Worship Weblog
Monday, March 12, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 6: Groan
Reading 2: Psalms 6-8
Psalm 6 focal phrase: “while you, O LORD—how long?” focal word: groan What struck me about this line is that it’s an incomplete sentence. A fragment. You expect the sentence to read, “while you, O Lord, ignore my cries,” or something like that. But the psalmist is too weary and too sick to even complete his sentence. All he can muster is groaning, he says in verse 6, and even that is getting too tiring. The syntax of verse 3 makes it feel more like a groan than a sentence. Some translations smooth this bumpy line out. The Geneva Bible rendered verse 3 this way: “My soule is also sore troubled/but Lorde how long wilt thou delay?” The NIV reads: “My soul is in anguish/How long, O LORD, how long?” The New Living Translation has this: “I am sick at heart/How long, O Lord, until you restore me?” In the words of these translations, the abbreviated utterance becomes a complete sentence, a rounded out thought. (more) Part of what makes the Psalms so poetic is their gut-wrenching expressions, their throaty, visceral, untidy ejections of emotion, their passion in both senses of the word: suffering and fervor. In English, sadly, this poetry often reads a little more like prose. We lose some of the shape of expression, the arcs and dips, the fits and starts. So I appreciate the versions of Psalm 6 that give us a feeling of halting, spontaneous cries. In the space of the dash between “O Lord” and “how long,” where a logical connector or conclusion should be placed, the psalmist instead wearily abandons his half-formed complaint and goes straight to his urgent request for relief. I read this Psalm very differently after learning (here) that this was the Psalm that David heaved out during the illness of the first child he had with Bathsheba (in 2 Samuel 12). The baby is dying as punishment for David’s capital crime, and his soul is bleeding guilt. In my first few readings of this psalm, without this background, I took it as more of a general cry of weary illness (one given title of Psalm 6 is “A Prayer for Mercy in Time of Trouble,” leaving “trouble” vague enough to accommodate a variety of maladies). Psalm 6 fits right in with its surrounding psalms (Psalms 3 through 7, 10, 12, and 13, to name a few in the same neighborhood)—a series of urgent complaints and demands that starts off this songbook on some startlingly discordant notes. We don’t get much of a warmup before we get to the wailing. Pastor Tim Keller says(mp3) that there are three things Christians can do with their emotions: hide them, vent them, or pray them. The desperate pleas of the opening psalms—8 of the first 13—model for us that third way, the biblical way. But the Bathsheba connection (which is left out in the introductory text above the psalm) frames the sick moans of Psalm 6 more specifically. The psalmist now has less of a sympathetic argument; his illness is self-inflicted. He’s getting exactly what he deserved for his conniving crimes. He knows he can’t plea bargain his way out of God’s wrath. He can’t lament, “Why, Lord?” So he pleads, “OK, I get it! Enough!” And he shows us that even that is a legitimate prayer. Even a sheepish, guilty whimper can be taken to God and plopped in front of him. The baby dies; Solomon comes next; the Bible continues. But the cries keep coming, from exile, from the cross, all the way into Romans 8: “We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” But then Paul makes this beautiful promise: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” The Spirit steps in and fixes and amplifies and raises our prayers, even when they’re just groans. Even when we can’t even complete the sentence.
More Meditations on the Psalms
Related Resources
The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship