Coping with impermanence in the Psalms

References to mortal transience are on every page – some of them taken up by countless adaptations and imitations in later Western literature.

As for mortals, their days are like grass: they flourish like a flower of the field;/For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

Nor should we assume the psalmist is here speaking only of the foolish and the wicked:

When we look at the wise, they die;/ …. Mortals cannot abide in their pomp;/they are like the animals that perish.

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Juxtaposed almost invariably with such evocations of impermanence, we find reference to the eternity of the god to whom the psalmist addresses his worship:

Your throne is established from of old;/You are from everlasting.

Very often, it is not simply the eternity of God’s being that such passages evoke, but His ‘steadfast love’ and ‘faithfulness’ – in short, the timelessness of a unilateral bond in which the faithful Israelite stands as a dependent.  To take just one such example of this juxtaposition (and there are many), the lines from Ps.103 just cited above (‘As for mortals, they are as grass ….’) lead immediately into the following:

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children/To those who keep his covenant/and remember to do his commandments.

God’s steadfast love and faithfulness can be manifested in quite specific deeds of power and favour accomplished for the people in the past, such as are retold at length by certain narrative Psalms. It is implied that a God who once acted so miraculously, and so faithfully, in furtherance of His plans, can be depended upon, whatever the travails of the psalmist’s present, to bring about their ultimate accomplishment at some time in the future. That eventual fulfilment can take the political and eschatological form of a future restoration of Zion, often under a messianic king of David’s line to whom all nations will be subject; or else, in the case of the psalmist’s personal suffering, some more immediate vindication – always, in this case, within, and not beyond, his own mortal existence (‘I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living./’)

Neither of these possibilities, however, quite seems to plumb the depths of the psalmist’s existential hope. This seems somehow to reside in the steadfast love itself, rather than in the various possibilities (i.e. restoration of Zion or victory over personal enemies) through which the psalmist imagines that love as being effectively demonstrated.

Here I come to the heart of what I want to say – something quite hard to poinpoint, let alone put into words. The idea of a covenant faithfulness that is actualized in the case of the Almighty (however inadequately reciprocated by his chosen people) points us to the eternal nature of the One whose Word stands firm, and to the sense in which He stands at the origin of, and so beyond, our space and time as creator and sustainer of all that is. At the same time, the psalmist would have us believe that such a transcendent God has somehow entered into relationship with His people in history. In other words, the focus of so many passages on divine ‘faithfulness and steadfast love’ carries with it the claim that the time-less has entered into relation with the time-bound. This is obviously hard to get one’s mind around. But however we seek to deal with it philosophically, there is one implication of such a claim that appears inescapeable. The mere fact of the possibility of such a relationship with the eternal confers a potentially eternal value to the time-bound object such as to render trivial by comparison any other circumstances of its existence in place and time. This appears to me to be the sentiment behind those famous words of Ps. 63: Because Your steadfast love is better than life.

Thus the psalmist perceives ‘himself’ as somehow belonging within a collective religious project defined by this engagement of the eternal in the timebound and the impermanent. On the one hand, he is struck by the impermanence of things as they exist intrinsically, in and for themselves; on the other, by the ultimate significance lent them by the project which is that of God’s glory. Those transient things shine, as it were, in a reflected light, as a solitary window in an otherwise darkening townscape blazes out in a ray of the setting sun. Here is a classic case of where the ‘self’ constituted through identification with the broader collective project of ‘Israel’ – that project of God’s steadfast love which serves His ultimate glorification – becomes, in the psalmist’s view so enormous and encompassing that the question of the survival of the individual subject (after death) dwindles into insignificance by comparison – like a candle in the full sun at midday, or rock pools before the incoming tide.  It would be hard to find a better instance of the relative solidity and durability of a ‘self’ founded in a reality transcending the more immediate concerns of the ego. This may also be a model of how we could think of the immortality of Christian ‘souls’ in Christ.

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There are, however, not infrequent passages in the Psalms where a concern with individual death and transience breaks through. Yet it is always in one circumstance, and assumes the same characteristic expression. According to the Psalms, the natural and ordinate response of a creature aware of its being the object of God’s steadfast love and favour is always acknowledgement and praise of Him:

O Lord my God, I shall give thanks to you for ever.

But this inevitably leads the psalmist to pose, from time to time, the question of the still faithful souls descended into Sheol. What of them, and the obligation of praise they might be imagined to owe their creator?  The question evokes a consistent, intriguing, if not ambivalent, response.  On the one hand, the psalmist seems unable to conceive of the possibility of the soul’s post mortem existence – i.e. as something capable of greater conscious agency than dust or shadow.  On the other, this impossibility (or rather perhaps inconceivability) is, as it were, outweighed by a still more overbearing theological refusal to countenance the idea that anything owed to God’s glory should be denied – in other words, that due praise should, in defiance of His glory, be reduced to silence. Hence, the occurrence of passages such as the following:

What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit?/Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?

Or:

Is your steadfast love declared in the grave? Or your faithfulness in Abaddon?/Are your wonders known in the darkness? Or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?

How are we to interpret such questions? As purely rhetorical? On the face of it, I think, yes. In the first case, the anticipated response would seem to be: ‘None’ and ‘Of course not’. In the second, probably: ‘No’, ‘No’ and ‘No’. Yet the evident depth of the psalmist’s bewilderment and dejection, at least in the case of Ps. 88 (that most despairing of psalms), where the facts of the situation appear to offer no more positive outcome – all of this coupled with the very insistence of his interrogations – perhaps suggest, that while appearing to close a door, he nevertheless holds it slightly ajar. Certainly, this implied ‘No’ is an incredulous one, the silence of death a theological paradox.

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In the light of everything I have argued hitherto about the response to impermanence in the psalms, I shall turn, at last, briefly to the New Testament, and Jesus’ words of response to a representative of the Sadducees, who ‘said there was no resurrection’ (Matt. 22.23).  There is no doubt that Jesus’ answer refutes the Sadducean position. But what strikes me as particularly interesting here, and highly relevant to what we have been saying, is the nature of his answer. We might have expected that it would lay claim to some established dogma – as the Church generally does today, and the Pharisees no doubt did before them. However, Jesus’ actual answer seems strangely in line with the position we have observed in the psalmist. It rests on the troublingly trans-temporal status of the relationship between an eternal God (the ‘I am’ of Moses’ encounter in the burning bush) and the evidently human, and therefore mortal, nature of the patriarchs of whom He IS the God.

Jesus answered them ….  ‘… And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God. “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”?  He is God not of the dead, but of the living.’

To my mind, this expresses the existential basis of the psalmist’s hope – the way that it seems to rest on the steadfast love and faithfulness of God and nothing else. Where the eternal is somehow in relationship with (‘is God of’) a human object, how can that object of eternal sollicitude cease to be? This takes the pslamists question, and answers with the affirmative:

Will the dust praise you?

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Psalm 30^[a]

¹ I will exalt you, Lord,
    for you lifted me out of the depths
    and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
² Lord my God, I called to you for help,
    and you healed me.
³ You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead;
    you spared me from going down to the pit.

⁴ Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people;
    praise his holy name.
⁵ For his anger lasts only a moment,
    but his favor lasts a lifetime;
weeping may stay for the night,
    but rejoicing comes in the morning.

⁶ When I felt secure, I said,
    “I will never be shaken.”
⁷ Lord, when you favored me,
    you made my royal mountain^[c] stand firm;
but when you hid your face,
    I was dismayed.

⁸ To you, Lord, I called;
    to the Lord I cried for mercy:
⁹ “What is gained if I am silenced,
    if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
    Will it proclaim your faithfulness?
¹⁰ Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me;
    Lord, be my help.”

¹¹ You turned my wailing into dancing;
    you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
¹² that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.
    Lord my God, I will praise you forever.