Meditation on Psalm 42: “Where Is Your God?”

As a deer longs for flowing streams, 
So my soul longs for you, O God. 
My soul thirsts for God, For the Living God. 
When shall I come and behold the face of God?
My tears have been my food 
Day and night 
While people say to me continually, 
“Where is your God?
These things I remember, . . . 
How I went with the throng,
And led them in procession to the house of God
With glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, 
A multitude keeping festival. 
Why are you cast down, O my soul? 
And why are you disquieted within me? 
Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him, 
My help and my God. 

May the Lord of the evening shadows bless my words and our time together. Amen. 

The Bible is a book of questions. We may prefer to read it as a book of answers, but it is both: question and answer / answer and question. Sometimes God asks the questions. Sometimes we ask the questions of God. Someone (with nothing better to do) has totaled them up in the four Gospels”: Jesus asks 307 questions. In the brief portion I just read of Psalm 42, you may have heard, When? Why? and, most cruelly, Where is your God? 

I am guessing that this unknown poet was an exile, a part of the great deportation of Jews to Babylonia. He/she is remembering with tears a joyous day. (Sometimes the happiest of memories produce the bitterest of tears). He is reliving a glorious festival procession into the temple, and who do you suppose was out there in front, leading it like a drum major, stepping high and dancing?—our sad psalmist

But that was long ago. All that is left is a memory. All that we know of this person is that she is crying and being made miserable by unidentified “people” who ask “Where is your God?”

It belongs to the genius of the psalms that they never divulge the source or details of the writer’s unhappiness. The psalms are intensely personal, but they are not specific or, as we might say, “photographic.” No psalmist ever says, “My father died, I lost my job, I may have cancer.” Their language is much more powerful than that. It is the language of the heart. Which means that if you live in the 12th century, or the 16th, or the 21st, the psalmist speaks to you, from deep to deep. 

Or, more accurately, the psalmist prays with you. Now, I would imagine that most of us do our praying alone. But there are times, aren’t there, when it would be good to have a partner to pray with, someone who understands you or who has been there before. When you feel like asking yourself “Why are you cast down? why is your heart so sad? why am I so down? —a companion would be helpful. One of the best things I remember about being an everyday pastor with the privilege of wearing a clerical collar in a hospital is that total strangers would ask, “Will you pray with me?” There is no need for specifics or a backstory. Just two strangers praying together. Deep calls to deep. 

In fact, Jesus was praying the psalms as he was dying on the cross. I wonder if felt like an exile from his Father’s kingdom. I wonder if he remembered leading the procession into the capital city just five days earlier, with the shouts of Hosanna ringing in his ears. Like the psalmist, Jesus was taunted by onlookers with the same question, “You call yourself the Son of God. Where is your God? 

Then, in a gesture of his total identification with us, he asked the question himself! In the words of Psalm 22, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Not “who are you,” but “where are you in this terrible darkness?” 

The question does not disappear as we become older, more enlightened, or more civilized. When we are confronted with the barbarism, animal brutality and innocent suffering that we have witnessed in the invasion of Ukraine, acts the world assumed it had “outgrown,” the question surfaces again. Where is your God? 

On Palm Sunday, our God was in the man Jesus, sitting astride a donkey, weeping over the lost city of Jerusalem. Today God weeps over the city of Kiev. God moves among the refugees, the maimed, the homeless; God buries the dead in unmarked graves.

When you and I experience tragedy (as we do), we can’t unspool it as if it never happened. We can’t unwind history. We don’t expect to “get back” the ones we’ve lost. But we do endeavor to see what the psalmist calls “the face of God” in the losing. But what does the face of God look like? Think of the scene in Genesis, when the two estranged brothers, Jacob and Esau, reconcile. Esau has just forgiven Jacob and Jacob replies, one imagines, taking his brother’s face between his hands, “Your face is like the face of God to me.” What does the face of God look like? It looks like forgiveness, compassion, grace, peace, strength, courage. Tonight, it looks like hope. 

The questions we ask are real. We can feel their validity in our bones. But the answer is also real. The answer is every bit as real as the questions. The word “hope” is every bit as real and substantive as the words “When? Where? or Why?” Because our hope is founded on the rock of God’s victory over death in the resurrection of Jesus. 

When the psalmist finally gets to that hope (and they almost always do), he is preaching to himself. When we finally get to it, so are we. We will say,

Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him 

My help and my God.