Afflicted by the Word of God --Psalm 119: xiv [Nun]

Sunday 20 November 2016

Psalm 119: xiv [Nun]

“…Lord, I am deeply afflicted:

by Your word give me life…”

Sometimes, it seems to me, that the way God speaks to us is through our mistakes, our seeing first one thing and then realizing it was another.  This happens to me all the time. I will see what I am certain is a dog sleeping next to a fence only to discover as I approach that it is a crumpled piece of cardboard box or a cluster of leaves; a shrub bustling in the breeze, on closer inspection, becomes a small child squatting in the grass, what appears to be some dropped laundry is actually an anaconda curled up and resting in the sun –or was that someone’s dress shirts?  For me, the world is often not what it seems at first glance.

When I first read the psalm this morning, I was certain it said:

           

            “Lord, I am deeply afflicted by Your word, give me life….”

And I was caught off guard by the insinuation that God’s word afflicts us.  The idea that God’s word, His will, “afflicts” us, was wonderfully troubling to me.  And in the next verse, when the psalmist asks that his homage be accepted and that he be taught God’s decrees –I felt a puzzlingly insightful paradox:

You afflict me with Your word God –I praise You; please afflict me more.  It is Your affliction (Your laws, Your decrees) that set me free.  Your will is my heritage—it is the joy of my heart….  It reminded me of Donne’s “Batter my heart three-person’d God…”

Then, I caught sight of that colon. The one I had missed. And instantly the reading changed. it became more accurate, but certainly less my own.  And that distinction seems important.

In this morning’s Divine Office prayer the reading was from Ezekiel 36.  It is one of my favorites.

I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your iniquities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you… taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts… live by my statutes…observe my decrees… You shall live in the land I gave your fathers, you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”  --Ezekiel 36:25-28

Coming upon that reading in light of my own misreading of the psalm, I found myself pondering not the stony hearts and the cleansing (which I am usually drawn to) but the statutes and the decrees and finally that promise of God’s:  “You shall live in the land I gave your fathers…” And I began to wonder about the affliction of God’s word, the affliction of His decrees, His statutes…

By living God’s statutes, by observing His decrees –by being “afflicted” deeply by His Word, we live in the land of our fathers—the land of promise. The Promised Land --our Eden—is there where we live by God’s statutes, where we observe His decrees. 

How often do we hear the voices of the secular world today proclaiming that God’s laws and statutes, His decrees are nothing but afflictions?  They are rules imposed on us to limit our pleasures and our freedoms.  But are they? Does unbounded pursuit of pleasure and sensation, utter self-fulfillment truly lead to an earthly paradise?  Or does it merely lead to what the psalmist refers to elsewhere as “licking the earth?” An uncontrolled obsession with sensation: taste, touch, sight, to encounter and contain everything –if possible?  Is that paradise? Or is that same endless, insatiable appetite –in fact—what we mean by Hell?

Is it possible that God’s statutes and God’s decrees are meant not as limitations on our freedoms, but guidelines for our pursuit of real, meaningful, fulfillment and true joy? Is it possible that the “affliction” of God’s words, His will, is the path to real freedom and complete fulfillment? Is it possible that wherever and whenever we live those words, those statutes, wherever and whenever we observe those decrees with openness and love and compassion… that place, that moment IS the promised land –becomes, for us, a garden of life –a place of Paradise, a moment of Paradise.  We are afflicted, by the constant badgering of the world, the anxieties and fears and conflicts (petty and large) by physical and psychological… and the pressure to seek always some new earthly pleasure or distinction or distraction to escape from those same pressures. But, today… today let us turn away from those cares, those afflictions, and let us today make the Kingdom of God here on earth… let us, today be truly afflicted by the Word of God.