Psalm 88
When I was a child, one of the things that used to keep me awake at night was the thought of the complete insignificance of my existence. I used to lie in my dark room and imagine how much bigger the street was than my house, how much bigger the town than the street, the country than the county, and so on until I reached the outer limits of the knowable universe. Compared to that vast expanse, I was a mere speck, a nothingness. It frequently reduced me to tears of complete desolation.
I am often reminded of those sleepless nights when I read these lines from Psalm 88:
“Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death; I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind. Your blazing anger has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me.”
Jesus would have known the Psalter intimately. Its 150 psalms functioned as a kind of hymnal for the Jewish people, so it’s not inconceivable to imagine Jesus calling to mind words of Psalm 88 during the total abandonment of his crucifixion:
“My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me, and darkness is my only companion.”
Hard as it is to imagine, God actually has to be absent before resurrection. God has to plumb the depths of human darkness and desolation for the possibility of the light of Easter fire to stubbornly prevail. In that sense, Holy Saturday is unique. It’s a liminal space, taut with paradox and contradiction. In the tension of this in-between time, we are invited to ponder the mystery of God’s presence and God’s absence. We are given space to experience our deepest fears, and perhaps even what the Christian mystical tradition has sometimes called ‘the gift of tears’.
Only once we have gone through the nihilistic journey of Psalm 88 are we truly ready to reorientate our spiritual selves towards the Easter dawn.
