Scripture Readings
I remember, about the age of twelve, learning to play
a new game. There was no name for this game. You played by hitting another boy
in the arm, and he hit you back in your arm. Then you hit him back, harder.
Then he hit you back, harder; and the two of you went on like this until one of
you quit. It wasn’t a very good game. It was only popular for about one week,
and then it disappeared. Everyone went on to play other games.
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| Pictures at a Nature Preserve Near Long Beach CA |
Sometimes a boy would get a tear in his eye right
before he quit. I wasn’t one of those. But I did quit first.
That was a boy’s battle against tears. We belong to a
culture that fights against tears. Jesus grew up in a different culture where
men were not ashamed to weep openly. It is a well known fact that “Jesus wept”.
(John 11:35)
Psalm 6 tells us about tears. The heading tells us
that this is a “psalm of David” which means that it could have been written by
David, who also wept. (2 Samuel 15:30 &18:33)
If it wasn’t written by David himself then it was
written for him, or for his family, after him. It was a royal psalm. It would have
been sung in the Temple
There is a tradition that has led this psalm of tears
to be one of the standard daily prayers of the Jewish people. If you are an
observant Jew, you probably begin each day, except for the Sabbath, with this
psalm.
Think of what shape your life might take if you
learned to begin each day with these words. “O Lord, do not rebuke me in your
anger or discipline me in your wrath. Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint;
O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish. How long, O
Lord, how long? Turn, O Lord, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing
love…. I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood by bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.” (Psalm 6:1-4, 6)
Whether or not it was one of the daily morning prayers,
in ancient times, Jesus still grew up singing this song in worship. The Book of
Psalms was the hymnbook from which all his neighbors sang.
These words were the words of God, in worship, that
shaped the incarnate Son of God; the God who made himself human in Jesus. The
battle of tears, in this psalm, defined, in some way, the identity of Jesus.
They tell us about the identity of God.
In spite of all the talk, in this psalm, about anger,
and wrath, and faintness, and agony, and anguish, and death, and enemies, this
psalm is the first psalm that reveals a special pattern. It is a pattern that
happens over and over again in the psalms, and in all the scriptures. It is a
pattern that revolves around the point of one essential element in the lives of
God’s people.
This psalm shows us the pattern of faith, the miracle
of faith; and this faith revolves around the one essential element of faith: the
unfailing love of God. “Turn, O Lord, and deliver me; save me because of your
unfailing love.”
I couldn’t see this, at first, because, as I studied
this psalm, I became obsessed and distracted by everything that obsessed and
distracted the writer of the psalm: anger, and wrath, and faintness, and agony,
and anguish, and death, and enemies. These things are very important. They are
huge things, and we will come to other psalms that shed light upon them all.
What makes the pattern clear (the pattern of the
miraculous power of the unfailing love of God), is that this is a prayer in
which the dark and agonizing things don’t go away; at least, not all at once. But
they drop out of the way, they drop out of importance.
Suddenly the unfailing love of God stands at the
center. The person in the middle of this prayer suddenly changes from a
desperate person to a confident person; from a person of fear to a person of
peace and hope.
We don’t see how the change happens. The psalm
doesn’t tell us. It doesn’t explain, how it happens. But this psalm is a
prayer, and it is in the middle of the prayer (or at the end of the prayer)
that this miracle, this change, appears.
It seems like an awfully short prayer for such a huge
change, but it is only the summary of a long, long prayer. This prayer is just
the tip of an iceberg of prayer. It is the liner notes of a continuing saga of
prayer. “I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with
weeping and drench my couch with tears.” (Psalm 6:6) “How long, O Lord, how
long?” (Psalm 6:3)
Here is someone who is almost sick of praying. He is
worn out. He sees no answer. He weeps, and weeps, and weeps, and weeps, and he
is still praying, and then it changes. He changes: “For the Lord has heard my
weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer.”
(Psalm 6:8b-9)
We don’t really know where his need for mercy was the
greatest. We don’t know, for certain, what the source of his tears was. He
mentions foes and enemies, but maybe his enemies were his mistakes and his very
real sins.
Maybe he was facing the consequences of bad and
selfish decisions he had made. David had to do that.
David did terrible things that destroyed much of his
family. He nearly destroyed his kingdom. Maybe his own actions were his
enemies, and so he felt the anger of God focused upon him.
The psalm begins where we never think to begin. The
person who is praying thinks he might be to blame for the crisis, or the
conflict, he feels. Almost the first thing he does is ask for mercy.
Is it me, Lord? Am I the cause of my own grief?
When we are in that place, we cannot ask God to take
away our consequences, but our battle of tears with God can be the beginning of
a miracle. God may not remove the consequences, but God gives us a new heart to
face those consequences, and the life that comes afterward.
In the case of our own guilt, our foes will fall “in
disgrace” because we will survive them as transformed people. The old self in
us does die under their attack, but there is a new person in our place, because
we are new in God’s workmanship. We have peace with God because we have faced
the worst in ourselves and we have surrendered to the unfailing love of God.
The psalm is a
prayer for healing. Was it a prayer for the healing of sin, and guilt, and
shame? Or was it a prayer for the healing of illness? He tells about the agony
in his bones. That is the core and foundation of the body. Everything hangs on
the bones. Was he so ill that he ached all over?
At the end of the prayer, he does not tell us that he
has been healed by that prayer. He tells us that his enemies (perhaps his
illness) will be put to shame and dismayed.
If you are ill, or if you have a condition that you
live with that goes on and on, what would it mean for you that, in your future,
your illness will be the enemy that is ashamed and dismayed?
What if the source of tears was a real conflict with
real enemies? Or maybe there can be conflicts that go on and on without there
being people who set themselves up as enemies. They would never think of
themselves as enemies, but they seem to always make good things stop happening;
at least, so it seems.
Sometimes our frustrations and our conflicts are so
big that they make us feel sick. We stop being ourselves. We may even go crazy.
Or we worry till our bones ache.
What would it mean to live in such a struggle, or
with such frustration, without anger, without fear, without agony and anguish? It
would be a victory when you live in the strength of the unfailing love of God. It’s
possible that nothing has changed but your own heart. And that can make all the
difference in the world.
I would tell you this. This is what I have found. You
can fight a battle with tears. You can go somewhere and pray your way through
it. You pray through the darkness, and God makes his presence known in the
darkness, and God gives you light.
Perhaps your own bed is a good place to go, as the
psalm tells us; if you can go there and pray without keeping someone else
awake. Go somewhere, and pray your fears, and angers, and doubts, and pains,
and weariness to God.
Pray and weep. There is more courage and hope and
endurance in doing this than you might think. David did this, and he was a
warrior. He was a prayer warrior He was a real fighter with sword, and shield,
and arrows and spears. His life of fighting taught him to pray, even with his
tears.
The boys’ battles against tears will never work here.
Sometimes you have to cross a forbidden line. You have to fight through your tears,
and pray though your tears to peace.
Jesus sang this song all his life; this song about
the battle of tears; this song of weeping your way to victory. Jesus was not a
weeper by nature, or else little children would not have come to him. If Jesus
was a weeper, he wouldn’t have been invited by sinners to so many of their
parties. But Jesus was not afraid of the battle of tears.
Jesus used this psalm by example. When Jesus faced the
cross (as if he were looking down the barrel of a gun) he prayed through his
fears and his weeping into victory. He said, “My soul is overwhelmed with
sorrow to the point of death.” (Mark 14:34) When he prayed through his sorrow
he was ready to say, “Let’s go!”
There is a double link between Jesus and his prayer
in the Garden of Gethsemane
Jesus prayed because he was facing enemies. His
enemies were the foreseeable pain of his arrest, and his beatings, and the
nails in his hands and feet, and the thorns in his head. His enemies were the
people who were going to do this to him and laugh at him while they did it.
The enemies of Jesus were our sins; the hurts we
cause and the hurts that are done to us. His enemies were the world of pain,
and sickness, and death, which we face. His enemies were all that separates us
from our neighbors, and all that separates us from ourselves, and all that
separates us from God.
Jesus battled his enemies (and ours) through his
tears in the garden, as well as through his sacrifice on the cross. Then he
rose from the dead.
All the evil in the world could kill him only if he
let it; but it couldn’t defeat him. He could rise and say the words that he had
sung all his life: “All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed; they will turn
back in sudden disgrace.” (Psalm 6:10) Our own enemies, whatever they may be,
also turn back in disgrace, because of Jesus who fought through tears and rose
from the dead.
Jesus made the unfailing love of God become more than the words of a song. He made himself into that song of life for us; that song that takes us through tears to strength and hope. Jesus became the song that makes a miracle happen and we become new again through him.
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