Meditation 257
Psalm 31:9-16
This psalm is the one for the passion readings from Palm/Passion Sunday. We have a choice for the readings on the Sunday before Easter, and my choice is usually to read the Palm Sunday lessons. The passion readings lead us into the suffering of Jesus in the time we call Holy Week. Verses 9-16 of Psalm 31 are a description of the psalmist’s distress, which could easily have been a description of Jesus’ anguish, or the suffering and sorrow of a person living today. The psalms lend themselves to being an expression for the feelings of anyone.
The psalmist in this case is believed to be David who asks for God to be gracious because he is in distress. David then goes on to describe that distress. His eye, soul and body waste away from grief. His life is spent with sorrow and his years with sighing, his strength fails because of his misery, and his bones waste away. The suffering and sorrow that David feels is so deep that it affects both his soul and body. He is utterly dispirited. We have all had times that we felt like that, at the loss of a relationship, or the death of a loved one. We feel so sad that we feel it in our body. When David experienced distress that was so deep that he felt that his bones wasted away, he prayed for God to be gracious to him. Out of his grief David turns to God in confidence because he knows that he can trust God (verse 14)
This deep sorrow, that we might call depression today, that David is experiencing seems to be the result of the plotting of his enemies. When human forces are closing in on him, David calls to the Lord. It may have been that when Jesus was riding into Jerusalem, knowing that authorities were looking for him, that he may have felt some of what David described in this psalm. Jesus was the scorn of his adversaries, and he may well have “heard the whisperings of many- terror all around! – as they schemed together against [him]” (verse 13). Still, Jesus went forward to meet the worst that the authorities could throw at him. Like David, Jesus would have known that he could trust in the Lord and he could say “You are my God” (verse 14)
This psalm describes in a few verses what can take a longer time to achieve. When our sorrow or depression is as great as David describes, it will take more than the few minutes it takes to read this psalm to go from being wasted away (verse 9) to being confident that you will be saved by God’s steadfast love (verse 16). If we use the words of a psalm as a prayer, one of the reassuring things is that we can use the same psalm over and over. God, who shows us steadfast love, will hear our prayers for as long as we need to bring the same prayer forward. We may be sure that Jesus who walked the path of Holy Week knows what we are experiencing in our faith lives, and Jesus will accompany us on our entire walk toward wholeness.