Lent 1, 19.2.21 – Psalm 139, 1-6

 

O Lord, you search me and you know me,

you know my resting and my rising,

you discern my purpose from afar.

You mark when I walk or lie down,

all my ways lie open to you.

Before ever a word is on my tongue

you know it, O Lord, through and through.

Behind and before you shaped me,

your palm ever laid upon me.

Too wonderful for me, this knowledge,

too high, beyond my reach.[1]

There may come a point in the journey of faith at which it dawns on us that we could not now live any other way – at any rate, not with any sense of completeness, or rightness.  We also find at this point, very likely, that we are reticent now to try to explain it to anyone else.  It’s hard enough to grasp it ourselves -- Too wonderful for me, this knowledge, too high, beyond my reach.

But we may still ask, what is this knowledge?  In the part of the Psalm I read, a verb “to know” is used five times… and then the Psalmist says,  Too wonderful for me, this knowledge, too high, beyond my reach.  So the Psalmist is making the vital point… what matters is not so much what, if anything, I know… what matters is the fact that God knows.  I am known.  The writer gives no hint of being self-righteous or sanctimonious or other-worldly.  Neither is it in any sense a reward for goodness or piety.  He is singing because he has known turbulence and pain, stops and starts and inconsistencies.  It is more like humbled awe and gratitude. If you can personally echo this, then the old arguments about whether God exists, about what’s wrong with church and religion, about imagined conflicts between science and faith, about believing the bible… these seem now to be beside the point.

If you are living in legalistic formal religion, one thing you can be sure of is that you are never going to be quite good enough.[2]  But this is something else, another knowledge.  I don’t have to measure up.  I am measured up -- I am known:  Lord, you search me and you know me, you know my resting and my rising, you discern my purpose from afar.  You mark when I walk or lie down, all my ways lie open to you.  Before ever a word is on my tongue you know it, O Lord, through and through. 

The Psalmist is glad because God sees him/her; God sees not only what happened but what was intended, longed-for, the innermost hopes.  Robert Burns wrote: What’s done we partly may compute / but know not what’s resisted.  Well, what was resisted is seen by God, says the Psalmist... through and through, he writes.  Behind and before you shaped me, your palm ever laid upon me.[3] 

It is a good Lenten thought, I believe, to dwell on what this ancient Hebrew poet is saying.  If the faith that is in us is real faith, then it is spacious, generously roomy, inside-outside flow.  It is not restrictive, or selective, let alone exclusive.  It is inclusive.  Its first product is gratitude and wonder – its lasting product is love.  It chops away the roots of fear.  It breathes the air of freedom.  It celebrates the God of the Psalmist, the God Jesus called Father, who made us, knows us, loves us.  Let’s hear it again, this time as Myles Coverdale brought it to us back in 1535:

O Lorde, thou searchest me out, and knowest me.

Thou knowest my downe syttinge & my vprisynge, thou vnderstodest my thoughtes a farre of.

Thou art aboute my path & aboute my bedd, & spyest out all my wayes.

For lo, there is not a worde i my toge, but thou (o LORDE) knowest it alltogether.

Thou hast fashioned me behinde & before, & layed thine hode vpon me.

Soch knowlege is to wonderfull & excellet for me, I can not atteyne vnto it.

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] The translation of Psalm 139 used in this series is The Grail Psalter, the inclusive language version of 2004 (HarperCollins).  It was originally made for the Jerusalem Bible of 1955.

[2] Fr Laurence Freeman writes (Aspects of Love): And most of us come to meditation with strong forces of self-hatred, self-distrust, self-rejection. Most of us, particularly in our religious upbringing, had been told that we must be very suspicious of ourselves when we were taught to examine our conscience, even as young children. When we were taught to go to confession, our first prejudice, the prejudice with which we were trained, was that we must first look for our faults because those are the aspects of ourselves that God is most aware of, and those are the aspects of ourselves which we must be frightened of because we will be punished for them.  (I think he may slightly overstate “most of us”.)

 [3] The Psalmist comes back to this thought later, when we hear about being formed in the womb.