Psalm 77 is the prayer of a suffering person who abruptly moves from pained yet faithful lament to relief and hope. The first nine verses are the cries of a burdened, weary, suffering human being seeking God to hear him yet pained by the contradiction between God’s promises and his circumstances. No description of his trouble, enemy, or guilt of sin is mentioned. There’s not a petition, just description, honesty, and the longing to be heard by God. His lament increasingly turns his attention toward God, and then as a gracious surprise, this same person speaks cheerfully of the God who works wonders with self-forgetful awe and begins to move from despair toward hope.
Pain of the Psalmist
The Psalmist cries aloud, he tells us twice, to God whom he expects to hear him. He seeks his listening Lord in the middle of his unnamed, undescribed trouble. He stretches out his hand “without wearying” as he seeks God, and yet can only find God acting as He holding open the Psalmist’s eyelids, increasing his trouble to speechless pain. The very memory of God is painful to him, he moans at the thought, and meditation (inward, internal remembrance) leads him to the point of collapse.
In his sleepless night, the Psalmist has been calling out, “seeking the Lord,” and “remembering God” yet these have brought him pain. He brings to mind better days when he would sing and meditate without burden. But this memory too turns to pain, he searches inwardly and diligently and all that he can find are his unflinchingly honest questions. He can remember God’s revelation to Moses (Ex 34) but God’s attributes: steadfast love, graciousness, and compassion seem utterly distant in light of his present suffering, so much so that instead of being comforted by God’s characteristics-- he calls them into question. It’s as if the Psalmist asks: “You said you are abounding in steadfast love, but has it ceased forever? You said your benefits are for thousands of generations, but have your promises come to an end? You said you are merciful and gracious, but have you forgotten? You said you are slow to anger, and yet I can see no compassion.” In other words: “are you still who you say that you are?” Or better: “Are you who you say that you are to me?
The suffering Psalmist laments the seeming absence, or worse the change in God in light of his “day of trouble,” yet he does so as he cries aloud (2x) to God who “will hear me.” Like the persistent widow of Luke 18, the Psalmist cries out day and night. The Psalmist’s confidence that God will hear him lays the ground for his honest complaint: “Lament is only possible because of the promise that it will be heard.”[1] Only because God has said “Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you” (Ps 50:15) would the Psalmist or any of us pray out of our distress and pain in this way. As one theologian writes, “Distress does not always teach us to pray. It can push into unlamenting resignation, despair, or autonomous attempts to overcome it. It does not necessarily lead to lament in the presence of God.”[2] In its way Psalms like this one reveal that lament (like praise) is the voice of faith rather than the precursor to it. The Psalmist shifts our attention, albeit in a jarring way, to God whom he expects will hear him. Not only to listen to him but also to act on his behalf.
Remembering the Deeds of the Lord
It’s only after this soul-bearing lament that we experience the turning point alongside the Psalmist, a shift that comes seemingly out of nowhere – there’s been no noted change in his situation nor the introduction of another source of wisdom. Instead, the Psalmist’s shift seems to grow out of his lament: as he presses his attention further and further upon God, even in this faithful complaint, God becomes his focus. The first half of the Psalm focuses on the Psalmist’s actions and memory and the second on God’s actions and history. As the Psalmist articulates his suffering before God, his gaze slowly shifts from his experience of God’s hiddenness to God’s redeeming power at the site of pain, landing specifically on God’s deliverance in the Exodus.
Adapting the Song of Moses, the Psalmist prays: “Your way, O God, is holy. What God is great like our God?” He praises the God who works wonders and the might he has made known among the people. He poetically heightens the Exodus story weaving metaphors for God’s redemptive power in the rain, thunder, lightning, and earthquake. “Your way” this holy way, is through the sea, through the great waters. The Lord, who heard the cry of his people in Egypt, spoke to and through Moses who led God’s people “like a flock” in the dead of night out of the bondage of slavery to the shore of the Red Sea. Seeing Pharaoh and his army approaching, the people feared, but God walked with them although his footprints were unseen. The Psalm closes with “You led your people like a flock by means of Moses and Aaron.” This abrupt stop is characteristic of this section of the Psalms but leaves a question instead of a resolution: since God intervened on behalf of his people and worked wonders for their deliverance, can he not do so now? Just as he heard the groans of his people in Egypt and responded with deliverance, will he not lead the Psalmist out too?
How different does this section sound? No longer is the Psalmist “moaning” at the memory of God, but instead recounting and praising God for his mighty deliverance. This recollection of God’s redemptive power does not necessarily relieve pain or suffering, as there is no direct sign it did for the Psalmist, but instead, shifts our gaze, lifting our eyes to the One who has entered the pain of His people, and at that very place redeems with his mighty arm.
In his novel A Place in Time, Wendell Berry writes about a family in the farming community of Port William who declared their son to be dead from war after an extended time of being MIA. As the community learns of this tragedy, they come to offer their condolences to the grieving parents, and in time so does the parish pastor. In a bungled effort of pastoral care, the pastor speaks theoretically and metaphorically about their hope in God, the family receives no comfort and the pastor leaves ashamed. Upon the pastor’s departure, the grieving father (without any malice) says the pastor cannot help because he offered a hope that lived outside of their sorrow.
In this moment of excruciating suffering, this family, like the Psalmist, needed hope that entered the pain of human life and didn’t merely transcend it. When the Psalmist “remembered God” in his troubled days and endless nights, the contradiction between God’s promises and his circumstances was unbearable. But in God’s mercy, after the Psalmist directs his lamenting attention to God, he is then able to “remember God” anew, not through propositions or attributes, but through remembering the concrete demonstration of his love, redeeming power, and provision, as he responds to the groans of his people and walks with them from bondage to freedom.
The New Exodus
We too remember the mighty deeds of God, in an even more concrete demonstration of God’s love and redemptive power. As the Psalmist remembers the unseen footprints of God, we look to the pierced hands and feet of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. As the Psalm recalls the wonders of redemption at the Red Sea, we see in it the anticipation of Christ’s resurrection as he parts the great waters of sin, death, and the Evil One that we might walk with him on dry ground to newness of life.
[1] Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith, 69
[2] Bayer, Living by Faith, 71