Psalm
130
Palm
Sunday
Drowning is a terrible
way to die. Somebody who almost drowned
in a swimming pool as a child describes his memory of that day.
“Scratching
desperately at the tiled side of the pool, I watched tranquil shafts of
sunlight waver in the water. I tried to cram my stubby fingertips into the
grout of the pool's tile, trying--and failing--to find some sort of handhold.
Alone and sinking downward, a shrill series of screams left my young mouth--but
they were lost as soon as they were uttered, transformed into mute bubbles. An
eternity later, the heavy water darkened around me. My limbs grew weary from
frantic windmilling; my lungs ached; my eyes closed, surrendering.”[1]
The moment when someone is going under is a moment
of total fear, when they cry out with all that they have. Psalm 130 is about just such a moment.
The
people of Israel, time and time again, faced physical danger of being
annihilated. The Assyrians and
Babylonians overran the country at different times, enslaving those whom they
did not slaughter. In exile, the book of
Esther describes, how those who survived and even came to prominence in their
new lands would sometimes face hatred and persecution and mass murder. Some commentators suggest that Psalm 130
might have been written as the lament of the exiles who lived both with that
danger and the thought that maybe they had done something to bring it on
themselves.
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be
attentive to the voice of my
supplications!
If you, O Lord, should mark
iniquities, Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you, so that
you may be revered.”
[Psalm
130:1-4]
It is the prayer of someone who is reaching out, whatever
circumstance they might be in, to the Lord and asking for the one thing that
someone who is drowning needs above all else.
That man who recalled almost drowning as a child said, “As I choked and sputtered with the
sting of chlorine, a hand reached down into the shadowy depths and yanked me
upward to the bright air.” He survived
because and only because of that hand reaching down into the water, the lethal
water, and lifting him up into life.
In 1872, the German
government forced the closing of all religious schools, both Protestant and
Catholic. As a result, in 1873 five nuns
were aboard the S.S. Deutschland, headed
for America, when the ship went down in a storm in the English Channel,
drowning around 200 people. The priest
and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described it.
“Into
the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The
Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake,
black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast,
in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and
white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making
unchilding unfathering deeps.”[2]
Hopkins
compares himself that evening, sitting calmly at home, not even realizing what
was happening out in the night.
“Away
in the loveable west,
On
a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And
they the prey of the gales;
She
to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling
flakes, to the throng that catches and quails
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come
quickly’:
The
cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.”[3]
She, at the moment of death, called out for the One
who can reach down into death and draw her up into life.
That
is the irony of Palm Sunday. People
thought that Jesus, riding into Jerusalem, was going to declare himself King
and raise himself up onto a throne when, in fact, he was riding to his death,
going into the very deepest depth that human beings face, to become the hand of
God that saves us from the depths; because God has heard, and God hears, the
cries of his people and with an outstretched arm and a mighty hand reaches out
to save them.
There
are so many depths that we face before we reach that point of death. There are the depths of a child’s loss of a
pet, and the depths faced by a farmer when the rains fail. There are the depths faced by parents who
lose a child or the people who are forced from their homes by war. There are the depths faced by a family that
watches its home burn down or by the business owner who (we even use the
language of drowning) goes under.
Finally, though, for everyone, there is the loss of life itself and even
when someone who has led a long and satisfying life knows that it is just time
to go and that they go to a better place, there is still that sadness.
Because,
however, Jesus did not ride into Jerusalem to
elevate himself, but rather to enter fully into human suffering and even
death in a terrible and gruesome form, it means that there would be nowhere
that God would be a stranger. That’s why
it matters that we insist that Jesus was actually God, not just God’s
representative.
“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word
I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than those
who watch for the
morning,
more than those
who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there
is steadfast love,
and with him is
great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel from all
its iniquities.”
[Psalm 130:5-8]
Jesus, entering Jerusalem that day, was God diving
into the depths from which we call to him, to reach us through the storm and
the waves, to lift us, in the end, to the only true safety anyone can ever
know, to a life that, like his, is without end.
Isaiah spoke for God, and said,
“But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you,
O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you
are mine. When you pass through
the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not
overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the
flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your
Savior.”
[Isaiah 43:1-3]
Jesus made that a full reality, at a terrible
price for him, but a priceless gift for us.
[1]
Erik Henriksen, “How to Drown Your Child” in the Portland Mercury, July 15, 2004.
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/true-stories-of-near-drowning/Content?oid=31724
[2]
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, l. 97-104.
[3] Ibid., l. 185-192.
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