Exiled to the Abyss: Christocentric Reading(s) of Psalm 88

Psalm 88 is the “low point” of Scripture. It is the only one of the Psalms of lament that doesn’t at some point turn toward repentance and/or praise. The psalmist’s complaint, unabashedly directed against God’s “oppressive presence,” bleeds like a deep wound that cannot be healed. The lament is, to borrow James Crenshaw’s turn of phrase, a “whirlpool of torment.”  I want to argue that precisely because Psalm 88 is the low point, the “deepest depths” of Scripture, it elicits our highest expressions of gratitude and joy when we read it Christocentrically.

(Note: I am aware that though the “seeing” and “hearing” Christ in the Psalms is an ancient and authoritative practice used even by the Apostles themselves (not to mention the Patristics), it has nonetheless often been perceived by non-Christians as an offensive practice, a kind of hermeneutical colonization of foreign territories. One Jewish scholar analogized this  Christian use of Hebrew Scripture to “planting Christian trees in Jewish soil.” This is a serious issue, and one that needs careful and prayerful thought, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll not address it.) 

In what follows, I want  first to offer my rendering of  Psalm 88, and then to propose three discrete ways of reading it Christocentrically.

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Psalm 88

O Lord, God of my deliverance,
when at night I wail in your presence,
let my prayers reach You;
let Your ear hear my cries.
For I am drunk with sorrows;
I am at the very brink of Death.

I am numbered among those who go down to the Abyss.
I am but a shadow
abandoned among the godforsaken.

I am like the corpses in their graves whom you have forgotten,
who are cut off from your covenant love.

You have exiled me to the bottoms of the Abyss
to the darkest places in the depths.

Your wrath lies heavy upon me like a yoke.
Like the waves of chaos,
your anger floods over me. Selah

You make my friends shun me;
You make me disgusting to them.

I am shut in and cannot escape,
and my health fails under this affliction.

I cry out for you, O Lord, every day;
I stretch out my hands to You.

Do You work wonders for the dead?
Do the ghosts rise to praise You? Selah.
Is Your covenant love proclaimed among the godforsaken?
Or Your faithfulness in the grave?
Are Your wonders made known in the underworld?
Your salvation in oblivion?

As for me, I cry out to You, O Lord;
Each morning I face You with my prayer.

O Lord, why do You reject me?
Why do You hide Yourself from me?
From my youth I have been afflicted
And all my life I have been drawing near to death.

You terrorize me at every turn;
You consume my spirit in the fires of Your anger,
and the dread of You crushes me like a wave.
Your assaults have besieged me like a flood.
Day and night
You assail me from all sides.

You have caused my lover and my friend to forsake me,
And my companions have left me in the darkness.

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Probably, this psalm was composed as an individual lament, perhaps by a poet facing the end of a long, terrible illness. Certainly he’s struggling with his imminent death and the nothingness that awaits him beyond death. He has no hope of a meaningful afterlife to comfort him. He has no hope of resurrection. In his world, the dead are the godforsaken. The tragedy is, he’s been counted among the godforsaken even in the days of his life! This is unbearable for him.

Also, the Israelites likely used this as a corporate lament, bewailing the exile (which, as Wright argues, effectively continued even after they’d returned from Babylon). YHWY had forsaken them much as He had forsaken the original poet. They were “cut off” from the covenant just as he had been. To use Ezekiel’s language, they were a mess of scattered skeletons, nothing more than dry bones in the valley.   

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Scholars agree the early Christians came to understand Jesus’ person and work through their reading of the Psalms, as well as other Scriptures, especially Isaiah. Some – and I’m in this number – think Jesus’ own self-understanding developed in large part from his reading of the Scriptures, including, for instance, Psalms 2, 22, and 110. We catch glimpses of this in the Gospels (e.g., Mark 12.35-40 and 15.33-34). 

I don’t think it a stretch, then, to suppose Jesus discerned his vocation in his reading of Psalm 88, too.  Nonetheless, regardless of whether Jesus’ reading of Psalm 88 did illuminate his self-understanding as God’s anointed, I think it entirely appropriate to hear this Psalm as a prayer of Jesus the Messiah. Why? Because it is the prayer of the godforsaken, and Jesus is the godforsaken one, par excellence. No one has experienced the godforsakenness he experienced. No one has died the kind of death he died or suffered as he suffered. He was uniquely acquainted with grief; he was (is) the true “man of sorrows.”Therefore, I suggest the following readings:

(1) We should read this as a prayer of the troubled Jesus in the days and hours before his betrayal and arrest. Perhaps he did in fact pray this very prayer in Gethsemene; regardless, this is an accurate reading of his feelings, for the Father did in fact refuse his requests and the Father did in fact make his friends to shun him. In the shadows of the garden and of Pilate’s court, Jesus’ lovers and friends did in fact leave him to the darkness.

(2) We should read this as the prayer of the dying Jesus. What was the cross he carried if not the yoke of God’s wrath?  There, on Golgotha, Jesus did stretch his hands out to God, unavailingly. There, as in the garden, his health did fail under the affliction. Then, on Good Friday, he finally realized that all his life he had been “drawing near to death,” drawing near to this death, death on a cross. 

(3) We should read this as the prayer of the dead Jesus.  On what to us is Holy Saturday, Jesus – God the Son incarnate - was dead. Sara explains,

[Holy Saturday] is the “underside” of the Cross, when Jesus’ experience of giving everything, which is distinctive of Good Friday, reaches its intrinsic fulfillment in the state of having given everything. This is a state in which Christ’s act of dying is over and now, having died, he finds himself in the situation in which every man finds himself at the end of his earthly pilgrimage.In this sense, Holy Saturday completes the descending, “incarnatory” movement of the Word into the caro peccati. The Son has obeyed the Father’s saving will to the end, and his obedience now takes the form of being dead with the dead. This being dead entails for the Son a real experience of separation from God, the “loss of glory” that without Christ would have been without exception the fate of the dead.     

The final movement of the kenosis: “being dead with the dead.” And in this, nonetheless faithful. Obviously, we’re moving in waters too deep for us. But if we read Psalm 88 as the prayer of the dead Christ, I think we get a sense of what the “harrowing of hell” was and how it was accomplished: by sheer, passive dependence upon God’s love.

Jesus, as Israel’s representative and, therefore, as the world’s representative, is exiled to the “bottoms of the Abyss,” so he is, in the realest sense possible, “abandoned among the godforsaken.”Precisely there, as God-the-godforsaken, Jesus accomplishes salvation for the godforsaken! There and then, as the despised and rejected one, Jesus mysteriously but really enters into and himself becomes that ultimate question haunting humanity and all creation: “Do You work wonders for the dead? Do the ghosts rise to praise You? Is Your covenant love proclaimed among the godforsaken? Or Your faithfulness in the grave? Are Your wonders made known in the underworld? Your salvation in oblivion?” 

Before that “moment,” (obviously, we’re dealing with a supra-historical event here, as well as a historical one) the answer had been No.  At that “moment,” the answer remained No.  But because of that “moment” the answer forever, finally changed. On the following day came the Yes and the Amen!  

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In conclusion, then. The “low point” of Scripture is, paradoxically and wonderfully, its highest. For here in the abyss of despair, we find the pinnacle of faith.  In this disturbing Psalm utterly bereft of praise or repentance we find the purest expression of Jesus’ obedient love efficacious for the salvation of all creation.