For those who want a change from the Gospel

Epiphany 2  –  Psalm 139

There is a legend about todays Gospel from the end of John 1 which maybe sheds some light on the strange affirmation that Jesus knew Nathanael while he was still under the fig tree, which brings for the response ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!’. This seems a bit OTT if Jesus had noticed him earlier that day or something, but legend has it that Nathanael was abandoned as a baby and left to die under a fig tree. If Jesus is saying ‘I have known you even from your birth’, that would make his response a bit more appropriate. It is no doubt this motif of being known by God which made Psalm 139 appropriate for today’s lectionary.

This is the first example we have encountered in this series of an individual Psalm, and by piecing together the clues in the text we can create a pretty good idea of its meaning, and therefore its application. As many readers will know, at one stage of our ministry we were accused and ultimately driven out of our parish. I never claimed to be entirely innocent – it always takes two to tango – but I did believe that the character assassination was unjust and deeply damaging to us as a family. Now imagine that I had been accused of, for example, leading the church into the practice of, say, Voodoo rather than orthodox Christianity. Just for the record, that wasn’t the problem, but bear with me. What might I want to say to refute these false accusations? The answer is Psalm 139!

The first six verses begin with the certainty that God knows that I am innocent; in fact he knows everything there is to know about me. Then the Psalm moves on to claim that even if I did want to escape from God, presumably because of my ‘secret guilt’, there is absolutely nowhere I could go to escape him. Not only does God know me now, but he knows my history, right from before I was born. Indeed it was he who formed and shaped me in my mother’s womb. If I am claiming innocence in front of a God that involved in my life, I’d have to be pretty daft or very hardened and arrogant to believe that I could pull the wool over his eyes. This is the equivalent of someone saying nowadays ‘I swear on the life of my children’. Not a helpful oath, but a very powerful one. In fact, says v.17-18, God is so precious to me that I would never, nor could never abandon him. The accusations against me simply do not make any sense.

But then there is an abrupt change of mood in v.19, surprise surprise filleted out in our lectionary. The Psalm becomes ‘imprecatory’, in other words the psalmist calls down curses on his enemies, something which is a common theme in the Psalms and which I’m sure we’ll encounter again in this series. But is that really what is going on here? Is the falsely accused victim calling on God to avenge him by destroying those who accuse him? It certainly looks like that, and if you have ever been in that position you will know what a natural human tendency it is to want to get revenge. But there is another way of reading this. I might not necessarily want to call down God’s wrath on all who in fact are involved in Voodoo, but I would certainly want to disassociate myself from them and their practices in the strongest of terms. Rather than being guilty of promoting Voodoo in the church, I would want them as far away from me as possible (v.19). I would want to make clear that such religion strikes at the heart of the God I know and worship, and who knows me so well (v.20), and that I hate everything they stand for (v.20-21). These verses seem like a deliberate distancing of the psalmist from the things of which he is being accused. Far from being thick with them, he says, I despise the whole system and everything about it. We are on diametrically opposite sides (v.22) That does put the opening line about wanting them dead into a slightly better context.

Finally the psalmist goes right back to where he started. In v.1 God has searched his heart, but in v.23-24 he is invited to do so again. This might be a further reinforcement of his claim of innocence of the charges pressed against him, but it might also be a very humble invitation to God to have another look, just in case there is any self-deception which has crept in there.

I really hope that you never have to face this kind of false accusation, but if you do, maybe Psalm 139 can fuel your prayer and lead to your vindication. Maybe we could use it to pray for all our Christian brothers and sisters around the world who face this kind of persecution on a daily basis.