the existence of suffering seriously.”
It is to such a suffering God that we bring our deepest pains and longings.
And we remember Jesus’ call to disciples to ‘take up your cross and follow me.’ We do so only in the power and might of God.
Christ is risen!
HE IS RISEN INDEED!
https://youtu.be/sQeIGbKqiw8?si=HEPtQHoHS0QnaV7M
[Charles Wesley]