Another obvious difficulty of the Psalter lies in the frequent obscurity of connection between verse and verse, in the rapid transitions, in the uncertainty as to the sequence of thought, or the meaning of the Psalm as a whole. This difficulty, as it bears upon the liturgical use of the Psalms, has been increased by the abolition of theantiphons, which in the pre-Reformation offices certainly helped at times to suggest a leading thought, or to guide the worshipper as to the Church's intention in the recitation of this or that Psalm. (Note C, p. 104.) Sometimes indeed, the connection between the verses of a Psalm is really very slight, more a matterof suggestion or association than of logic. Such is the case in "proverbial" Psalms, like the 33rd, 34th, and 37th, or the 119th. But in others it is well worth the effort to gain a continuous view of the Psalm as a whole. A simple commentary will give this, or even sometimes the R.V. alone, or the headings in the A.V., such as the very suggestive one prefixed to the 110th: "1 The kingdom, 4 the priesthood, 5 the conquest, 7 and the passion of Christ." (Note D, p. 106.)
There are also difficulties caused by a real obscurity in the Hebrew, or by mistranslations. Here, again, a comparison with the R.V. is of great value. The meaning of the 87th springs to light at once when we read "This one was born there," instead of the mysterious "Lo, there was he born," etc. The Psalm refers not to the birth of the Messiah, but to the new birth of individuals out of the heathen races who thus become citizens of Sion. "So let indignation vex him, even as a thing that is raw" (lviii. 8), becomes certainly more intelligible as "He shall take them away with a whirlwind, the green and the burning alike" (a metaphor from a traveller's fire of brushwood, blown away by a sudden wind); and even if "the beasts of the people" remains still obscure in Ps. lxviii. in the revisedtranslation, its "why hop ye so, ye high hills?" is more significant when it is read—
Why look ye askance, ye high mountains:At the mountain which God hath desired for His abode?
Sometimes the alteration of a single word makes the difference between obscurity and sense, as in xlix. 5, where "the wickedness of my heels" becomes intelligible as "iniquity at my heels"; or in Ps. xlii., where "Therefore will I remember thee concerning the land of Judah and the little hill of Hermon" is made clear at once by the substitution of "from" for "concerning." The verse is the cry of the exile, who, far away in northern Palestine, among the sources of the Jordan, yearns for the Temple and its services, which he is no longer able to visit.
Doubtless the reasons which prevented the older version of the Psalms being changed in the Prayer Book in the seventeenth century, when other passages of Scripture were revised, still hold good. Neither A.V. nor R.V. are so well adapted for music, nor have they endeared themselves to the worshipper by daily use. Those who have time and opportunity maydiscover for themselves more exact meanings or clear up difficulties by private study. But even those who have not may find that there are better uses of the Psalter than a merely intellectual grasp of its meaning. Possibly an occasional obscurity may even have a humbling or awe-inspiring effect on the mind. The strange version of the Vulgate of Ps. lxxi. 14, though incorrect, is not without its point:
Quoniam non cognovi litteraturam,introibo in potentias Domini.[1]
Learning by itself can never lift the soul on the wings of devotion and worship. The unlearned, Christ's "little ones," have in every age found a voice that spoke to them in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, even though its accents were inarticulate, and its message music rather than words. Such considerations may prevent us distressing ourselves because something, perhaps much, in the Church's book of praise is unintelligible and must remain so.
Two practical suggestions may be offered here to those who find themselves hindered in devotion by the difficulties of the Psalter, by its rapid transitions, or its constantly varying tone. The leading purpose of the Psalter inthe Church's use is expressed in its Hebrew title,Tehillim, "praises." "We shall do well," says Dr. Cheyne, "to accustom ourselves to the intelligent use of this title, and to look out in every psalm for an element of praise." It is good to allow this thought to dominate our mind while the Psalms are being read or sung in the Church's service. For this and for that our fathers in the Faith thanked God; for what He had revealed, or promised or done. And He is the same, He changes not. Ever and anon as the service proceeds, a verse will suggest some ground of thanksgiving for ourselves or for the Church we love. We need to keep our minds, like our bodies, in the attitude of praise and aspiration, like that exiled lover of his nation who wrote Ps. cvi.:
Remember me, O Lord, according to the favour that Thoubearest unto Thy people:O visit me with Thy salvation;That I may see the felicity of Thy chosen:And rejoice in the gladness of Thy people,And give thanks with Thine inheritance.(cvi. 4, 5.)
Not only the attitude of praise should be cultivated, but also that of sympathy. This will be especially fruitful as we take upon our lips these constantly recurring expressions of penitence, struggle, and sorrow. These are certain to be at times unreal to us, unless we can remember that we recite them not merely for ourselves, but as part of the Church's intercession for the world, in which it is our privilege to take part. Others are suffering under the burden of sin and grief, others are overwhelmed with sorrow, racked with pain, harried by the slanderer and the persecutor. It is such as these that we remember before God, as fellow-members of the one body. And will not such a remembrance, such sympathy, bring us very near to our blessed Lord's own use of the Psalter in His days on earth, Who "Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses"?
Yet beyond all these difficulties of language, history, and modes of thought, whether they yield to study or not, there are outstandingmoraldifficulties of the Psalter. Some of the Psalms appear to be inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel, or even with the moral sense of mankind, educated as it has been for so long in the Gospel-school. This objection seems at firstsight a more serious difficulty than any of the others; but before it can be satisfactorily dealt with, another and more fundamental question must be faced. What is the attitude, as a whole, of the objector to the revealed word of God? There are those to whom the Psalms seem to speak altogether in an alien tongue, who find the recitation of them in the Church's service "tedious" (a reason alleged recently as one of those which keep people from attending church), to whom the 119th Psalm appears to be "mechanical and monotonous," whose very expression in church proclaims them "bored." Such feelings may be only the result of ignorance, or lack of effort, or inherited misconceptions. Or the reason may lie deeper. The worship of the Catholic Church can only be understood by those who are of the mind of the Church, who have learned to place themselves in the believer's attitude towards God and His revelation.
However much the word "conversion" may have been abused, and turned into a mere catchword or shibboleth, it is unquestionable that the Christian religion demands a fundamental change of mind and attitude, a change which does not come by education only, nor by any natural process. There is a hidden wisdom in the Church which to the natural man is"foolishness" (1 Cor. ii. 14); it can only be learned by those who humbly set themselves to be taught by the Spirit. This change, come it suddenly or very slowly, must have its effect upon the whole man, his intellect, as well as his heart and will. "There is nothing hid from the heat thereof." Especially will it rule our attitude towards Holy Scripture. Without such a change neither historical nor grammatical explanations can make the Scripture sweet or even intelligible. Not least will our comprehension of the Psalter be influenced by it. How impossible is it really to say, "Lord, what love have I unto Thy law," if one has never realised that there is a law of God, supreme and absolute, to be read in the Scriptures and in the witness of the Church; and that only in obedience to this law can man find his true self and "walk at liberty." It is vain to seek to be critics before we are disciples. And the Psalter is clearly meant for the initiated, not for him who merely follows the crowd. The Divine Office, which the Psalter fills and dominates, is the means whereby the instructed faithful express their unchanging delight in, and loyalty to, what they have received freely from God. It is not the Church's message to the unconverted world, nor the voice of man's natural desires and sympathies,undisciplined by grace. The Catholic temper, the mind of the Church, is an absolute first principle in the right use of the Church's book of praise, and the key to its chief difficulties.
Bearing this in mind, let us endeavour to face, in conclusion, this moral difficulty of some parts of the Psalter—a difficulty which undoubtedly causes pain and uncertainty to some who are really devout, and which has led many to ask for a revised or expurgated Psalter for the public services. First, there is what appears to be the self-righteousness of the Psalter. Side by side with the most perfect expressions of humility and penitence, there are found protestations of innocence and purity which, if they were merely personal, we should rightly hesitate to make our own. But the "I" of the Psalter is not merely personal; it is the collective voice of the Church, and of the Church in her ideal aspect, such as we confess her in the Creed—"one, holy, Catholic." It is the voice of the great company of the holy souls from the beginning of the world, on earth and beyond the veil. It is with these that we recite our psalms, with these that we humbly associate ourselves, it is their righteousness that we seek to make our own, for it is the righteousness of Christ.
And if the "I" of the Psalter is theself-expression of the Communion of Saints, still more is it the voice of the King of Saints, the immaculate Lamb, in whose Name we offer our worship.
But there is still the problem of the Psalms of Imprecation. What can we say of their apparent fierceness and vindictiveness, their reflection of the stormy passions and bitter warfare of a primitive age? There is much indeed that can be rightly urged, here, as in the other Old Testament writings, from the point of view of the difference between Hebrew modes of expression and our own, and from the progressive character of revelation, much that may help to remove prejudice and clear away apparent inconsistencies. But the larger view of the Psalter as the book primarily of the Church is of still greater importance. The imprecations of the Psalms, though expressed in so vividly personal a manner, are no more personal than the protestations of innocency. They express rather that age-long passion for righteousness, that burning belief in a moral Judge of the world Who must do right, which have always been the Church's saving salt among the corruptions and indifference of the world. It is this spirit that inspires them, rather than the thirst forvengeance or the vindication of self. They express the Church's belief that there is a world-conflict ever proceeding between the cause of God, the cause of truth and right, and the passions of men urged on by the powers of evil.
For lo, Thine enemies make a murmuring:And they that hate Thee have lift up their head.They have imagined craftily against Thy people:And taken counsel against Thy secret ones.(lxxxiii. 2, 3.)
Lay hand upon the shield and buckler:And stand up to help me.Bring forth the spear and stop the wayagainst them that persecute me:Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.(xxxv. 2, 3.)
This sense of an irreconcilable conflict between the malignity of evil and the will of God, between the carnal mind and that reflection of God's will which He has implanted in the human conscience, is much to seek in our own day. We are too much inclined to minimise the reality of sin, and to imagine that it isdisappearing before civilisation and the growth of gentler ways and sentiments. The Psalmists knew better—they knew that the battle was to the death, and that God alone can win His own victory; and they express, sternly and roughly perhaps, but with the utmost sincerity, their undying faith that He will; that the overthrow of malice and falsehood and treachery must one day be manifested,
God shall suddenly shoot at them with a swift arrow,
and that the part we each have played in the battle will be the true measure of our worth.
All they that are true of heart shall be glad.(lxiv.)
In this sense we may even repeat the dreadful conclusion of the Babylonian exiles' Psalm:
Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children:And throweth them against the stones.(cxxxvii.)
For what are Babylon and her children but the powers of falsehood, oppression, and cruelty? and blessed still and ever is he who is afire with indignation against such things, who scornsany easy compromise with them, who burns to deal a blow at them for Jerusalem's sake!
And there is still another justification for the continued use of these Psalms, which will be understood by those who have begun to be disciples in the Church's school. The Psalms are not merely the response to revelation, they are part of that revelation themselves. The Church uses them not as mere human utterances, but as the inspired words which God Himself has given her, and which the Lord Jesus consecrated by His own personal use of them. God cannot contradict Himself. The Gospel may expand the Law, or do away with its letter in order to bring out the underlying spirit, but it cannot abrogate it. If there were a real discrepancy between the imprecatory Psalms and the New Testament, it would be scarcely conceivable that the first word of Scripture quoted in the first history of the Church would be that sentence already alluded to:
Let his habitation be made desolate:And let no man dwell therein.
The severities of the Psalms are matched by the severities of the Gospels. There is no real difference between our Lord's sentence on the scribes and Pharisees, "Behold, your house isleft unto you desolate," and the sentence which the Holy Spirit puts into our mouth against the hypocrite and the traitor, "Let his children be fatherless: and his wife a widow" (cix. 8). God is still "a God of judgment" and a "consuming fire," and there is a "wrath of the Lamb" revealed, even though He is "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world."
God has, as it were, put upon our lips, in these Psalms, His own great condemnation of sin, and made us our own judges. We recite, remembering that it is His word, and not our own, the denunciation of the sensual and the covetous, the traitor and the liar, the persecutor, the slanderer, and the hypocrite. From this point of view the recitation of such Psalms as the 69th or the 109th should be an exercise of personal humility, of godly fear for ourselves and others, and might well bring to our mind often that other great challenge of the Spirit:
Why dost thou preach My laws, and takest My covenant in thy mouth?Whereas thou hatest to be reformed:And hast cast My words behind thee.(Ps. l. 16, 17.)
These are considerations which surely ought to be well weighed before we seek to make the Psalter a book of "smooth things" only, or eliminate any part of its witness. There are no short or easy methods applicable to its deeper difficulties. Like all the ultimate problems of faith, they fade away only before the uncreated Light of the Spirit of God, when He visits the heart.
I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear:But now mine eye seethThee.(Job xlii. 5.)
[1] "Inasmuch as I know not man's learning, I will enter into the mighty works of the Lord."
Paravi lucernam Christo meo.
Jewish and Christian tradition alike connect the Psalter with the great name of David. Whether David himself wrote any of the Psalms or not is a question that may continue to agitate the minds of scholars. But there can be no question that the permanency of the throne of David and the Divine promises on which it rested are leading thoughts in the Psalter. The starting-point must be sought earlier in the Old Testament, in the great oracle communicated by Nathan to David (2 Sam. vii., referred to directly in Ps. lxxxix. 20, etc.), "Thy throne shall be established for ever." In this was recognised from the first something more than a mere promise of the long continuance of the crown in the family of the son of Jesse. It carried with it some special sanction andblessing over and above the ordinary Divine authority of heaven-anointed kings. The words "I will be his Father, and he shall be My son" seemed to imply a peculiar and unique relationship between God Himself, the true King of Israel, and His earthly representative. The comment ascribed to David himself is significant: "Is this the manner ofman, O Lord God?" No mere human sovereignty, however glorious or firmly settled, would satisfy such a prophecy as this.
The thoughts of the pious in Israel must have dwelt often and deeply in after-time upon this promise and its connection with the Divine calling of the sacred nation and her mission in the world. It is remarkable how persistently this thought of the permanence and supernatural character of the Davidic sovereignty recurs in the prophetic writings—even when the crown had passed to an unworthy head, or seemed to have been plucked off for ever. Jeremiah, when the clouds are gathering thickly round the doomed city, foretells that the covenant of David will be as lasting as that of "the day and the night in their season," and that the seed of David will be unnumbered "as the host of heaven and the sand of the sea" (Jer. xxxiii.). Ezekiel from his far-off exileby the waters of Babylon, while he proclaims the Divine sentence against the degenerate son of David—"Remove the mitre, and take off the crown: this shall be no more: ... I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, ... until He come Whose right it is"—predicts the time when Judah and Ephraim shall be one, and "David My servant shall be their prince for ever" (Ezek. xxi. 26, 27, xxxvii. 15-28). Haggai, in the days of the Return, continues the promise to the uncrowned prince, Zerubbabel—"I have chosen thee, saith the Lord of hosts" (Hag. ii. 23).
It is not to be wondered at that in the Psalter, the inspired response of worshipping Israel to the revelation of God, we should find Psalms that rejoice in this indestructible and royal hope, Psalms that look beyond present failures and imminent perils to a perfect fulfilment of what God had spoken "sometime in visions to His saints." Thus the 2nd Psalm tells triumphantly of the Divine "law" or "decree" concerning David's son, and sees in it the assurance of a world-wide empire, the discomfiture of the raging of the nations and the gathering of the kings of the earth:
Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee.Desire of Me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance:And the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.
The 18th describes the Almighty riding on His chariot of whirlwind and storm, coming down from heaven itself in His condescension, to pluck His anointed out of "many waters," "to deliver him from the strivings of the people, and to make him the head of the heathen." The 45th tells, with "the pen of a ready writer," of this everlasting sceptre and throne, founded on truth and righteousness, of a king to whom Divine titles are given, "anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows," and sees in the marriage of this king with a foreign princess the earnest of a kingdom over all the earth. The 72nd describes not only the prosperity, but the moral greatness of this empire stretching from sea to sea, "from the river to the ends of the earth." Not like the giant empires of the East, founded on aggression and cruelty, with no motive but the monstrous pride of their founders and rulers, the Davidic king is to be the champion of the poor, the needy, and the helpless:
He shall deliver their souls from falsehood and wrong:And dear shall their blood be in his sight.
The 89th, while it tells how God has found David His servant and anointed him with holy oil, and made him "His first-born, higher than the kings of the earth," is bold to face in those later days the agonising problem of the apparent failure of all this lofty promise:
But Thou hast abhorred and forsaken Thine anointed:And art displeased at him.Thou hast broken the covenant of Thy servant,And cast his crown to the ground.
"Lord, how long? ... Lord, where are Thy old loving-kindnesses? ... Remember, Lord!"
The 132nd, also apparently a Psalm of a later age, though ascribed to David, dwells with joy on David's love of the sanctuary of God, pleads for the fulfilment of the promise, asks that the lamp may not be put out, nor the face of God's anointed "turned away" in confusion.
Rightly are such Psalms as these called "Messianic." We feel that even those whooriginally wrote them looked for more than "transitory promises." They were learning to look for the redemption of Israel and of the world itself through Israel and her kings. They were bold to believe, even when the crown was gone and the purple faded, and Israel was no longer a sovereign state, that the ancient word of God to David could never be exhausted. So when at last the great message of the Archangel came to the virgin of the house of David, it was felt by those who had read aright the history of their nation that here was no mere fanciful resuscitation of a dead past, but the vindication of God's undying purpose: "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High: and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David: and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His kingdom there shall be no end" (Luke i. 32, 33).
It was therefore strictly legitimate, and in line with all the history of revelation, that the Christian Church should adopt these Messianic Psalms as her own thanksgiving for the mysteries of the Incarnation. Thus on Christmas Day she welcomes the Nativity in some of the Psalms already alluded to—in that which tells of the reconciliation of mankind with oneanother and with God under the figure of the marriage between the anointed King and the king's daughter "all glorious within" (xlv.); in that which pleads the great promises to him who so loved God's presence that he would not "suffer his eyes to sleep nor his eyelids to slumber" until he had found a permanent resting-place for that presence among men (cxxxii.); or in that, again, which in the strength of faith can gaze even on the casting down of the throne and the breaking of the covenant, resting still on God's faithfulness among "the rebukes of many people" (lxxxix.).
But there are other Psalms which, if they cannot strictly be called Messianic, yet bear their witness to another aspect of the same great hope of Israel. In the voice of prayer, or joyful confidence, they look forward to somecomingof God to earth, some visible manifestation of His righteousness and His world-wide purpose:
For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth:And with righteousness to judge the world,and the people with His truth(xcvi. 13),
or—
Bow Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down:Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.(cxliv. 5.)
In the 85th, one of the Psalms appointed for Christmas Day, this advent of God is spoken of in words which are re-echoed in the prologue to S. John's Gospel (i. 14) as a dwelling or "tabernacling" of God's glory, not in the darkness of a Holy of Holies (as the later Jews imagined the Shekinah), but as a new and permanent fact in the moral order of the world:
For His salvation is nigh them that fear Him:That glory may dwell in our land.Mercy and truth are met together:Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.Truth shall flourish out of the earth:And righteousness hath looked down from heaven.
In such prophetic visions as these, as well as in the Psalms that speak of the glories of the Messianic King, the Christian conscience hasrightly recognised definite predictions of the coming of Christ, of Him Who was both "the effulgence of God's glory" (Heb. i. 3) and also, by His human birth, the Son of David and King of Israel, and Who manifested the holiness of God in human flesh and blood. He Himself, when He came, selected from the Psalms one striking phrase, in which both ideas, the Divine glory and the human calling, are combined. For He quotes, as a witness to Himself and as a corrective of imperfect views, the 110th Psalm (again a proper Psalm for Christmas Day), where the Messianic King is spoken of both as Ruler and Victor and Priest of humanity, and as standing also in a unique relationship to God, which exalts Him far above any mere earthly connection with David:
The Lord said unto my Lord:Sit thou on My right hand—If David then calleth him Lord, how is he his son?(Matt. xxii. 45.)
But besides all these prophecies, which look onward to the great outcome of Israel's history, there is another and wider sense, as the Christian Fathers apprehended, in which the whole Psalter is the book of theIncarnation and speaks of Christ. "David," says S. Jerome, "on his harp and ten-stringed lute, sings throughout of Christ, and brings Him up from the dead." However fanciful and over-subtle the early Christian commentators may seem to us in their working out of this idea, they had grasped a profound truth. When we once recognise that Christ, knowing Who He was and why He came into the world (cf.John xiii. 1), must in the Jewish services or in private prayers have recited the Psalms with a perfect intention, and found in them the true expression of Himself, with regard both to the eternal Father and to His brethren, we are compelled to admit the possibility of each verse of the Psalms having some bearing on the Incarnation. It is a conclusion which might at first sight seem extravagant; but it forces itself upon us as we realise the true humanity of the Saviour. He is "the Son of Man"; He took of the substance of His Virgin-mother the fulness of human nature; He has a human body, a human soul, a human spirit; He is "the second Adam," the great Head of our race, Who, in the striking phrase of S. Irenaeus, has "summed up" (recapitulavit) all humanity and all the long history of man. "For verily, not of angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of theseed of Abraham" (Heb. ii. 16). He has gathered into Himself all truly human experience, the hopes of humanity, and its sufferings; its infinite pathos, its capacity of sorrow and of joy, its progress towards God, and its final apprehension and vision of God.
This is the key to the most constant feature of the Psalter, the portrait of the Righteous Sufferer. Whether we regard it as the personification of the holy nation or the self-expression of human conscience in its moral witness and its conflicts, it is an ideal that is only fulfilled in the Just One, Jesus Christ. He appeared in the world as the pattern Man, in Whom the Divine image is perfected and Whose moral nature corresponds with that holiness which is God's essential character. He appeared, too, as the perfect realisation of the filial spirit, that spirit of sonship which is the true attitude of the creature towards the Creator. Therefore it is in Christ Himself that the witness of the Psalms to righteousness, their expression of man's effort towards his ideal, is taken up, illuminated, made perfect. Therefore it is that a New Testament writer is found applying directly and without question to Christ not only the descriptions of the self-revealing God of the Old Testament, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hastlaid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of Thy hands" (Heb. i. 10, from Ps. cii.), and the portrait of the Messianic King, "The sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of Thy kingdom" (ib., from Ps. xlv.), but also the description ofmanin his ideal excellence and supremacy:
Thou madest him a little lower than the angels;Thou crownedst him with glory and honour,And didst set him over the works of Thy hands(Heb. ii., from Ps. viii.),
and that word in which some unknown psalmist and prophet had consecrated the free obedience of his will to God, as a higher offering than the sacrifices of the Law:
Wherefore when He cometh into the world, He saith,Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not,But a body didst Thou prepare for Me;In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sinThou hadst no pleasure:Then said I, Lo, I am come(In the roll of the book it is written of Me)To do Thy will, O God."(Heb. x., from Ps. xl.)
This line of interpretation may be followed out with great spiritual profit in the varied aspects of the Psalms. The thanksgivings of the Psalter are in the same spirit as those recorded by the Evangelists from our Lord's own lips, as when He thanked the Father for the revelation made to babes rather than to the wise and understanding (Matt. xi. 25), or at the grave of Lazarus gave thanks that His prayer was heard (John xi. 41). The prayers of the Psalter might well be those in which the Incarnate Son communed with the Father. For He fought our human battle with the human weapons of faith and prayer. The great description given by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews of Christ as "the Author and Finisher of our faith" (Heb. xii. 2), implies One Who inaugurated our effort of faith by Himself first taking part in it, and Himself perfectly accomplished it by bearing to the very final and utmost strain our human temptations. Hence we may hear the voice of Christ Himself in those pathetic outcries of the Psalter; in its appeal of faith as the Righteous One wrestles with doubt anddepression or faces the contradiction of sinners; in its stedfast hold on God even when sin is triumphing, and a world created good seems given over into the hand of the wicked. All these utterances have a new meaning, a fuller efficacy, when we recognise in them the words of the "Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief." There is nothing either fantastic or presumptuous in this reading of the Gospel in the Psalter. Did not He Himself vouchsafe to shew us something of this human struggle of faith in the words spoken on the eve of His Passion, when He confessed that His soul was troubled, and He would fain have said, "Father, save Me from this hour" (John xii. 27)? Did He not lift the veil even further in admitting us to the dark sanctuary of Gethsemane, in suffering us to hear even His utterances from the Cross?
The fourth Word from the Cross, so often misunderstood, is the opening of the 22nd Psalm. This cry at the climax of the Passion is really the voice of faith, faith triumphing over desolation of spirit, faith holding on by the unseen, amidst the falling away and the vanishing for the time of every consolation. It is notmerely"Why didst Thou forsake Me?" but it is "My God, My God," the fundamental confession of a personal faith in a personal God, seeing HimWho is invisible, waiting for Him Who hides His face, believing, even though His truth and justice seem blotted out of the world, that God is, and that He is still "enthroned upon the praises of Israel" (v. 3). And this faith finds its last utterance of peace and thanksgiving and renewed consciousness of union with the Father in the seventh Word, again from the Psalter, "Into Thy hands I commend My spirit" (Ps. xxxi. 6).
One of the most fruitful lines of Christian meditation will be found in this Christological aspect of the Psalms. It throws a wonderful light on the inner life of our Lord, and gives the Psalter a value which no merely literary study could give.
The five Psalms appointed by our Church for Good Friday are a rich storehouse of the secrets of the Passion. The 22nd and the 69th bear upon it very directly, and present many points of similarity. In each the sufferings of the Righteous are described minutely and pathetically, in each these sufferings lead on to triumph and to the assurance of their world-wide efficacy:
All the ends of the earth shall remember themselves,and be turned unto the Lord:And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Him.(xxii. 27.)
For God will save Sion, and build the cities of Judah:That men may dwell there and have it in possession.The posterity also of His servants shall inherit it:And they that love His Name shall dwell therein.(lxix. 36, 37.)
Each, again, in its picture of undeserved suffering, brings out the true nature and the malignity ofsin. In the 22nd sin is portrayed in its cruelty and its irrational character, as if men led by it were but wild beasts, "wild oxen," "bulls of Bashan," "dogs," and "lions." In the 69th we see its ingratitude, and its pitiless and causeless malice, and the fact that, whatever its immediate object, it is really directed against God Himself:
For Thy sake I have suffered reproach.* * * * *The reproaches of them that reproached Thee are fallen upon me.
Both these Psalms, again, contain what wemust confess to be definite predictions of details of the Passion. The 22nd tells of the very words and gestures which the chief priests and Pharisees in their blindness made use of to insult the Crucified:
All they that see me laugh me to scorn:They shoot out their lips, and shake their heads, saying,He trusted in God, that He would deliver him:Let Him deliver him now, if He will have him.(Cf.Matt, xxvii. 39-43.)
Another startling prediction is that of the piercing of the hands and the feet. No such punishment was used by the Jews, or endured, as far as we know, by any of the martyrs of the Old Testament. All the four Evangelists, again, note the literal fulfilment of xxii. 18:
They part my garments among them:And cast lots upon my vesture.
Indeed, this 22nd Psalm along with Isaiah liii. stands forth beyond all the other writings of the Old Testament as a witness which is proof against all attempts to explain it away, to thetruth that "the Spirit of Christ" was in the prophets "testifying beforehand of the sufferings of Christ "(1 Peter i. 11).
The 69th (like the 40th) may have been originally suggested by the persecution of the prophet Jeremiah, when he was thrown into the miry cistern (Jer. xxxviii.); but it contains an anticipation of Calvary, whose fulfilment is described by all the Evangelists, in the wine mingled with myrrh, and the vinegar and gall offered in mockery before the Crucifixion:
They gave me gall to eat:And when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.
S. John, the nearest to the Cross and to the heart of the Crucified, tells us moreover that this verse was consciously appropriated by Christ Himself, when, "knowing that all things are now finished, that the Scripture might be accomplished, He saith, I thirst" (John xix. 28).
Each of the other proper Psalms for Good Friday bears its witness to the suffering Christ. The 88th, at first sight one of the most difficult in the Psalter, a Psalm whose darkness seems scarcely illuminated by any ray of hope, is clearly chosen to illustrate Christ's desolation on the Cross, the Three Hours of darkness, HisBurial and His descent into Hades. The Sufferer is absolutely alone, lover and friend are in darkness; He is fighting the battle with that last enemy of mankind, the King of Terrors, yet overcoming the sharpness of death by faith and patient endurance; He is looking on to the dawn of Easter:
Unto Thee have I cried, O Lord:And early shall my prayer come unto Thee;
or—
In the morning shall my prayer come before Thee (R.V.).
May not even those strange words "from My youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind" have been on the lips and in the thought of the "Man of Sorrows" as the Cross cast its shadow over Him, perhaps from His earliest years? "For not even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself," saysThe Imitationin one of those chapters which sweeten the tears of the world, "was ever one hour without the anguish of His Passion as long as He lived" (Imit.ii. 12).
Both the 40th and the 54th suggest that inner secret of the Atonement which the writer of theEpistle to the Hebrews has fixed upon as giving Christ's Passion its universal efficacy:
An offering of a free heart will I give Thee.(liv. 6.)
I come—that I should fulfil Thy will, O my God.(xl. 9, 10.)
"By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10). For the Passion is the supreme oblation of the freewill of man, the re-direction into the right attitude of that high faculty by which man had sinned and fallen originally, the consecration of it to its true end, voluntary obedience to God. "Not My will, but Thine be done"; that Christ as man should bring the human will perfectly into conformity with the will of God is what "in the volume of the book"—i.e.in the writings of all the line of prophets—was written of Him; for this "the body was prepared" for Him in the pure flesh of the Virgin-mother; for this His "ears were opened," that as child and youth and man He might perfectly hear and obey the word of the Father.
But the 15th verse of the 40th Psalm suggestsan obvious difficulty in the application of the Psalms as a whole to Christ personally:
My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am notable to look up:Yea, they are more in number than the hairs of my head,and my heart hath failed me.
How can we ascribe these words, or any of the confessions of sin in the Psalter, to the sinless Lamb of God? Are not these at least all our own? And yet He Himself must on earth have repeated them. In their original meaning they referred either to personal or national guilt. In either sense the recitation of them, at first sight, would seem to be alien and external to His pure conscience. But do they not take a deeper and more solemn tone when we consider them in the light of the prophet's great description of the Atoning Sufferer, "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Is. liii. 6), or of S. Paul's statement, "Him Who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf" (2 Cor. v. 21)? Such words as these contain more than the mere bearing of the punishment of sin; they imply some inward connection between the Sufferer and the sin. Indeed, rightly understood, they help toremove the difficulty that many have felt as to the apparent injustice or unreality of a vicarious Atonement. Christ was not merely a Victim suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and making reparation for all the age-long sin of man; speaking of it as if it were His own sin, so closely has He made Himself one with us in our extremest need.
Cardinal Newman, in one of the most eloquent of his sermons, "The Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion," has developed this thought in language whose daring is only justified by its devotion. It is a description of Christ kneeling alone in Gethsemane: