In one of his commentaries, John Calvin calls the psalms, “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul,” because he believed that there was no human emotion that can’t be found within this collection of poetry. And he’s right: themes range the gamut from ecstatic joy to sorrowful remorse to righteous anger. In fact, many of the psalms incorporate several emotions all together at once: lament, repentance, thanksgiving, and praise all in one convenient package.
But Psalm 88 is different. Psalm 88 expresses one emotion and one emotion only: utter despair. It’s known for its persistently desolate and hopeless tone. While almost all the other psalms of lament end on a note of hope and trust, Psalm 88 has no such resolution. It ends instead with the Hebrew word for darkness. There is no redemption to be found in this psalm.
In what seems to be a one-sided dispute with God, the psalmist flings accusations of torment and abandonment like weapons, and he uses disturbingly evocative language to make his case. He’s been calling out to God morning and night, he says, every single day since the time he was young - not even necessarily asking for help; just wanting to be seen. And yet, God offers no acknowledgement. The psalmist is left in the metaphorical pit, among the dead bodies, howling into the void.
Does this psalm make you uncomfortable? It certainly makes *me* uncomfortable. It’s difficult to hear God described in such an incriminating way, and it’s even more distressing that God seems to remain completely silent in the face of such anguish. This is not who our God is; this is not what our God does. In all of the other readings from this sermon series so far, God is an active participant in the conversation - if only for the purposes of scolding a stubborn prophet. But here, where the psalmist is clearly expressing deep, unrelenting suffering, there’s no response from God whatsoever. Psalm 88 remains decidedly one-sided.
Or does it?
See, during my sermon prep, I try to read a few different translations to get a better sense of the passage, and as I read Psalm 88 in the NRSV, I began to draw connections to another psalm I know well - Psalm 40. Psalm 88 says, “Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry,”[1] while Psalm 40 says, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.”[2] Psalm 88 - “You have put me in the depths of the Pit;”[3] Psalm 40 - “He drew me up from the desolate pit.”[4] Psalm 88 - “Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? [Is your] saving help [known] in the land of forgetfulness?”[5] Psalm 40 - “I have not hidden your saving help within my heart; I have spoken of your faithfulness…I have not concealed your steadfast love…”[6]
I double checked the Hebrew to make sure that this wasn’t just a translational fluke, and sure enough, each of the English parallels reflect identical words in the original text. Now, are any of these words particularly uncommon in Scripture? Not really. Are they frequently used together to describe God’s nature? Absolutely. But even though there’s no definitive proof that these two psalms are directly related, the linguistic parallels between them are still striking.
Their similarities are what draw our attention to them, but it’s their differences that communicate a message. In its refusal to acknowledge any hope or resolution at all, Psalm 88 reflects a painful reality of the human experience. There will be times when the hits just keep coming, when our misery seems never-ending, and hope is impossible to *find*, let alone *hold onto*. It has nothing to do with your level of faith - it’s just the way that life works sometimes. It’s easy, in those moments, to feel like no one is listening and no one will ever answer.
But in using echoes of identical language, Psalm 40 becomes the answer that Psalm 88 is missing.[7] When we plead with God to incline and hear our cries, to pull us out of the pit of death, God WILL incline and God WILL lift us out of the pit. Sometimes God’s response comes long after the “end” of our prayer, long after we’ve stopped listening entirely. But God does not forget us or our suffering. God does not abandon us, even when it feels like all hope is lost.
When we hold Psalm 88 together with Psalm 40, we’re reminded that just because there are seasons of life when we can’t feel God’s presence or we don’t hear a response to our prayers, it doesn’t mean that God’s face will remain hidden forever. We already know this - the Bible has told us time and time again. Remember Abraham and Sarah, who waited 25 painful years before Isaac was born to them. Remember Joseph (of technicolor coat fame), who spent 13 years, first in servitude and then incarceration, before being appointed as Pharaoh’s second in command. Remember the Israelites, who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before finally being allowed into the Promised Land. Remember the Jewish people, who waited hundreds of years for the messiah they’d been promised.
Actually, hold on to those last two examples in particular for a moment.
Even though Psalms 88 and 40 seem to fit together perfectly, we know for a fact that they were written by different people at different times. This is a reminder of another important aspect of the Psalms: although we can see our own feelings and experiences reflected in them as in a mirror, they actually represent the collective experiences of many different people, written over the course of a thousand years, over two thousand years ago. So even when we find connections between them, like between Psalms 88 and 40, it very well could be that they were actually written years, decades, or even centuries apart.
But this doesn’t invalidate the connections we find at all. In fact, it’s kind of the point. When John Calvin called the psalms, “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul,” he didn’t necessarily mean all the parts of a *single* soul. Each of the psalmists, at different points in history, took a snapshot of their own experience and put it on paper. And when all 150 of these snapshots were eventually compiled and placed next to each other, what we discovered is that we hadn’t wound up with a junk drawer full of random photos. Instead, the result was a stunning collage, distinct fragments of different people that somehow came together to create a single, cohesive image - not the soul of a single human being, but the soul of humanity itself. The entire communion of saints contained within the Psalms.
Why does this matter? Because when we pray, we usually think of our prayers as being unconnected from everyone else's - our own personal concerns from our own small corner of the universe. When we’re suffering, we think that our suffering only concerns us. When we’re joyful, we think that that moment is between ourselves and God alone. But that’s not how God experiences our prayers. Each one that we raise becomes a part of a larger tapestry that we can’t see - the intricate weaving of all of humanity, in all of time and space, together with God *and* one another. And as lovely as our personal relationship with God is, we can’t even begin to imagine the utter beauty of the bigger picture that God is creating with all of us.
The Psalms remind us that each of our prayers is a part of something that goes far beyond ourselves, whether we realize it or not. It’s a beautiful and holy gift from God. But because of this, the timeline between our prayers and God’s response ALSO extends far beyond ourselves. The truth is that we may not live to see the resolution that we so desperately seek. Many of the Israelites in the wilderness - including Moses himself - never did get to enter the land that had been promised to their ancestors. Many, many Jews who lived in the time between the people’s return from exile and the Roman occupation of Judea died without ever knowing that the messiah was close at hand. We may be left in the pit, with darkness as our only friend, like the psalmist. God’s time is not ours.
This is a really bitter pill to swallow, but it’s the price we pay for being a part of God’s masterpiece. So it’s really important, in the times that we find ourselves praying Psalm 88 with no Psalm 40 in sight, to keep reminding ourselves and each other that God’s delay isn’t because of anger, or hatred, or indifference. It’s because God is working all things, in every time and every place, together for good in ways that we can’t even fathom. Ways that are far better than if God had answered our prayer right away. God is creating the collage, weaving the tapestry of humanity’s soul, one prayer at a time, like a master craftsperson - and you don’t rush an artist.
Just because we can’t see the bigger picture now doesn’t mean that we never will. When the weaving is done and the answers finally arrive, we will still have our chance to rejoice and give thanks alongside all of the saints - whether in this life or the next. And so, even when it feels hopeless for us, we keep praying. Even when we don't think anyone is listening, we keep demanding to be heard. Even when we can’t imagine a way out of the pit, we keep crying out to God. Because it’s not just for us. It’s for everyone who ever has and ever will feel the same way. It’s for everyone whose prayers ascend together with ours. It’s for every part of humanity’s soul. Even now, God is weaving our prayers together, to become something more than they could be on their own. Thanks be to God for that. Amen.
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[1] Psalm 88:2, NRSV[2] Psalm 40:1, NRSV
[3] Psalm 88:6, NRSV (also v. 4)
[4] Psalm 40:2, NRSV
[5] Psalm 88:11-12, NRSV
[6] Psalm 40:10, NRSV
[7] Although Psalm 88 comes after Psalm 40 in the biblical canon, the book was assembled according to criteria like authorship, thematic clusters, and liturgical use rather than chronology. Therefore, it’s entirely possible that Psalm 88 was written prior to Psalm 40.
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