The
Asbury Theological Journal 46.1 (1991) 87-94.
Copyright © 1991 by Asbury Theological Seminary. Cited with
permission.
A Question of
Identity:
The Threefold Hermeneutic
of Psalmody
JAMES L. MAYS
I.
In
his Confessions, Augustine tells how
he used the psalms as his own
prayer: "What utterances I used to send up unto
Thee in those Psalms, and
how I was inflamed toward Thee by them."1
Athanasius said of the psalms:
"They
seem to me to be a kind of mirror for everyone who sings them in
which he may observe the motions of the soul, and as
he observes them give
utterance to them in words."2 He
was seconded by Calvin who wrote in the
introduction to his commentary:
"I am wont to call them an anatomy of all
parts of the soul; for no-one will find in himself a
single feeling of which the
image is not reflected in the mirror."3
The historic comment on the psalms
is strewn with such observations.
These
remarks testify to a general and continuous experience. Christians
found themselves and came to expression in the
language of the psalms.
Their
own selves were identified with, and identified by, the self whose
voice speaks in these prayers.
When Christians talked like that,
they were referring especially to one
group of psalms, the prayers and songs composed as
the voice of an indi-
vidual. It was these psalms in
the first person that invited an awareness of
self and offered language to self. There are far
more psalms of this genre in
the book of Psalms than hymns of praise and poetry
of instruction. By the
James
Luther Mays is Cyrus McCormick Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament
Interpretation at Union Theological Seminary in
and editor and has recently served as president of
the Society of Biblical Literature.
In
this article, based on a lecture delivered at Asbury Theological Seminary in
the
Ryan
series, Mays explores how hermeneutical issues encounted
in the psalms
relate to contemporary practical concerns such as
liturgy, pastoral care and
personal piety.
88 Mays
weight of their number they dominate the Psalter and
give a cast and tone to
the whole.
The majority of the first-person
psalms are the prayers of a person in
trouble. There are some fifty of them in the
book. There is real variety in the
group in length, arrangement and content, but they
are held together as a
group in two important ways. First, they are
consistently composed of a
common set of elements. They name God and speak in
direct address to the
Lord.
They feature descriptions of trouble that is personal or social or theo-
logical in various combinations. Each is
organized around a petition to be
heard and helped. Trust is avowed. A promise of
praise and sacrifice to tes-
tify to the sought
deliverance is made.
The second common characteristic of
these prayers is what may be
called paradigmatic openness. Those who speak in the
psalms describe
themselves and their situations, but they do it in
a way that draws a verbal
portrait of a set of types rather than a report
about a specific person. The
language of description is formulaic and
metaphoric. It creates types of per-
sons and predicaments. The descriptions offer roles
which suit the continu-
ing structures of neediness
in human experience. It is precisely this com-
monality and openness that have
rendered this group of psalms so available
for the uses of corporate liturgy and private devotion.
For nearly two mil-
lennia, Christians have sung,
chanted and murmured these psalms as their
prayers. In acts of worship and devotion they
spoke of God and self and
world with the words the psalms provided. They found
and knew them-
selves through these prayers.
It is, however, a fact that these
prayers have become difficult and
strange for contemporary Christians. Where our
predecessors in prayer re-
ceived and used this language
with a sense of recognition, discovery and
lumination, it has become
problematic for many in our time. We hear these
prayers of pain and anguish as coming from
another quarter. This voice that
speaks so insistently, pleads and protests and even
argues. This voice that
addresses an absent God directly as if God were
there, a presence. This soul
riven by a desperate
dependence for rightness and life. This pilgrim that
must make a way as if through a dark valley
surrounded by foes to trust
and obedience. This human whose desire will not be
satisfied by anything
less than the experience of God. This individual in
the prayer psalms has
come to be different, a stranger, sometimes
embarrassing.
The public evidence for this sense
of discontinuity with the tradition of
psalmody began to appear, I think, in the movement
away from a complete
Psalter in communions that had always used one. Where selections of
psalms for singing and reading were made, it was
psalms of this particular
group that were omitted. Those that were included
were frequently edited
to omit portions felt to be difficult. The first
version of the contemporary
Common
Lectionary was sparse in its use of the prayers for help. Emphasis
on worship as celebration made them sound
incongruent in liturgy. Under-
standings and fashions of prayer that do not
easily accommodate the stance
A Question of Identity: The Threefold
Hermeneutic of Psalmody 89
and mood of psalmic
prayers are widespread. The prayer psalms visibly lost
their place as the canonical core of corporate
liturgy and private devotion.
What brought about the rupture
between the self evoked in the psalms
and the self-awareness of believers? The problem is
more than simple his-
torical and cultural distance.
After all, the correlation had lasted nearly two
thousand years. What are the reasons? A liberal
optimism about the human
condition? A stolid technical literalism that lost
the feel for the poetic, meta-
phorical, mythic as media of
reality? Theologies that obscured the face of a
God
who could (or would) answer the cry, "Hear me, help me"? Surely,
various related reasons exist, sometimes
gathered up under the sign of mod-
ernity.
There is currently a revival of
interest in this sector of psalmody. In part
the interest has been stimulated by the liturgical
renewal with its concern to
restore the psalms to their traditional role in
the materials of worship. The
latest version of the Common Lectionary uses far more
of the prayer psalms
than the earlier one did. There seems to be a
feeling of canonical guilt at
work in this and a determination to be more
inclusive. In part, the interest
expresses the realization of pastors and pastoral
care disciplines that these
psalmic prayers give people
language to express the distresses that press
against the limits of our customary banal,
trivial, deceptive talk. Rage, frus-
tration, depression, grief and
failure all can find a voice here not available in
the usual confines of liturgy or the normal
circumspection of pastoral en-
gagement. These are positive and
promising moves toward the recovery of
psalmic prayer.
But, one must entertain serious
doubt whether these moves get at the
central alienation between people and psalms. It
probably will not work
simply to put these prayer psalms back in the service.
They will likely re-
main the utterance of some person unknown and not
understood. It will not
do to employ them simply as a resource of
counseling and therapy, a tool of
catharsis that uses them to express a
sell-consciousness that is already there.
The
authentic use of the psalmic prayers in the tradition
has involved not
just the expression of the self through the psalms,
but also (and most impor-
tant of all) a self-realization
that comes with using these prayers.
II.
What was the nature of the
transaction between these psalms and those
who prayed them? With that question on my mind I
came upon a comment
in the Mishnah Tehillim on Psalm 18: "R. Yudan
taught in the name of R.
rael and to all the
ages." That is, the identity offered by the psalm is not
simple but complex, not singular but threefold.
Whoever prays Psalm 18,
said these rabbis, assumes a self constituted of a
relation to David and the
people of God and mortal humanity.
One recognizes the parallel to early
Christian interpretation. Augustine,
commenting on Psalm 3, provides a typical
illustration. Here are some
90 Mays
phrases culled from his discussion about who
speaks in the prayer: "Christ
speaks to God in his human nature...both the Church
and her head...cry out
with the lips of the prophet...which of the faithful
cannot make this lan-
guage their own?"4 Again, the hermeneutic of a threefold identity.
The indi-
vidual in the psalm is
constituted of an interrelation between Christ, Church
and Christian.
It would be easy to dismiss this
transaction as a hermeneutical artifact,
the practice of allegory or typology. I do not,
however, think it is fair to the
matter to assess this understanding as merely the
result of a theory of read-
ing applied in a somewhat
technical way. It is, rather, an account of what
happened when the psalms were used as Scripture
and liturgy—that is,
when in the synagogue the prayers of David were read
as liturgy of the con-
gregation and meditation of the
pious; and when in the church, the psalms
were read under the direction of their use by Christ
in the Passion as the lit-
urgy of worship and the
prayers' of believers. Hermeneutical theory, to the
degree that was important, was generated by practice
rather than the other
way around.
It may be important for our
history-oriented mentality and its concern
about original meaning to bring yet another matter
into consideration. This
approach did not originate in the synagogue and
churches of the first centu-
ries of our era. It is a
continuation of what happened in making the book of
Psalms. To put the development in a sentence: Prayers
written to provide
individuals with appropriate typical languages
became corporate liturgy
and were related to the scriptural narrative of
David. The semantic horizon
of the redaction and collection of the psalms was
this literary process.
As I have thought about this
testimony of the rabbis and Augustine it
has begun to dawn on me what is at issue here—a way
of prayer far more
profound than the one I practice, one learned
because the communities of
faith prayed these psalms in an awareness of the
three selves of which their
identity was constituted.
A way of prayer
that is Christological, not just autobiographical.
A reading of these psalms
as words that witness to the
identification
of Christ with our humanity.
A way of prayer that is corporate, not just individual.
A use of these
first-person psalms as the voice of the
community
and of others in it in vicarious representative
supplication.
A way of prayer that is typical, rather than subjective.
A saying of these psalms
to create a consciousness of who
and
what we are, rather than as expressions of a
consciousness
already there.
I want to reflect on each of these
ways of construing the first-person
prayers in the psalms in the form of
questions—questions because this three-
A
Question of Identity: The Threefold Hermeneutic of Psalmody 91
fold hermeneutic of prayer involves habits of
consciousness that are difficult
to acquire in our time.
III,
The first question: Can we, should
we, find in these prayers of derelic-
tion and trust an evocation
of the Passion of our Lord? I am not proposing
that we understand them as prophecy in the specific
sense that term has in
the classification of literature. These psalms were
not composed aforetime to
predict events and experiences of suffering that
would come true in the life
of Jesus. There is a nod toward this approach in
the New Testament (John
19:28).
There is a long and important tradition of reading psalms as proph-
ecy in the history of
Jewish and Christian interpretation, but that approach
is not underwritten by what has been learned about
the character and pur-
pose of the psalmic
prayers.
They are, rather, the literary
deposit in the Scriptures that testifies to the
range and depth of anguish that can and does come to
those who are mortal
and vulnerable and undertake to live unto God. They
are the classics of life
that undergoes the worst in faith and for the faith.
They are the paradigms
of the soul that uses affliction, alienation, pain
and even dying as occasions
to assert the reality and faithfulness of God. As
such they can show us in
detail the mortality that belongs to Christ in His
identity with us.
The Gospels draw on the psalms to
tell the story of Jesus more than on
any other sector of the Old Testament.
Particularly, the narrative of the Pas-
sion of Jesus uses language
and motifs from them extensively. Features from
Psalms
22 and 31 and 69 appear recurrently in the narrative. These psalms
are not used as prediction and fulfillment, but as
elements of the story itself.
The
self-description of those who pray in the psalms becomes a scenario
which Jesus enacts. He identifies himself with and
through them, assumes
their afflictions, speaks their language.
The way that the Gospels use the psalmic prayers to tell the story of Je-
sus, the way that Jesus
enters into the identity of the voice and experience
heard in the psalms, must mean that these prayers are
meant to be a major
commentary on the meaning of His affliction. The
relationship advises that
the sufferings of Jesus were not unique. Their
significance does not lie in the
amount or measure but in the typicality. The
identification of Jesus with the
self who speaks in the psalms is the sign of the
representative and corporate
reality of His Passion. He suffers and prays
with all those whose suffering
and praying is represented by such prayers. He
enters into their predica-
ment. The hurt and cry of
that great choir of pain is gathered into His life
and voice. Henceforth the voice of affliction in
these psalms is inseparable
from the voice of Jesus. They are the liturgy of His
incarnation, the language
of His assumption of our predicament.
He is one of us and one with us in
our mortal humanity. Yet, can we
rely on our own experience, our self-consciousness,
our language to grasp
what His Passion, His identification with the human
predicament involves?
92 Mays
We
are too petty in our complaints, too limited in our empathies, too inhib-
ited in our language. We
will usually trivialize, but these psalmic prayers
for
help do not trivialize. Indeed, they seem one vast
exaggeration until read
toward His life. When we ask with Gerhardt's great
hymn on the Passion,
"What
language can I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend, for this thy
dying sorrow?" can there be any other answer?
Can we learn to say these prayers as
a way of hearing Christ pray in and
for our humanity? Can we say them as the voice of
His unending passion in
and for our mortality?
IV.
The second question: Could the
problem of our relation to the persons
praying in these psalms lead us to a different
understanding of how we use
the first-person pronoun when we pray, the meaning
with which we say "I/
me/my"?
The use of the first-person psalms
in Christian liturgy and devotion is
complicated by a difference between
consciousness of self and social
group. The first-person pronoun had a dif-
ferent content and structure
then. The Jews received identity and signifi-
cance from identity with the
group. To say "I" meant to speak of one's
group as well as one's person. We bring our identity
to a group, differenti-
ate ourselves within it, join it, accept its ways
and opinions, expect the
group to nurture the individual and to justify itself
to the individual.
In
tically. And the individual
said "I" in congruence with and not in distinction
from the group. So the use of the first-person
psalms by individuals today
will work differently. We contextualize them in our
identities. We wonder at
the disparity between our experience and the
experience described in the
psalms because we don't think of ourselves typically
or corporately.
Can we learn to say these prayers in
liturgy and in devotion as an act of
empathy and sympathy, as an expression of
solidarity with others? Could
we give voice to their pain and need, make these
supplications serve as
intercessions for them as one with
us, as the body of Christ, as the totality of
humanity?
The psalmic
prayers come to us from the history of their use with the
"I"
already expanded to "we." It helps us to use our imaginations and re-
member how many countless thousands in all the ages
have left their marks
on these prayers: Jeremiah and Jesus and Paul and
Augustine and Calvin
and Wesley and the highlanders of
complete the list. Know that history, and you
cannot say and sing them
without hearing the echoing chorus of "all
the Saints from whom their la-
bors rest, who thee by faith
before the world confessed."
But our corporateness
is a fact not only of yesterday but today. Could
the use of these prayers remind us and bind us to
all those in the world-
wide Church who are suffering in faith and for the
faith? All may be well in
A
Question of Identity: The Threefold Hermeneutic of Psalmody 93
our place. There may be no trouble for the present
that corresponds to the
tribulations described in the
psalms. But do we need to do more than call
the roll of such places as
that there are sisters and brothers whose trials
could be given voice in our
recitation of the psalms? The
tyrs who prayed in their
praying the psalmic prayers.
Would it be possible to say them for
the sake of and in the name of the
fellow Christians known to us? We do make
intercessions for them, but per-
haps these psalms can help us do more than simply,
prayerfully 'wish grace
and help for them, help us to find words to
represent their hurt, alienation,
failure and discouragement.
Then there is the whole world of
humanity beyond the Church known
and unknown to us who have neither the faith nor
the language to hold
their misery up before God. In the day-to-day course
of events they may be-
come simply part of the scenery of life, features in
the newspaper, in the
evening news. These prayers are so poignant and
vivid that they give con-
creteness and personal actuality
to what is happening beyond the range of
our personal experience.
The Apostle said, "If one member
suffers, all suffer together" (1 Cor.
12:26).
He also said, "Bear one another's burdens." Can these prayers be-
come a way of doing that?
V.
The third question: Could the
problem of our relation to the person
praying in the psalms lead us to a deeper,
truer, more ultimate-awareness of
who/what we are, why and that we need to pray for
help?
The problem is certainly there. We
live and think and feel as part of
modern Western culture. It is true of our culture that
it is not informed with
the active consciousness of mortality that was
characteristic of earlier ages,
and is still characteristic for much of the rest of
the world. But these psalmic
prayers give the clear impression that they were
composed in a culture and
out of a consciousness structured by a sense of
life's vulnerability.
In recent years the Israelis have
been conducting an archeological exca-
vation of a cemetery at a
location near the walls of
ha-Mivtar. The burials in the
cemetery are dated to the second and first
centuries B.C. As the archeologists have cataloged
and identified the remains
in the cemetery, they have learned that about
sixty percent of the people
who were buried there had died before they reached
the age of twenty-five.
Only
six percent were sixty years old or older. It doesn't take much imagina-
tion to grasp what that
meant for the sense of life.
The change from that kind of
situation is very recent. A few years ago a
professor at the
dren of Pride. It is composed of a collection of letters
which he found and ed-
ited, letters that had been
written between the members of a family who
lived in the early 1800s just south of
94 Mays
with the news of sickness and dying as part of the
normal scene. The regular
occurrence of illness and death created such a
regular part of the texture of
life that it is difficult for a contemporary to
imagine what it must have been
like. As I read the book I remembered the dying of
my grandfather who ac-
quired an aerecipilis
infection in 1928 for which there was no help. Today,
treatment for that illness is a fairly simple
matter of several antibiotics. Now
the old outnumber the young and the problems we
ponder are the problems
of people being kept alive.
But, is it the truth about us that
we are not still essentially needy—that
is, mortal, limited in our competence to manage
what happens to us, vulner-
able to events and to others—that we do not need
divine help? In the long
view, ultimately speaking, there is no technical or
scientific solution to the
reality of human finitude and sinfulness. To be
human is to desire life and
right-ness, and because we cannot autonomously
secure either, to be
tially needy.
Could we use these prayers to learn
that, admit that, learn from them to
nurture a consciousness structured by an honest
sense of our finitude and
fallibility? The Jewish novelist, Isaac Bashevis Singer, once said, "I only pray
when I am in trouble. But I am in trouble all the
time."5
VI.
The answers to these questions—for
each of us and for the contempo-
rary community of faith—can
be found only in the practice and experience
of prayer. Can we discover through these psalm-prayers
an identity that is
Christological, corporate and typical? Can they break up and
break into our
preoccupying subjectivity and
imperious individualism? Can their use bring
us intimations of the consciousness the apostle
spoke of when he wrote
such sentences as: "Wretched man that I am! Who
will rescue me from this
body of death?" (Rom. 7:24); "You are the
body of Christ and individually
members of it" (1 Cor.
14:27); and "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ
who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20)?
Notes
1.
Basic Writings of
1948), 1:132.
2.
Athanasius as quoted in A. F. Kirkpatrick, The Book of Psalms,
Bible for Schools and
Colleges (Cambridge: University Press, 1930), p. ciii.
3.
John Calvin, Commentary on The Book of Psalms, trans. J. Anderson
(Edinburgh: Printed for The Calvin
Translation Society, 1845), 1:xxxviii.
4.
The Works of The
Fathers by Translation, Ancient Christian Writers, ed. J.
Quasten and W J. Burghardt, no.
29 (
Press, 1960).
5.
E. H. Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms
As Tools For Prayer (Harper and
Row, 1989), p. 99.
This
material is cited with gracious permission from:
Asbury Theological Journal
Michele Gaither Sparks (Asc. Editor)
Asbury Theological Seminary
www.asbury.edu
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