Read Psalm 129 from the ESV.
Read my Psalm 129 poem from A New Song.
When I think about the universal fact of pain and suffering I soon realize that what qualifies for pain and suffering can vary quite a bit from person to person. In the Christian world, people often say they are “carrying their cross” to signify they are experiencing pain at the time. I have heard some speak about how their bum knee, back pain, or a goiter (what is that anyway?) is the “cross they must carry.” And while I’m sure those are heavy crosses to carry — I don’t mean to minimize such pains, I have a herniated disk in my back, so I understand it — I’m not certain those are the sort of things Jesus intended when he spoke of carrying our cross. I’m pretty sure that the kind of affliction he meant, and to which the psalmist refers in Psalm 129, is much more intense than the sort of aches I feel when bending over to pick up the dog’s food dish.
During their exile, the Israelites were being afflicted by the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians. They had been slaves of foreign nations, and this was not financial slavery we think of when we read the New Testament term “bondservant.” This slavery was much closer to that horrible mark in the US history of African slavery. There were whippings, beatings, torture, molestations — more than most of us can possibly imagine. This sort of slavery produced a sense of endless futility and oppression in the slave. In contrast to our bad backs or bum knees, where there is nearly always some hope that the pain will go away, this sort of slavery lasted generations devoid of any possible sense of hope. Each day bled into another and another and another without a promise of respite or relief; what happened to the parents, happened to the children, and their children, and so on. Those enduring this sort of affliction most likely concluded that no matter how righteous they could be, their wicked oppressor would always prosper.
If you have been following these Psalm meditations for the Songs of Ascent, you will know that Psalm 128 claims that God will prosper those who wait on him. Psalm 128’s promise echoes the words of Psalm 1 which says that God blesses those who do not walk with ungodly people. But we must not forget the flip-side to Psalm 1, which is that the wicked will be blown away like chaff in the wind (watch THIS to see what that really means ). God’s promise to toss aside the wicked in Psalm 1 is echoed in Psalm 129, the 10th step in the Songs of Ascent — good news for the readers of this psalm. But we must be honest with ourselves and admit that it doesn’t always feel this way, right?
I think one of the problems with modern life is that we live in technological bubbles and don’t experience the world of nature the way the people of Bible-times did. Most of us don’t know what it means to grow something for harvest, such as hay, wheat, or grass. But, had we been living at that time, many of us would have left our house in the morning and spent long hours in fields collecting and bundling hay. And when we came back from the field at night we would have been tired and ready to eat and relax before heading to sleep. But I’m sure there is one thing we wouldn’t have done, and that is run from housetop to housetop harvesting the random shoots of hay and grass which would have inevitably grown in the cracks of each house’s roof. We would have treated those shoots of hay the same way we now treat a weed in a crack of our driveway — either ignore it or remove it because it is worthless and unsightly.
That is much like what will happen to the wicked oppressors under God’s hand of justice: they will be removed like a random shoot of hay to which no one gives a second thought. The oppressors will not be the ones living in glory, they are the ones destined to fade away, never to be thought of again.
But knowing this to be true and living it are two very different things. Even the holiest person has a difficult time looking past temporal pain and suffering to see the eternal blessings found in the Lord. C.S. Lewis touched on this when he said in The Problem of Pain, “If only this toothache would go away I could write another chapter on the problem of pain.”
Yet, these are the moments in life when our faith in God’s promises must rise up and bring us to the hope of glory he offers to those who believe in him. Pain has a unique way of incapacitating our ability to see the eternal picture by twisting our focus to only see the immediacy of our temporal situation. But Psalm 129 urges us to look past those pains in life — the real pains of truly desperate situations, like those experienced by the Israelites, as well as the marginal pains of a bum knee — and see that we are God’s harvest and the causes for our pains are nothing more than lone stalks of hay on the rooftops, or weeds in a crack.
