God With Us in Suffering – Psalm 31

A text – Psalm 31:9-16

⁹ Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress;
    my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also.
¹⁰ For my life is spent with sorrow and my years with sighing;
my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away.

¹¹ I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horrorto my neighbors,
an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.
¹² I have passed out of mind like one who is dead;
    I have become like a broken vessel.
¹³ For I hear the whispering of many—terror all around!—
as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

¹⁴ But I trust in you, O Lord;
    I say, “You are my God.”
¹⁵ My times are in your hand;
    deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.
¹⁶ Let your face shine upon your servant;
    save me in your steadfast love.

A reflection:

I have been thinking about this psalm and all the passages of the Old and New Testament that tell us that faithful people, in the midst of suffering and fear, have called upon God, who is their hope.

David, Jonah, Jeremiah, even Jesus from the cross. The faith we try to live out each day walks with us through our suffering. We believe not only that God is connected to us in some way all the time, but that a person of the Triune God, Jesus, has gone through the very same thing – the suffering that makes us feel alone and abandoned, but also the hope that God will see us through.

I love the psalms of lament and complaint, of horrible, no good, very bad days. Because I have those sometimes and I need to know that my ancestors in the faith and even Jesus, Son of God, has gotten through those same days chanting these verses or others like them. I am not making up my own meaning. I am riding on the shoulders of thousands of years of believers who have done the same.

I am not surprised that Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Christian teacher and martyr in Nazi Germany, read and prayed the Psalms daily for years, noting in 1943 that “no other book I know and love as much.”  He taught that the Psalms are human words that become God’s Word in Jesus’ mouth. He also taught praying the Psalms together in community, rather than only as an individual, psalms as corporate laments.

Perhaps this quality of faith – to be of aid in really bad times as well as good times, are what make the Jewish and Christian faiths so strong. But to make use of this quality of our faith we cannot be triumphalists, seeking glory and victory at the downfall of others, as Christian Nationalists might. We have to be weak and aware of our frailty and our desperate need of God’s help, not relying on our own. Isn’t it good to be weak in this way, knowing we have a God who goes with us in our sorrows?

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for being a God who sees us through adversity. Help us to be unafraid of our weaknesses because they make us rely on you to be our strength.