Psalm 17

Lent is traditionally a season of loss, a season of grief, a season of preparation without the joy and bright lights of advent. It is a season that can stretch our ability to see the promise of Easter. Lent is a season that can make us uncomfortable. It is a season that invites us to enter into our fears and failures and to recognize that God is walking with us into the dark places of our lives. 

Our Psalm comes to us out of the tradition known as Psalms of Lament. In this particular psalm the author finds themselves unjustly confronted, perhaps attacked and it seems as if the community which had supported the psalmist in days past is now surrounded with those full of callous hearts, arrogance and like a lion hungry for prey (10-12). 

What an uncomfortable place to be! Who wants to sign up for that? How much easier to perhaps go along to get along. The psalmist has worn themselves out and found the only place of sure refuge is in God. I call on you, my God, for you will answer me (vs 6). 

An admirable prayer in the face of their circumstances. But notice how the prayer of the psalmist begins to stray from the character of the God they pray to. In verse 14 we find ourselves confronted with another prayerful phrase of the psalmist: 

May what you have stored up for the wicked fill their bellies; may their children gorge themselves on it, and may there be leftovers for their little ones.

Sometimes in our own lives it is easy to ask God to give someone else what we think they deserve. To couch our resentment in prayerful language and spiritual tones. But Lent calls for us to recognize our own failure to represent fully the God who has come to us in Jesus. To live in repentance and to extend forgiveness before it might ever be asked for. 

The psalmist doesn’t stay in that place of resentment. For they go on to declare in verse 15: As for me, I will be vindicated and will see your face; when I awake, I will be satisfied with seeing your likeness. The psalmist asks us to see beyond our resentment, our failures, to look upon the face and likeness of God. Lent calls us to look beyond ourselves. 

Author: David Brown

Other Lenten readings for today:

• Zechariah 3:1-10
• 2 Peter 2:4-21