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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Earlier in our Vespers service tonight, we prayed another of what, since the sixth century, have been called the “Seven Penitential Psalms”, and tonight, as the sermon did on Ash Wednesday, and as the sermons will do on the next four Wednesdays and on Maundy Thursday, this sermon focuses on one of those Seven Penitential Psalms. Tonight, the Penitential Psalm is Psalm 6, to which you may want to re-open your hymnal as we reflect on it. The Seven Penitential Psalms are sometimes thought to correspond to the seven times of prayer in a single day that the Bible mentions, or to the seven days of the week, or to the seven deadly sins (confer Neale, I:125). Regardless, praying the Seven Penitential Psalms during the penitential season of Lent is “a long-held and practiced Christian tradition” (Wohlrabe, CPR 25:2, p.3), and our sermons’ reflecting on them in a sense intensifies our penitential use of them.
Sometimes we may assume that people properly understand the term “penitential”, when, in fact, they may not. To be sure, it relates to “penitence”, or, as we Lutherans might be more likely to say, “repentance”, but even Lutherans can use that term without properly understanding it. Recently I watched a video our Synod’s Concordia Publishing House put out about Ash Wednesday that talked about “repentance” as “contrition”, or “sorrow”, over sin but failed to mention explicitly the second part of true repentance: namely faith that believes or trusts that sins are forgiven for the sake of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross for all people (see Augsburg Confession XII:3). If, as the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions teach, sorrow over sin and trust that God forgives sin for Jesus’s sake are the two parts of true repentance, or penitence, then we might expect to find both parts in the Penitential Psalms, and, in fact, we do find both parts in Psalm 6.
Psalm 6 may be striking for its lack of either an explicit confession or even a mention of sin (Leupold, 83; confer Wohlrabe, 48), but the psalmist David’s recognition of his sinfulness is both in the background of the psalm and implied by the words of the psalm itself (Weiser, 130). We do not know the exact context of the psalm (TLSB, 850), but the psalm’s prayer seems to come the morning after a particularly difficult night (Keil-Delitzsch, 130), during which night David suffered under extreme sorrow over his sin, which sorrow may even have caused him some severe physical illness (TLSB, 850). Making matters worse, David’s enemies apparently were mocking him as if God had forsaken him (Keil-Delitzsch, 135), and David may even have interpreted his enemies’ hostility as the punishment of God’s righteous wrath and so the result of David’s own sin (Keil-Delitzsch, 130; confer Wohlrabe, 48).
In Psalm 6, David speaks in general of languishing and of being troubled in body and soul, practically paralyzed with fear (Leupold, 85). David speaks specifically of being weary with moaning, flooding his bed with tears, drenching his sleeping couch with weeping, of his eye wasting away because of his grief, and of its growing weak because of all his foes. David appears to be sorrowful over his sin! Can we say the same? Does our sorrow over our sin ever weigh on us heavily enough to cause us severe physical illness? Do we consider that the afflictions we face may be the consequences of our own sin? Do we recognize that by nature on account of our original and actual sin we deserve far worse than even what God permits us to face? We all should be as sorrowful as David was sorrowful, and we all should also be as trusting as David was trusting.
The Lord called and brought David to true repentance—both sorrow over sin and trust that God forgives sin for Jesus’s sake. Yet, as if the Lord were elsewhere, David in turn called to the Lord to turn to him, to deliver his life, and to save him. Even though David’s asking “O Lord, how long?” seems to be an impatient complaint, it is a bold and confident prayer that shows that he trusts God faithfully to deliver and save him (confer CSSB, 791). Shortly after David’s plea for the Lord to deliver and save him, the mood of the psalm changes suddenly, and David tells his enemies to depart from him, for the Lord has heard his weeping and plea and accepts his prayer. “Even before [David’s] plaintive prayer is ended[,] the divine light and comfort [have] come quickly into his heart” (Frisch, paraphrased by Keil-Delitzsch, 135). The same is true for us as we pray Psalm 6 or otherwise repent of our sins, God instantly comforts us by forgiving our sins for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Truly the only basis for our forgiveness is the God-man Jesus Christ’s perfect life, brutal suffering, and death on the cross—all for us. In the psalm, David does not plead any merit of His own (Leupold, 84-85), not even the depth of his sorrow, and neither should we. We should only plead God’s steadfast love, His mercy, and God’s grace to us for Christ’s sake. In order to be forgiven, we need God to lead us to both sorrow over our sin and trust that God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake, but such contrition and faith are not the reasons why God forgives us. Rather, we might say that they are the conditions under which God forgives us. When we are sorry for our sin and believe that God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake, then God forgives our sin—He forgives our sinful nature and our actual sin—whatever it might be. God forgives the sins of those who so repent through His means of Grace, His Word read and purely preached and His Sacraments rightly administered—Holy Baptism, individual Holy Absolution, and the Sacrament of the Altar. In these ways our bodies and our souls are given peace; we experience God’s grace as living realities (cf. Weiser, 131).
To be sure, one of the more-difficult statements in Psalm 6 comes in verse 5, as David, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says, “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise.” This past Sunday in Adult Bible Class we talked a little about the meaning of the Hebrew word sheol as either “the grave” or “hell” (and there will be more about that in the March newsletter). Here, at least the meaning seems to be “the grave”, as several Bible versions that do not simply transliterate sheol (for example, ASV, NASB, ESV, NEB) in fact do translate it (for example, KJV, NIV, AAT, NKJV). While we carefully want to not read too much into what David says here, he importantly links God’s mercy with the response of praise, and David’s experience in the body of believers assembled for worship could even be what brought on the psalm’s sudden change in mood (Weiser, 133).
Certainly the psalm itself now has its place in worship, whether during the penitential season of Lent or at other times. For, in its original Hebrew, the psalm has what appears to be some sort of musical direction as to how it is to be sung. And, as we live every day with both sorrow over our sin and trust that God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake, like David, we rest assured that, as we praise God in body and soul here and now, so, while our bodies rest in the grave, our souls will praise God in heaven, and, after the resurrection of our bodies and our vindication over our enemies, we will praise God again in body and soul, only under the new heaven on the new earth for eternity.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +