Day 26, Sunday, 11th March: Psalm 107.1-22

Speaking of hope, as I did at some length in yesterday's blog, Psalm 107 is a really hope-filled psalm. Essentially it's like Jesus' parable of the prodigal (sometimes called "lost") son. The boy insults his father, demanding his share of the inheritance early, thus wishing his father dead, then goes off and wastes it, ruining his life. In desperation he turns back to his father, who accepts him back, joyfully. Christian hope depends upon God being like the good father.

So it goes in Psalm 107. This is the call to thanksgiving the once lost but now found son could have made:

"O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures for ever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,
those he redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands..."

That term "hesed", translated here as "steadfast love", is a really important one in the bible, and particularly in the Hebrew scriptures. Time after time, and in various ways the scriptures remind us that God is trustworthy, loving and on our side. If we "stuff up" God is there to "pick us up". Each of the following 3 stanzas, which constitute the rest of the passage, gives us examples of this.

The first refers to the lost:
"Some wandered in desert wastes...
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble
and he delivered them from their distress."

The second could, perhaps, have been written with the Babylonian captivity in mind:
"Some sat in darkness and in gloom,
    prisoners in misery and in irons,
for they had rebelled against the words of God,
    and spurned the counsel of the Most High.
Their hearts were bowed down with hard labour;
    they fell down, with no one to help.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he saved them from their distress;"

And the third describes the consequences of bad behaviour:
"Some were sick through their sinful ways,
    and because of their iniquities endured affliction;"

And so the psalm continues. The point is, no matter what we have done and or what disasters we have brought upon ourselves, God is near at hand, ready and willing to save us. The ecological disasters humankind is provoking on the planet in this "anthropocene" epoch may be the latest and most serious of the disasters humankind has brought upon ourselves, but we can still have hope because of God's "hesed".



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