Retreat Address on the Psalms 5 - Prayer and Rage (Psalm 79)

In my second address, I began by mentioning the psalmists oppressed by wickedness and the utter wrongness of things who cry, “How long, O Lord?”. Here is one of those psalms that has turned up in our morning cycle. So let’s not tiptoe round the maelstrom but plunge into its centre in the hope of finding some still small voice amid the roar of wind and waves.

Primo Levi’s powerful memoir of Auschwitz, If This is a Man, offers an unflinching testimony to the minute particulars of cruelty and suffering. In one place, he writes about the wooden bowls each prisoner had. They were precious because without your bowl, you would not be able to eat, and once lost, it could be extremely hard to procure another. So prisoners would etch their name or camp number on the bottom of their bowl. But Levi came across a Frenchman who did not do this but etched instead the words Ne pas chercher à comprendre. For Auschwitz is a place beyond all understanding, a place that makes no-sense, where there is no answer to the question “why?” This is the world our psalm inhabits.

You’ll remember that in the week of The Queen’s Speech, a “day of rage” was organised in London in support of the Grenfell Tower victims and the social conditions that were exposed by that terrible fire. There was a lot of criticism about the demonstration, and a number of Christians posted messages on social media arguing that it was a day of prayer that was needed, not a day of rage. I can see both sides of this debate. But when I read psalms like 79, so full of anger in the aftermath of a fearful catastrophe, I find I have more sympathy with the protesters. Whatever else this psalm and others like it have to say, they seem to me to give us permission to rage. Not to protest at the injustice of it all seems to me to be a failure to feel with and for its victims who are our own flesh and blood.

But this is not a licence to rage blindly, or to rage hatefully at other people. The thing is, to rage in the presence of God. And that is the startling insight of these angry psalms, as it is of the Book of Job which we have been reading at the Church of England morning office in recent weeks. This is not sightless rage, but a far-seeing rage that sees that there is a God to be wrestled with and reckoned with, to whom all the great questions of life and death, suffering and distress need to be addressed. Why this? Why us? Why now? Why did you allow it? Where were you? How long, O Lord before you come to help us?

Like Psalm 106 which we looked at yesterday, disaster has struck Judah. They, the destroying nations, have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. This points again to the Babylonian invasion of the sixth century. By this time, the people are possibly in exile, or maybe still picking over the ruins of their holy and beautiful house in a post-traumatic state of shock, bewilderment and paralysis that is common after some awful catastrophe has befallen. And the opening verses leave us in no doubt about the terror they have endured. Human bodies lie unburied because there is no-one left to care for them; they are now carrion for wild animals and birds of prey. Blood has flowed in rivers around Jerusalem. The nations looking on, the pitiless goyyim as the psalm calls them, have no words of comfort, only derision and mockery. It is one of those unforgettable human landscapes depicted in the scriptures, and one of the most desolate and forlorn. Who would not weep in the face of such anguish?

The heart of this lament is the passionate prayer introduced by the words we began with, How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?  It’s hardly a comfortable psalm to recite when so much of it is dominated by the sense of divine judgment. But there is a logic here, and the way the argument works is important. It begins by recognising that the Lord’s anger with his people is justified. There is a reason for all the suffering they have endured: do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors…deliver us and forgive our sins. So we are back in the same experience of yesterday with Psalm 106 and how we tell the story of our own failure and sin. Here, it is the people who are doing this collectively. In the other psalm we recited this morning, Psalm 51, it is the individual penitent. Both these are different from the many laments where the sufferer does not understand why he or she is undergoing this punishment. Here, the people do not question God’s justice. They accept the premise that turning away from the will of a righteous God, violating his torah and transgressing his commandments is wilfully to break his covenant. And that in turn is to bring down on Israel the sanctions of a broken contract, the curses that are the other side of the blessings set before the people when the covenant was enacted in cloud and fire at the mountain of Horeb that you find in the Book Deuteronomy

The psalmist sees the nations as God’s unwitting agents in punishing Israel. Yet the prayer is that God will deliver Israel from the goyyim who have been the instruments of his justice. There seems to be the assumption that in the wholesale havoc they have wreaked, they have overreached themselves. So the prayer asks that God will turn his anger away from Israel and towards the goyyim. Pour out your anger on the nations that do not know you, and on the kingdoms that do not call upon your name. For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation. And all this because poor Jacob is left friendless without ally or champion – whether among the surrounding nations or in almighty God himself. 

It’s important not to misunderstand outbursts of anger like these which are very common in the psalms. It is not (or not primarily) that Israel wants vengeance for its own sake. Rather, it is the concern that God should be God, should vindicate himself before the world, publicly demonstrate that he cares about protecting his reputation, is moral as well as mighty. You could say that what exercises the psalmist is putting right and stabilising the moral order of the universe. It is unjust that the nations have punished Israel beyond what they deserved. And it is unjust that they continue to mock the people and blaspheme their God. Why should the nations say, “Where is their (that is, Israel’s) God?” Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes. 

The final section encapsulates these themes and adds an afterword. The psalmist returns to the plight of Judah’s victims and prays let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power preserve those doomed to die. But his fury is so close to the surface that it bursts out one last time. Return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbours the taunts with which they taunted you, O Lord! A sevenfold punishment is exceptionally severe. But the psalm doesn’t end on that vengeful note. Instead, it looks forward to deliverance. There is a “certainty of hearing” as there is in so many laments, the confidence that God will act for his beleaguered nation and in due time they will have cause to be thankful. Then we your people, the flock of your pasture, will give thanks to you forever; from generation to generation we will recount your praise. So the first forever question is answered by a forever affirmation. Will you be angry forever? … We will give you thanks forever. It is in the Lord’s hands. Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

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I said this was not a comfortable psalm. I think it calls for spiritual self-awareness if we are going to pray it with integrity. I don't so much mean that we are all affected the church’s culture of niceness where negative feelings are not allowed. I am more thinking of the risk we face that we could be eaten up by this rage, so full of righteous (or unrighteousness) anger that we forget that we are taught to love not only our neighbour but our enemy as well. I want to come back later to how we read this psalm on Friday, the day of the Cross.

Here is what I find myself doing with psalms like these. First, I want to affirm the importance of truth-telling when it comes to calamity and devastation. What is refreshing in the psalm laments is the total absence of pretence. They are written out of the searing experience of disaster and agony, and this is what the psalmist intends to lay before God. This puts a question mark by our propensity always to find a formal, courteous register that we regard as fit to be used in the presence of God. I am all for getting the words of public worship right! But there are times when carefully honed rhythms and cadences do not quite do justice to the hardness and roughness of human experience. The laments tell us: we do not need to be afraid to come as we are into the divine presence. God asks us and wants us to be truthful about our condition, and if that means crying out in unadorned protest at the ordeals that others or we are suffering, then that is how we must pray. Indeed, it would be wrong to bend the ear of the divine on any other terms. And if we doubt the legitimacy of praying out of godforsakenness and despair, we have only to think of the agonised last words of Jesus on the cross in St Matthew and St Mark. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabhachthani? “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Next, I want to ask us to take seriously the kind of God to whom this lament is addressed. When the text talks about his being angry forever, we tend to think of the affect, an outburst of emotion as likely as not wild and uncontrolled. I believe this is to misunderstand the psalm. In the Hebrew Bible, anger at its best, like love, is an act of the will. It's a decision. In the concrete imagery of the Old Testament, love is to turn your face towards someone else, while anger is to turn your face away. Which is to say that when we get behind our emotions, anger and love are two sides of the same coin, which is about honouring the integrity of a personal relationship. It’s in the nature of a holy God to love truth, integrity and justice, and to abhor what is false, wicked and wrong. So the psalm appeals to God’s character as a way of reckoning with the disaster that has happened. If God is responsible for events (as he must ultimately be), then it is only by laying over them the template of God’s character as we have learned to know him that we can hope to respond adequately, theologically and spiritually. So at its best, our human rage at the injustices that we see all around us is a way of aligning ourselves with the God who is angry about them too. I would not want to pray to a God who was not angry about the injustice and cruelty in the world, angry at how the poor and the voiceless and the meek and those in pain suffer, so often at the hands of both the tyrannical and the neglectful. 

And this brings me to a third reflection, that all our prayer and all our theology must be rooted in the experience of human beings. What has prompted this psalm is the destruction of a land and the suffering of its people. So it starts out with the victims and their plight. This is a feature of all the laments. Psalm 79 is specific about the pain being endured by a people who are crying out to be delivered. The first four verses are a vivid description of an ordeal that speaks for itself. Only after the psalmist has entered into that dreadful experience can he develop a way of praying in the light of it. I think there is an insight here of profound importance for our prayer, our proclamation and our mission. For if, as I said yesterday, religion has nothing to say about suffering, then it has nothing to say. We must be for the suffering people, as Albert Schweitzer said. And whatever we believe we are called to say in the aftermath of some terrible tragedy (and we shall of course choose our words with the greatest of care), the first message to convey is that we are trying to understand, to think ourselves into other people’s ordeals, to give ourselves in compassion, empathy and love. And if this is the way in which Christianity teaches us to serve, it is also the way it teaches us how to think, theologise and pray. 

My fourth thought is about the importance of keeping hope alive. That might not strike you as the message of the psalm. But I think it lies at its very core. For one thing, why pray to God at all if the psalmist didn’t believe that he or she would be heard? Or that God was capable of making a difference? Or that he cared? Prayer is the evidence that hope exists even when it looks as though all hope is lost. And the psalm’s conclusion leaves us in no doubt that this lament springs not only out of bitterness and anger, but also out of hope. There is this “certainty of hearing” that I have mentioned before. We your people, the flock of your pasture, will give you thanks forever. That phrase your people holds the clue. It’s an allusion to the covenant promise, “I will be your God and you shall be my people”. So the psalm ends by reminding God of his undertakings to the people he loves. It's a vital clue about the relationship between God and his people that makes this passionate prayer possible at all. We could easily miss the promise and hope enfolded in it. For us Christians, it makes us look beyond the immediate historical context of the psalm to the relationship of mercy and love God wants to have with all humanity. It was for this that he sent his Son as the everlasting sign of his face turned towards us, and which is symbolised in the gospel when Jesus is named Immanuel, God is with us. 

My final reflection is perhaps the most important of all. On this Friday as on every Friday, we commemorate the cross. So we must always read texts of suffering in the light of the Passion. For it is at Golgotha that human pain meets God’s pain, and the suffering of humanity is interpreted and given meaning by a crucified God himself. 

As we gaze on the cross with our hearts full because we love Jesus, we can perhaps share the anguish of this psalm. I mean that as we look on him as the innocent victim of human cruelty, it would be natural to rage against those who hate him so, who mock him and spit on him, who crown him with thorns and pierce his precious side. Some of the art and music of the crucifixion captures this sense of outrage, for instance the choruses in the Bach Passions that protest against what is being done to the divine Victim. But of course that sits side by side with another insight of Holy Week, that it is we ourselves who are doing this to Jesus. It is we who need to be reconciled, we for whom Jesus prays from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. 

So before I take this psalm on my lips to express my anger, or God’s anger, towards others, I need to recite it against myself, so to speak, imagining myself as the oppressor of God’s people and therefore the oppressor of God. For I know, if I'm honest, that I have it in me to be the one who clamours “crucify him!” I wish I didn't. So I need to face the violence within myself that is capable of cruelty and harm, even if I don't act it out. And when I view the psalm from that turned-round perspective, it leads me straight to the cross and to the Reproaches of Good Friday, “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!”  

I'm saying that while it may seem a long journey from the rage of our psalm to the forgiveness and healing of the Cross, it isn't really. When the psalmist draws on the image of the shepherd tending his flock, we know we are not far from Golgotha, the place where that same shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. In that act of redeeming love, all hatred, all wrath, all bitterness, all despair is gathered up and transformed. The cross makes all the difference because it is where, as I said earlier in the week, we see what glory means: self-emptying, love poured out. It turns lament into thanksgiving, defeat into victory, sorrow into joy, desperation into hope. The psalmist can glimpse a dawn because he knows that even as he passes through the valley of the shadow of death, he needs fear no evil “for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me”. The possibility of living confidently out of hope while surrounded by terror and devastation is all that the psalmist needs to travel on. It is all we need as well. We can once again light candles in dark places and make the desert blossom. It may sound heroic in bleak circumstances. But experience tells us not to lose heart. It may feel like hoping against hope. But because of the cross, we know that our hope is not in vain. 

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For meditation today, we might want to think about those on whose behalf we are angry, people treated unjustly, the victims of cruelty, those who are helpless in circumstances that overwhelm them. We could ask ourselves how we express our anger, how we turn it into prayer and good action that could make a difference to others. And on this Friday, we shall want to come back to the cross and give thanks for the redemption of the world and for our own forgiveness, and where we pray for the reconciliation of all people and all things in the Christ who loves us to the end.

Retreat Address on the Psalms 4 - Prayer and the Memory of Failure (Psalm 106)

This psalm is the last of a sequence of long psalms which concludes Book IV of the Psalter. Psalm 102 is one of the penitential psalms which is answered by 103, a joyful song of forgiveness. 104 is a glowing hymn that celebrates the marvels of creation as God’s handiwork. Psalm 105 continues the theme of telling the story of God’s ‘wonderful works’ (105.2) by recalling how the Hebrews were delivered from Egypt, kept safe through the years of wilderness wandering and finally installed in their own land. Together, these four big Psalms encompass the whole of Hebrew faith in a God who has created the world and loves his people, who has redeemed Israel as his chosen and looks for a covenant relationship with them.  

Psalm 106 tells the same story as 105, but from a quite different perspective.  Its first few verses are deceptive.  The invitation to praise the Lord! O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever’(1) is very like the start of 105.  We imagine that this joyful note of celebration will be continued through 106 as well.  But it is not to be. There are soon hints of a minor key: remember me, O Lord, when you show favour to your people; help me when you deliver them (4-5).  The sun may have risen in a clear sky, but it is not long before clouds begin to obscure it.  

The hues become rapidly more sombre.  Both we and our ancestors have sinned; we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly (6).  This is not simply some general acknowledgment of human frailty but the psalmist’s recognition of a specific strain of rebelliousness on the part of the people.  What made their unbelief particularly culpable was that it went right back to the founding events of their story, and this in the face of the clear evidence of all that God was doing for his people.  Our ancestors, when they were in Egypt, did not consider your wonderful works; they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love, but rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea (7).  And this becomes the depressing theme of this long recital of Israel’s waywardness.  She had been redeemed from slavery, and set on the long march to freedom.  Yet inwardly there was no redemption and therefore no true liberation.  The message of the Psalm is that this people were as enslaved as ever in their hearts.  Freedom still lies in the future.  And the psalmist himself is part of this carefully crafted confession. both we and our ancestors have sinned.  

God however constantly acts in spite of the people’s unbelief and ingratitude. The “gets” and the “buts” of this psalm are striking. Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, so that he might make known his mighty power (8).  Faced with the signs and wonders of the Exodus, there is, to be sure, a period of obedience: Then they believed his words; they sang his praise (12).  But it doesn’t last long. They soon forgot his works (13).  Forgetfulness, or rather, the more blameworthy “not remembering” is the fundamental issue of this Psalm for which the people are both culpable and to be pitied.  To the psalmist this spiritual amnesia is not only hard to forgive but hard to understand, in stark contrast to how God himself does not forget his covenant but ‘remembers’ it, as the psalm goes on to say (45).  

This interplay of divine memory and human forgetting follows the way the stories are told in the Books of Exodus and Numbers.  The central section (13-33) is an indictment of the Hebrews for their failure of memory and their lack of faith in the desert.  A long sequence of episodes reinforces this bleak message.  No sooner have they crossed the sea than they ‘test’ God by demanding to be fed (14-15). Then envy sets in, represented by the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram (16-18) whose grumbling against Moses led to a spectacular display of judgment. I said yesterday when we looked at the wisdom psalm 49 that envy is so often the root cause of wrongdoing. So it is here. What follows is the episode of the golden calf (19-23) made by Aaron at the insistence of the people, an act of defiance not only of Moses’ leadership but of the covenant itself.  All this was tantamount to ‘despising’ what was promised (24) while they grumbled in their tents and did not obey the voice of the Lord (25). And then the wholesale collapse into idolatry, which is to give to a created thing the honour that is due only to God. 

However, God hesitates to treat the people as contemptuously as they have treated him.  Just as he saved them from the enemy despite their rebellion (8), so twice he restrains himself from executing the judgment that their behaviour merits.  On both occasions, this is at the behest of a human intercessor.  The first time it is Moses who after the incident of the golden calf stays God’s act of execution. Therefore he said he would destroy them – had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach (23).  The prayer attributed to Moses in Exodus 32.1-14 movingly asks God to ‘remember’ his promises of old, and not to bring himself into disrepute by appearing to be fickle in his treatment of the Hebrews.  The second occasion (24-31) occurs when the Hebrews have fallen into idolatry by engaging in the worship of ‘Baal of Peor’ and in illicit sexual activity. Thousands of Hebrews perish in the plague that follows.  However Phinehas, a grandson of Aaron demonstrates such zeal in acting against one of the transgressors that he earns for himself an everlasting memory as God’s favoured priest: and that has been reckoned to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever (31).  

We would like all these events to be simply episodes in an otherwise blameless history.  We would understand it if the difficulties and challenges of extreme circumstances in the desert brought out the worst in the people. Surely things will get better when they arrive in a generous and fertile land!  Yet the final part of the story relentlessly drives home the lesson that nothing has changed when they cross the Jordan. Their desires remain as disordered as they always were.  When they should have purified the land of its pagan cults, instead they merely make its religious practices their own (34-39), its depravity symbolised by the practice of child-sacrifice (37-38), always in the Hebrew scriptures a mark of people who have sold out to the most corrupting behaviour imaginable.  In this way, he says, they not only pollute the land but themselves (38-39) in acts of apostasy that the psalmist, in common with prophets like Hosea, unsparingly calls acts of shameless ‘prostitution’.  

This is why the Israel finds herself in her current predicament.  Up to now, the psalmist has not mentioned the historical situation in which Israel finds herself.  But at the Psalm’s climax it becomes clear what this long recital is for.  It’s to assert that in a decisive act of history, God has finally done what he had intended to do all along: to punish the people for their unfaithfulness.  His prayer at the very end makes clear what this refers to: Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the nations (47).  The people are overrun and in exile.  And this time there is no-one to intercede for them.  They are on their own before God.  Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people… he gave them into the hand of the nations, so that those who hated them ruled over them (40-41).  We are in the 6^th century BCE when Israel is in the alien land of Babylon and crying out in despair, in the words of a more famous psalm, ‘how shall we sing the Lord’ song in a strange land?’ (Psalm 137:4).

Bleak though this landscape is, the psalmist is not without hope.  In a final act of remembering, he recalls how Yahweh heard his people when they were oppressed and saved them (43-46).  The cry for deliverance with which the Psalm ends is almost no more than a simple coda.  But how much poignancy and pain is compressed into the single verse in which the psalmist, taking up the mantle of Moses and Phineas on behalf of the people, beseeches the Lord to save his people (47).  There is no pretence that the story is other than it is, no pitiful excuses or self-justification.  There is simply the hope, reminiscent of Moses’ prayer, that a restored and grateful people will demonstrate God’s faithfulness to the world: gather us from among the nations, so that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise’. The last verse, a doxology of praise to mark the end of Book IV of the Psalter, also stands as the anticipated thanksgiving of a restored people who can once again say ‘amen’ to a final act of deliverance.

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This long catalogue of perversity and its punishment does not exactly lift the spirits. So what should we do with texts like this? 

Here are three reflections. First, the psalm reminds us that while there are times, many of them, when we need to tell our story in order to celebrate it, at other times we need to tell the same story as an act of contrition and lament.  I don’t think we are good at doing this, either as nations and communities, or as individual men and women. What this psalm makes us face up to is our propensity to deceive ourselves as to our true state before God and one another. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So it comes down to spiritual candour, making sure that when we hold up the mirror to ourselves, it tells us the truth. “Faking it”, as we might say, “play acting” as Jesus calls it in the Sermon on the Mount, inevitably leads in the end to disclosure and downfall. What we are in ourselves will always become plain to see in time, like the picture of Dorian Grey. Our desires always give us away in the end because they make it plain what we truly value. 

And, says the story, it all happens because of our neglect of God. St Augustine says that sin is to be “bent back into yourself”, that is, giving way to desire that is misshapen, distorted because its focus is on yourself, not on God. He says that it's therefore a failure of love, not so much a lack of love but applying love in a self-serving way.  This psalm gives us an anatomy of disordered desire, how we can and do give ourselves up to the wrong things which can never be ends in themselves. In the opening chapters of the Letter to the Romans St Paul takes up words and images from this Psalm and universalises them. He says in effect, this story of Psalm 106, of forgetfulness, envy and idolatry is us, all of us, at least in terms of our unreserved propensity. ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3.20). St John urges us to keep ourselves from idols. You could say that “good” religion comes down to this, freeing ourselves from idolatry and acknowledging and worshipping the one true God. And this is the possibility held out to us in the gospel.

And that brings us on to my next reflection, which is about transformation. There lies in this psalm a profound impetus for change, for a new direction in the future. In one of his essays Thomas Merton says that “the Christian’s vision of the world ought, by its very nature, to have in it something of poetic inspiration”. He means by this seeing “beyond the surface of things and events”, glimpsing “something of the inner and ‘sacred’ meaning of the cosmos which, in all its movements and all its aspects, sings the praises of its Creator and Redeemer. And if this is true of how we contemplate the created world, it's also true of how we tell the story of God’s mighty works. In that story, we need to learn like the psalmist how to discern not only our human frailty but the sacred and redemptive too, not only nature but grace.

This sacramental vision of life may sound altogether too rarified for the cut and thrust of life. But for Merton, it’s precisely in “ordinary time” that we most need to cultivate this contemplative, poetic attitude that glimpses possibilities in the banal, the dispiriting, the tragic stories of human life. He goes on: “There is no revolution without a voice. The passion of the oppressed must first of all make itself heard at least among themselves, in spite of the insistence of the privileged oppressor that such needs cannot be real, or just, or urgent. The more the cry of the oppressed is ignored, the more it strengthens itself with a mysterious power that is to be gained from myth, symbol and prophecy. There is no revolution without poets who are also seers. There is no revolution without prophetic songs.” Merton is thinking about human oppressors, but in the psalm it is corruption and vice that are the oppressing enemy from whose iron fist we cry out to be saved. St Paul describes this conflicted experience in Romans chapter 7 where he agonises about the good he wants to do but can't, and the evil he wants to shun but instead finds himself committing. Merton and St Paul tell me that the oppressor does not have the last word. And believing this is the motivation I need to act for change, or at least to pray for it. 

Finally we should notice the key role in this psalm that belongs to Moses and Phinehas. To “stand in the breach” and make intercession for others is one of the greatest gifts we can offer anybody in their times of testing and trial. The nation’s ordeals did not in the end get the better of them, though it looked as though they would. The psalm rightly credits these two men with performing nothing less than a rescue through acting as brave intercessors. It was an act of love on their part: intercession always is. So here is a direct message to you as a religious community. Among the many things you offer to the world and the church is your intercession. Maybe we secular Christians don’t recognise enough the contribution you make through your faithful prayers day in, day out, standing in the breach on behalf of so many people both within the church and beyond it. So I want to thank you for this “work” that you do as part of your celebration of the opus dei, for the love you show to the human race by your constant involvement in the prayer of the church. It's a reflection of how our Great High Priest bears humanity before the Father, interceding for us in our brokenness and exile and pain. 

Our hope, our conviction, must always be that the covenant has not failed. The psalm reassures us that it hasn't. Its concluding words turn this long text back from lament to praise and gratitude. Nevertheless he regarded their distress when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered his covenant and showed compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love. God’s wish, God’s only purpose is to mend humanity, put us back together again, apply balm to heal the grievous wounds that afflict our race, rescue us from the distorted desires that drive us into idolatry and remake us in his image as people of grace and mercy, truth and peace. This is how we prodigals find our way home again and are welcomed back by a loving Father. We are forgiven, reconciled, embraced. At the end of this psalm’s long and gloomy day, the sun comes out once more.  

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For reflection today, we may want to imitate this psalm and look back over the story of our lives. When and why have our desires become misshapen, when and why have we fallen prey to envy and idolatry? Are there patterns we can discern? And then, having faced the truth about that story, how can we retell it as a story of grace, mercy and forgiveness so that we end up where the psalm ends up, on a note of thankfulness? As part of this, can we identify and give thanks for those who stood in the breach and interceded for us? How does that memory help us in our own intercession for other people today?

Scotland

So the Union is safe – for now. I won’t pretend that I am not mightily relieved at the result of the Scottish vote. I was surprised to be moved by the news: perhaps I hadn’t realised how much I had invested in being a citizen of Great Britain. I am sure many of you share my gratitude that we have drawn back from the brink, but perhaps not everyone, so I am speaking personally. But we all agree that now it is time for healing and reconciliation, for the promises made to Scotland to be honoured, and for all the peoples of the United Kingdom to grow together. This is a great opportunity for our nation to flourish in a new way. We must not squander it.

 

Last week we installed a candle stand in front of the altar of Queen Margaret of Scotland and invited people to pray for this momentous decision. What did it have to do with an English cathedral? Our history tells us why we should have a special care and regard for the Scottish people. First, Cuthbert symbolises our long involvement with Scotland. He was born in what we now call the Borders, and entered the monastery at Old Melrose. He was not a Scot but a Northumbrian: the great northern kingdom at that time extended right up to the Firth of Forth. Only after the Conquest was the present border more or less defined. So Cuthbert has always led this Cathedral to look north rather than south.

 

Secondly, we know that the Scottish king Malcolm III was present when the foundation stone of this Cathedral was laid in 1093. I like to think that his wife, the saintly Queen Margaret whose confessor was Prior Turgot was there too. Thirdly, this Cathedral, next to the Castle on this acropolis, were built as a bastion against invasions from the hostile north: ‘half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot’ as Sir Walter Scott says in the lines etched on the parapet of Prebends’ Bridge. In these northern marches, relations with Scotland were always volatile. The great Neville Screen was given in thanksgiving for victory against the Scots at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. In 1513 Cuthbert’s banner was carried into another Anglos-Scottish battle at Flodden.

Finally, in one of the darkest episodes in our history in the winter of 1650-51, hundreds of Scots captured at the Civil War Battle of Dunbar were marched into England by Cromwell, and imprisoned here to die of cold, hunger or disease. I doubt that any English cathedral is as implicated in a long Scottish history as ours. But here in England, it is the future as well as the past that has greatly concerned many of us. It isn’t dramatizing things to say that the very existence of Great Britain was at stake. We need to be clear: a Union without Scotland would have made England a very different country from the country we grew up with within the United Kingdom. So when the Supreme Governor of the Church of England said that the decision was ‘a matter for the people of Scotland alone’, I’m afraid I needed loyally to dissent. A Yes vote would profoundly have affected everyone who is a citizen of this country, not least those like us who live so close to the Border.

 

But for me as a Christian, this debate has not only been about self-government, currency, immigration, Trident and oil, or even about social justice and welfare. It has raised deep theological and spiritual questions. We have heard surprisingly little about from the Church of England about is. So I want to ask: what light does a Christian mind shed on a decision that would always be divisive, even rancorous, where so much was at stake for England as well as Scotland? Running through the Bible is the idea of covenant which lies at the heart of God's relationship with human beings. God makes undertakings to his people; they in turn promise their fidelity to him as a response of gratitude and love. In the Bible, it is this insight about God’s character and what he asks from us that is at the heart of how we as individual human beings and as whole peoples relate to one another. ‘Better together’ is almost an echo of ‘It is not good for a human being to be alone’ in the book of Genesis. Therefore, any covenanted relationship based on mutual trust, fidelity, common purpose, interdependence and a care for one another’s welfare has to be better than being independent and alone. The breakup of the united kingdom of Israel and Judah after Solomon’s reign was seen as a disaster by the prophets because it flew in the face of a covenant between peoples. 

 

So I believed that for Scotland to say No to a hugely successful Union of 300 years would have been a tragedy. But it would also have been to turn away from the hard-won vision of what has bound our four nations together. The point is not whether Scotland could be a successful, prosperous nation on its own.  I am sure it could. But the Christian ideals of mutuality, partnership and service surely point in the opposite direction from narrow nationalisms and self-interest. The question for the UK’s member nations isn’t only, what are we getting out of the Union? but what can we put into it? What gifts and experience do we bring to it so that all our peoples flourish? I believe that we should be investing more in the relationships between us, not dismantling them, especially at a time when the world is hurtling dangerously in the direction of ever greater fragmentation and risk to peace. 

The United Kingdom is not a perfect union. We English have a history of treating the Scots with disdain, even contempt. We need to repent of this and start treating Scotland as an equal honoured partner in the Union. We should always have celebrated the intellectual, social, economic, cultural and spiritual benefits Scotland has brought to the UK, not belatedly talking them up in the last few panicky weeks. No doubt much will need to change in the way Scotland, and the United Kingdom are governed. A new covenant between Scotland and England will mean greater devolution, and this could blaze a trail for the regions of England too, not least here in the overlooked North East. The way ahead will be far from easy.  But I want to underline the words federation and partnership: these are the covenant virtues that should inspire us to work together so that all our peoples respect and celebrate one another’s charisms, dignity and worth. 

On St Matthew’s Day we remember a man whose imagination was stretched by meeting the Messiah. He saw that there was a larger future awaiting him in the company of Jesus and those who followed him. Through a life-changing relationship, he gave his life to the vision that so inspired him. He recognised that to join the community of Jesus’ disciples could only immeasurably enrich his life: better together than being held captive within the prison of self-absorption and self-interest. 

Is God calling the peoples of the United Kingdom to make a similar transformative journey? This is what we could model as we embrace newly-covenanted relationships among the rich diversity of its peoples. Scotland, thank God you did not leave. We need you as we travel together. It is not good to be alone. As they say on the Isle of Skye, ‘May all evil sleep, may all good awake as you walk the path ahead.’ God bless Scotland. God bless all our peoples.