Psalm 82 and Ash Wednesday
. . . with thanks to John Goldingay and Malcolm Guite
This morning Merna and my reading was from Psalm 82. Here it is in John Goldingay’s translation, taken from his wonderful 3-volume commentary on the Psalms.
God is standing in the divine assembly,
in the midst of the gods he exercises authority
How long will you exercise authority for the wicked
and elevate the faithless?
Exercise authority for the poor and orphan,
act faithfully for the person who is weak and in want.
Rescue the poor and needy,
save them from the hand of the faithless.
They have not acknowledged it,
they do not consider it.
They walk about in darkness;
all earth's foundations totter.
I myself had said, You are gods,
offspring of the Most High, all of you.
Yet you will die like a human being,
fall like one of the leaders.
Arise, God, exercise authority for the earth,
because you yourself own all the nations.As Goldingay notes, and as in many psalms, it can be a bit tricky to figure out is speaking, and just who is being addressed.
In this case, he argues that the speaker is human throughout the psalm. The last verse makes clear that a human is addressing God and urging action, and Goldingay notes that it’s not necessary in many cases to assume various speakers unless they are introduced/signified in the text itself.
The scene is set as in “the divine assembly,” a not uncommon image in the First Testament: Israelites believed in powers below the Most High, and they believed that those deities had power. (Jesus and the New Testament acknowledge the reality of such deities, too; elucidation of that perhaps belongs to another time.)
Many psalms speak of human opppressors and ask God for relief from them. In this psalm, the human speaker protests against the way that powers over whom the God of Israel has power are nonetheless wreaking havoc with the earthly order by their failure to wield their power on behalf of weak, needy, poor, disenfranchised people.
Goldingay says that delegation of power does not obviate the fact that the one delegating still has responsibility. Even if the powers that be are on a lower level than unique God and God has granted some power to them, that unique God bears responsibility for dealing with those lower powers. In his “theological reflections,” Goldingay says:
Yhwh has delegated to subordinate heavenly powers responsibility for affairs in the world, and therefore when people neglect the poor, blame for allowing this rests with these powers. “The charge against the gods is not that they are idols or nonexistent but that they have failed to put down wickedness and bring justice.”1 Yet the psalm knows that one can delegate power but not responsibility. Indeed, in keeping with the OT’s usual view, it knows that Yhwh does not give power away in such a way as to be unable to take it back. And it therefore urges Yhwh to exercise responsibility: not just to stand up in court but also to stand up to take action in the world. . . .
“The religion of the gods legitimated a hierarchical social system in which those at the top prospered and those at the bottom suffered,” one that emphasized the economic prosperity of the powerful at the expense of the exercise of authority in faithfulness toward the needy.”2 It is such a system that the writer [Goldingay refers to himself] and most users of this commentary [I and Merna, this morning] profit from and collude with. Psalm 82 therefore stands as one of the most worrying texts in the OT. It is also one of the most “spectacular” for its “definition” of God, “who has tied his divinity to the fate of the poor and dispossessed.”3
What a powerful way to start the season of Lent, to consider today, Ash Wednesday, and what the ashes symbolize! What a mess our world is.
Can we cry to God that he end the life of the powers of this world, that the poor, the needy, the oppressed might see justice? Yes. But only as we see the ways in which we ourselves wield power wrongly. Many are the ways.
From contemplating this psalm, we went on to read from Malcolm Guite’s book of collected poetry for Lent, The Word in the Wilderness. His own poem for this day resonates, at least in part, with Psalm 82. Here it is (I read him enough to know that he won’t mind me quoting it):
Ash Wednesday Receive this cross of ash upon your brow Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday’s cross; The forests of the world are burning now And you make late repentance for the loss. But all the trees of God would clap their hands, The very stones themselves would shout and sing, If you would covenant to love these lands And recognize in Christ their lord and king. He sees the slow destruction of those trees, He weeps to see the ancient places burn, And still you make what purchases you please And still to dust and ashes you return. But Hope could rise from ashes even now Beginning with this sign upon your brow.
Oh, may we acknowledge our complicity with the powers of this world, the gods whom we see all about us. And may our good God who owns all the nations “exercise authority for the earth.”
Goldingay’s quotation is from James L. Mays’s commentary on the Psalms, p. 269
The quotation is from McCann’s commentary in The New Interpreter’s Bible, pp. 1007–8.
Quotation from Hossfeld and Zenger’s psalms commentary, vol. 2, p. 337.
Thank you for this particular arrangement of a rather timeless theme - our role vs role of the gods. It serves me as a good reminder that in fact both are needed; we can't imply abdicate as if nothing about what we do matters and we need more than that, too (that only God can provide). What a great way (day) to imagine the merger.