Two great Psalms in my reading for Morning Prayer today - Psalms 25 and 26. Great Psalms in isolation, but curiously contradictory when you read them side by side.
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| King David Playing the Harp (Gerard van Honthorst, 1622) |
Notice first of all that these are both presented as 'Psalms of David'; whatever exactly we think about the originality or significance of the headings to the Psalms, we are certainly being encouraged to read these together in some sense. We can't say that these Psalms belong to different traditions, or represent different theological viewpoints, or belong at very different points in the history of revelation and redemption. The Psalms seem to originate together and belong together. And yet...
In Psalm 25 we have confessions of sin, pleas for forgiveness, expressions of dependence on God's mercy:
Do not remember the sins of my youth
or the acts of my rebellion...
Lord, for the sake of your name,
forgive my iniquity, for it is immense.
Consider my affliction and trouble
and forgive all my sins.
But then in Psalm 26 we have a rather different mood:
Vindicate me, Lord,
because I have lived with integrity...
I wash my hands in innocence
and go around your altar, Lord...
How do we hold together the frank admission of 'immense' guilt with the confident appeal to one's own innocence and integrity? How do we join up what is essentially an appeal to God to forget David's behaviour (because it was sinful) with the appeal to God to remember David's behaviour (because it was righteous)?
There are of course a number of simple ways we might get around it. If we take the Psalms primarily as expressions of human psychology, perhaps in connection especially with the life of faith, then it's not difficult to think of times from our own experience when we felt especially sinful and other times when we felt basically innocent. Perhaps it's just that these two Psalms are given to us so that we can pray appropriately in the light of those different feelings.
Or we can construe a scale of relative righteousness - we could argue that David knows of course that in God's sight he is sinful, but compared to the enemies who oppress and harass him (and these enemies are prominent in Psalm 26) he is innocent. Or we can imagine a situation in which David, without denying his essential guilt, could be maintaining his innocence in this particular case. He hasn't done this one thing of which he is accused, and so he can appeal to God on the basis of this innocence.
Any or all of those things may have a grain of truth to them, but the deeper, and more Christian, reading of these Psalms is as expressions of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. Maybe David wrote these Psalms, but they belong nonetheless to Christ. The Lord Jesus in his life took up the guilt and sin of humanity and made it his own; he identified with sinful humanity in his baptism, and he carried that identity through as far as the cross. He can confess on our behalf the immense iniquity which we carry - indeed, he confesses it to such an extent that we no longer carry it. But on the other hand, the Lord Jesus never sinned. He, and he alone, could truly wash his hands in innocence. The guilt which he bore, he bore guiltlessly. The iniquity which he confessed, he confessed from a position of total integrity. Jesus sings both Psalms.
And because he sings both Psalms, I can sing both Psalms. Lord, forgive my iniquity, for it is immense. In innocence I go around your altar and proclaim thanksgiving. In Christ I sing.
