Article
- Date:
- Tuesday 12th January 2021
- Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Midweek Service
- Readings:
- Psalm 90
"I thought I heard you say at the beginning that you hoped to provide us with some comfort" I hear you thinking to yourselves "and then you come up with this miserable psalm!" I know what you mean, in conventional terms, but this is a Psalm that could have been written by a Yorkshireman for Yorkshiremen who pride themselves on being grim, people like Oscar the Grouch in Sesame Street who famously complains: "Nothing's going wrong!"
But setting aside my Yorkshire origins which might direct me towards this Psalm as one of my favourites, its real virtue, for me, is that it puts us in our place.
It begins by noting, with regret, the hardship of our lives and the hardness of our hearts which both reflect God's purpose for us and God's harshness when we fail. This first part of the Psalm puts us in a very difficult world with no room to escape: here we are, caught in the vice of hard labour and cruel punishment.
But suddenly the Psalm turns to God's mercy and our hope of sharing in his glory.
The starkness of the contrast between our apparent lot and our hope is instructive for all of us in general because it puts a very proper check on pride, a check that is always required to mitigate our worst offence against God, but I believe that the verses have a sharp relevance in the midst of our pandemic.
Since the Second World War we have become increasingly complacent, enjoying ever greater prosperity, better health, longer life, stronger security and a belief that the inevitable trajectory of human existence is towards everything becoming ever better. This trend has persisted, in our minds at least, in spite of considerable, global poverty and a widening gap between the well off and the poor in our own country such that, since the financial crash of 2008-9 the wages for the poor have either fallen or remained static while the rich have got richer. This year, by January 6th, the chief executives of our top 100 companies had earned precisely the same as the average wage earner in a whole year.
When the pandemic began, we were told that the disease would be a great leveller; but this has turned out to be untrue because the mortality rate among the poor as twice as high as among the rich. Nonetheless, the main point I wish to make is that, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are living in a state of real fear but, whereas in the Cuban case the fear was rather general and vague, in this case we know it could happen to us, individually, or to one of our family.
Perhaps perversely, then, I take comfort in being put in my place, of knowing that life is meant to be hard, that comfort is an illusion, that pride causes self-inflicted damage but that, in the end, we can rely upon God to be merciful and to transpose us into his glory.
Although the Prosperity Gospel" might be at an extreme end of a theological spectrum, Western Christianity has been seriously infected by two related blights: the first is that the ultimate aim of earthly life is comfort, and the second that this achievement of comfort is a moral good which we possess whereas the poor are to blame for their poverty and, lacking this moral good, are morally inferior to us. This, in turn, establishes a power dynamic in doing good, such that the recipients of our largesse or, in objective terms, smallesse, are having something done to them much in the way that a doctor might administer medicine to the sick. We have forgotten the huge element of luck in human existence for not only do people not choose to be born into a society but they certainly don't choose where and in what circumstances. Psalm 90 puts all that right: it tells us that while we might have mitigated human misery we can easily be cast back into it; and that no amount of cosseting or evasion will spare us from the divine power to judge Our only comfort is that God is merciful.
But what self-respecting person would behave badly for life, relying on a last minute reprieve from a merciful God? Well, the answer is that many of us live in precisely that way, while others behave well in the belief that this is the only way to achieve salvation.
Psalm 90 tells us that neither of these assumptions holds: God is merciful but we cannot regulate the extent of the mercy and, what is more, how we behave has nothing to do with salvation. We should behave well because that is the reason why we were created, to exercise free will in a loving life; to sin is to go against our created nature. But, I say again, that has nothing to do with salvation.
The Psalmist says two things, above all, that human life is difficult but that God is always with us; so if we find life so easy that we lose consciousness of God, something is going badly wrong.
The comfort of Psalm 90, then, is in its bringing us back to earth in our understanding of what we are and what God wills for us. For very complex reasons we have backed ourselves into a very difficult corner: the Reformation confirmed the sound doctrine that our deeds cannot earn salvation but that it is God's gift; but, having affirmed this, we then down-graded the value of right living; and then, in a final twist, we came to believe that living well was the same as living rightly, enabling us to adopt a position of moral superiority with respect to the poor.
Psalm 90 tells us that all this clever theologising is in vain: that if life isn't hard then it isn't God-like and that we are all dependent on God's infinite mercy. We should fear God but not be afraid.