Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

 

“Relent, O LORD! How long will it be?

Have compassion on your servants.” Psalm 90:13

 

The very heart of this famous old poem is “how long?” If you want to understand Psalm 90’s centuries’-old soulful appeal, then understand this about Moses, who’s doing the singing: he has fallen deeply into the black hole of God’s absence: “Relent, O LORD! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.” Moses is estranged, as all of us are at one time or another. He’s in a lane with Mother Teresa, who—hard as it is to believe--spent much of her life feeling far, far, far from God’s own presence. God is gone.

 

And what happens to us in that black hole? What happens when we understand that our days are, in fact, as numbered as the Moses says, that we won’t escape the sentence of death? We change: our values alter, our vision skews.

 

Every single one of the dozen verses that precede this line proclaim God’s omnipotence, testify to his eternal strength, his timeless care. But Moses isn’t sweet-talking, currying favor. He’s throwing himself before a God who he can’t help believing just isn’t there, and who has, for no understandable reason, turned his face away.

 

What this line describes is the doleful emotional color of God’s absence. Moses is sure he has been rejected, forgotten; and the desperation which God’s absence creates prompts the self-less prayer of the first dozen verses. “Without you we are nothing, Lord—please return to our lives.” That’s the story of the moment.

 

And it may well explain why this old Psalm reads so rewardingly at funerals. It isn’t just the references to sixty or seventy years; it’s more than that. With death’s imminence setting right beside us—the coffin itself—grief obliterates most every joy. Christ may well have conquered death when he arose on Easter, but death’s sting is never a pin-prick. We feel left behind, the world more dismal.

 

The power of this old psalm is the despair Moses feels in thinking himself and his people so abandoned, something akin to what we feel when we lose someone we love. In the entire poem, he’s telling God what God must do, not because he fears God won’t do what he should, but because he can’t simply hold back his own tongue. The pain is that deep That’s how much he hurts.

 

“How long?” he says in verse 13. “Have compassion on your servants.”

 

He’s begging, imploring, even demanding, his back to the wall.

 

Where there’s probably a casket.

 

“You are our everything, Lord—where on earth are you? Please come back!?”