Psalms of Lament: Psalm 44 (Lent 2024)

Psalm 44

Wednesday of Reminiscere + February 28, 2024

Innumerable are the daft things I have said. But among the most cuckoo was to my mother, who advised the teenage me to read the Psalms. “They’re boring!” I told her. “They’re all the same.”

Well, they’re not all the same, and they’re not all the same even within a particular category. We’re looking this Lent at the category of Lament Psalms. Within these Psalms of Lament there are surprising, even perplexing differences.

In tonight’s Psalm, 44, we have a national lament. The people of God have suffered a catastrophic defeat. Those who survived complain to God that He caused their defeat. But first, they remind YHWH how He previously acted:

O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us,

What deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old:

You with your own hand drove out the nations…

And they have not turned away from Him. If you read the Hebrew Scriptures, you’ll see a simple pattern emerge: The Israelites sin, God punishes them through defeat in war, they’re oppressed. They call out to God, He delivers them. They give thanks, but soon they fall back into sin. The pattern repeats, again and again.

But here, the Psalm argues, that is decidedly not the case.

In God we have boasted continually,

and we will give thanks to your name forever.

But you have rejected us and disgraced us,

and have not gone out with our armies….

You have made us like sheep for slaughter,

and have scattered us among the nations…

Undergirding all of this is the question, “Why?”

All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you,

And we have not been false to your covenant.

Our heart has not turned back,

Nor have our steps departed from your way;

Yet you have broken us in the place of jackals

And covered us with the shadow of death.

“We have not been unfaithful!” they are saying. The accusation to God is, “You are being unfaithful to us!”

And perhaps that’s something you can resonate with. The early Christian teacher Origen saw in this Psalm the situation of the martyrs. It is precisely the faithful that suffer. And that is what we are to learn in the sufferings we experience that we cannot understand. I must admit, most of the time when I experience something adverse, I think, “I deserve it.” I don’t mean to make myself out to be pious or holy. Just the opposite. I’m a terrible sinner, and still God has blessed me, all out of His fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me.

But when a person suffers unjustly, what can we say to that? It is teaching the sufferer that his heart must be radically submissive to God, even when He seems not to be keeping faith with us.

This is how the Apostle Paul used Psalm 44, where in Romans 8 he discusses the persecutions and perils the first generation of Christians were suffering: “‘For Your sake we are killed all day long: we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” This was not a radically new thought that the Apostle introduces, it’s embedded in the Psalm:

All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you…

And still, in the suffering, they do not forget, and appeal to God, like the Canaanite woman in Sunday’s Gospel who persists despite her maltreatment at the hands of the Savior.

Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord?

Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!

A strange piety the Psalms give us, because they invite us to complain to God, even to accuse God. He is not acting in the way we expected. And the only hope, the only reliable thing, is to return to the foundational character of God, expressed in the final line of the Psalm: “Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.”

The people of God don’t expect God to act because of something they are offering Him; in fact, they don’t even try. There is no bargaining.

And they don’t expect Him to act because of their accusations of His not being fair, as though He could be shamed into acting.

They simply appeal to God to be who He is: His nature is steadfast love, sometimes translated as mercy, like in DS3: “Oh give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever.”

So the Psalms are not boring, and they are not all the same. Sometimes complaints before God are just. Sometimes things really are unfair, from our perspective. The Psalm asks God “Why?”, and the question isn’t answered. It just leaves us with an appeal: “Rise up; come to our help!”

And that’s where all this is leading, the journey through Lent: toward the Day when the Lord rises up, on the cross, and comes to our help, and then rises again from the tomb. He is coming to our aid. So shout your complaint to God, and demand He be who He is: the God of steadfast love.