Losing the Plot? Psalm 17 and November 5th (a sermon)

On this day, November 5th, in 1605 a search of the dank undercroft of the House of Lords carried out in response to an anonymous tip-off discovered a cache of thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.

Guarding the horde was a thirty-five year old former soldier named Guy Fawkes. As a recent documentary presented by Top Gear’s Richard Hammond has amply and rather spectacularly demonstrated, this was more than enough gunpowder for its intended purpose: to ensure the utter destruction to rubble of the building and the death of anyone unlucky enough to be in it at the time. The planned time, the day of November 5th, was scheduled for the opening of parliament. The hope of the conspirators was of course that the Protestant King, James 1, would be among those destroyed in the blast and that they would thereafter by able to install his daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic queen. Instead of becoming a date of sombre remembrance, as September 11 has surely become in our time, Nov 5th became for the English nation a day of joyous celebration, with effigies of the hapless Fawkes placed atop large bonfires and fireworks exploding. And of course it was not merely held to be a national deliverance; it was a religiously significance moment. For years, the church bells would ring and special prayers and sermons would be offered on the day as a thanksgiving to God for his rescue of the English nation and its people.

The custom seems quaint to us today in this far off time and place. Yet there remains for us in our world a fine line between terror and triumph, between paranoia and providentialism, between fear and festival; and we ought to recognise that we sit at times on either side of that line. As in the past, we have a sense of the genuine fragility of our way of life and our deep dread of it all being swept away, not merely by some natural disaster, but by the hands of our enemies; and our feeling that if we survive it is because of, or evidence of, some divine vindication of our way of life. It is the theology of the golfer who thanks God for his victories, or of the movie star who clutches her Golden Globe in one hand and a claim of divine favour in the other. Like most bad theology it gains its power from being half-true.

Today’s Psalm seems to plunge us into that perspective, but very much on the side of fear. The Psalmist is, he feels, surrounded by his enemies (vs 9), pursued by them remorselessly (vs 10-11), the subject of what could be described as a vendetta (vs 11):

11 They lie waiting in our way on every side,
watching to cast us down to the ground;
12 Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey,
and as it were a lion’s whelp lurking in secret places.

He has, it seems, a good basis for his fear. His life is exposed to the wickedness of others. We shouldn’t imagine these fears to be baseless – even if we have not had the feeling of complete isolation and despair in the face of determined opponents who wish our destruction, we know of enough instances of this experience to understand it as a reality that some do experience. The canon of Scripture of course links this Psalm to the narrative of David’s life and his experience of Saul’s determined and murderous pursuit.

And so his appeal to Yhwh is desperate, made on the basis of his real experience of fear. He wants God to ‘Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the ungodly, that trouble me;’h - in other words, to secure him when all seems insecure. But more than this: he wants Yhwh to vindicate him by overthrowing his enemies (vs 13) –

13 Up, LORD, disappoint him, and cast him down;
deliver my soul from the ungodly, by thine own sword.

He appeals for a violent and decisive end to this persecution. And the appeal emerges from two convictions:

One is the conviction that his cause is just, and that he has himself not been dishonest in his appeal. We see this in vs 1-5. He is convinced of the rightness of his cause, and that if his heart is exposed to the judgement of God he will be found innocent. Likewise: his feet, he claims, have not slipped from the divine path – he has been a committed follower of God. He’s a victim, and he can see no way in which he is complicit in the crime.

We ought to note that there is no embarrassment about naming oppression and injustice, no sense in which he is a self-blaming victim. Though we should be aware enough of the capacity of human beings to self-justify and to overlook our own involvement in evildoing, we should not let ourselves become deaf to the cries of real victims.

Still, there is an awkwardness of the demand for divine vindication – since even if I am guiltless here, in this matter, I am certainly not, there, in that matter. Surely if nothing else a Christian frame of mind tells us to be wary here of catching specks while missing logs.

The second basis for his appeal is to the character of the Lord – he is the God of hesed, of steadfast love. The Lord is a saviour of those who seek refuge – the one whose renown down the ages has been for his rescue of the slaves from Egypt.

But both of these bases for his appeal require us as Christian readers to say more, given our knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.

The character of God the Psalmist knew from the Exodus and from his covenant with national Israel. The way in which we understand the salvation and the refuge of God and the steadfast love of the divine being is in the cross of Jesus Christ. We see there God’s commitment to his world not only as a victory, but as a victory won through the channel of defeat. We see there not only the divine conquest, but that the divine conquest comes in the midst of submission to the wickedness of humanity, absorbing the worst of its blows. The divine response to this human complaint is to make these words divine words – Jesus knew the fear, pain and isolation in the fragility of life surrounded by, taunted by and tortured by his enemies.

Already we can see how the second basis for the Psalmist’s appeal is open to a Christian understanding – the innocence of the Psalmist is the innocence of the Son, of Jesus himself, who was innocent of all deceit and wickedness, whose feet did not transgress, - and who was vindicated by God when he was raised from the dead and exalted to the highest place. It was he who ‘beheld God’s face in righteousness’; who met the conditions of the just judgement of God against the outrages of human behaviour and in whom we can know justification and righteousness, vindication, hope and security. It is Christ who makes this prayer our prayer – he makes it a prayer we can pray without self-justification, or self-righteousness, or triumphalism. He makes it possible for us to hope in the teeth of our terrible crisis. It makes it possible for us to receive God’s blessings without understanding this as something belongs to us by right, or as a sign of our own inherent superiority. It is a grace that teaches us gratitude. He makes it possible for us to name injustice and condemn it without hypocrisy. He enables us to be the ones that overcome.

Psalm 17, we discover, is a prayer a Christian martyr could pray – in hope that their cause is just and that God is a present help in trouble.