(why have You forsaken me?) For the choir director, upon the hind of the morning. A psalm of David. Psalm 22:1 (Hebrew text) The Hind of the Morning – If you thought the contemporary passion for praise and worship songs started in this generation, then you haven’t read the Psalms. In fact, Moses started the whole genre with his song (Exodus 15), but David is the consummate composer. However, David’s praise and worship songs might never make it into our Sunday services. Why? Because they don’t always have the upbeat, positive, repetitive outlook that we have come to expect. David’s praise and worship songs come from a penetrating experience of life, not from idealized theological answers. A prime example is Psalm 22. We recognize the psalm by its first English verse (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), but that is not the first Hebrew verse. The first Hebrew verse is the instruction to the choirmaster to set these words to the music of a tune called, “the deer of dawn.” In Hebrew, the phrase is ayyeleth hashshahar. Now, you’re probably thinking, “So what?” What does it matter that David wanted this psalm sung to a tune about deer? Ah, but you don’t see just how startling this is unless you recognize what David’s choice implies. You see, the words ayyeleth hashshahar are used in other parts of Scripture (Song 6:10, Proverbs 5:19) as metaphors for a man’s beautiful bride. You would have seen the clue if you knew that the word ayyeleth is specifically a female deer (a hind, not a roe). The tune David chooses might easily have been a wedding song. But for David, the joyful tune of the morning after marriage becomes the vehicle to speak of a terrible loss – the absence of God. Imagine taking one of the familiar tunes of celebration, like “Here I am to worship”, and re-writing the lyrics so that the song is about God’s abandonment. Now you have some idea of the marked contrast that David wants to employ. David takes a wedding tune (possibly) and turns it into a funeral dirge. Why would David create such a jarring juxtaposition? Perhaps David wanted the music itself to underscore the traumatic content of these words. “My God, where are you? Why have you left me? I am lost and hurting. I know Who You are, but I don’t see You acting appropriately. What’s the matter?” The lyrics are shocking, even more so when they are set to a tune of joyful exuberance. Now the music and the lyrics thrust us into the confusion of these thoughts. We expected a God of grace – and we got a God of silence. We wanted joy in the morning – but we got an empty bed. Praise and worship? Yes, the Bible does not allow us to escape into the world of make-believe “everything is perfect” repetition. Praise and worship begins here – in disparity between what should be and what is, in desperate cries and emptiness. Praise and worship starts with the absence of the lover of my soul – but it doesn’t end here,Forsaken – If you want to understand the depth of David’s cry, you must know something about the verb he chooses. ‘Azav has a special history; a history that colors this opening line in lampblack. The first time we see ‘azav in Scripture is in Genesis 2:24, a verse that is at polar opposites from David’s cry. “For this reason, a man shall leave,” is really the verb “forsake.” A man shall forsake, abandon, separate from his parents in order to cling, attach and join with his wife. There is a price to pay to enter into a new union, but this “forsaking” is well worth it. Marriage is the human symbol of God’s intended intimacy for our divine relationship. David certainly must have had this joyful union in mind when he used the same verb to express a forsaking that leaves us empty. The equation is not balanced. Instead of forsake resulting in cling, we are left at the altar. The intended spouse does not arrive. At the last moment, God seems to have chosen divorce rather than marriage. There will be no celebration, no “deer of the dawn” because the wedding has been called off. What should have been a marriage made in heaven has become a separation straight from hell. Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers chronicles the life of a minister who no longer experiences God’s presence. Asked to pray for a dying woman, he offers his plea but confides that his prayer hits a lead ceiling. There is no answer. God has forsaken men. As Leonardo DiCaprio said in Blood Diamond, “God left Africa a long time ago.” There are certainly days when we find ourselves in the dark corners of the universe, wondering where the God of grace has gone. This is a time for a genuine theology of emotions. Intellectual propositions cannot touch the despair of feeling that our deepest desire for intimate union remains unquenched. Something is wrong with the world, and we are powerless to fix it. Unless God arrives in all His emotional glory, our lives are as unfulfilled as the one left standing at the altar. When love fails, the world falls. This is the message of Ecclesiastes. A theology of emotions must begin with pain, the universal language of all human beings. If your version of praise and worship skirts the real cries of shattered souls, then you live an anemic Christianity. You faith will not stand up to the deepest questions. If God is to be my really intimate partner, the lover of my soul, then He must come to me when I am overwhelmed with grief, desperate and alone. I need a God Who feels what I feel; a divine spouse Who knows the darkness that wants to drown me. I need the equation balanced. Forsake must become cling.shalom
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 02:47:43 +0000
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