Psalm 31—Hammered Between Bone and Bone

"All these worries run inside the circle of your hand."

Note from Andy

In re-reading the post on Psalm 74, I realized I sent it out without adding notes on the rendition! That is fixed now. I’ve added notes on some of the major patterns that happen in the Psalm—the exodus pattern, the temple/garden pattern, the serpent pattern, and the devastation pattern.

Also, if you’re just joining the Darkling Psalter, here’s how it works around here:

I am creating poetic renditions of the Psalms and pairing them each with a new poem and brief commentary. Each post has four parts:

• The Rendition: This is a creative retelling of the poem based on the original Hebrew. If a word-for-word translation is what you’re after, the Darkling Psalter ain’t it (go to StepBible instead, it’s great). I take too many poetic liberties with the text for true translation. My aim in the renditions is to put something in a fresh way, to tie in other biblical themes, or bend a line toward a poetic formulation that strikes me as beautiful. On the other hand, if The Message is what you’re after, this ain’t it either. Each rendition is made with the Hebrew text in front of me and remains anchored to it. Though the rendition wanders back and forth across the path of the original words, it still follows the path. (Psalm 51 is a good example of this.)

• The Notes on the rendition: This is where I clarify confusing bits of the psalm, shed light on why I made the choices I did, and bring out larger biblical themes that surface in the text. (Psalm 147 and Psalm 32 are good examples of this.)

• The Notes on the poem: Here I give you a bit of context for what is going on in the poem and what it means to me. Some of you like to come to the poems fresh, if that is you, you have my blessing just to skip this part. Personally, I have a hard time getting into most poetry and need a little help from someone with a bit of knowledge about the poem, so that is what I’m trying to offer readers in this section.

• The Poem: This is the hardest part for me and why these posts take so long to make. In this section, I’m trying to create a new work that will run parallel to the psalm so that each can inform the other, as well as spark new meanings in both the places where they walk in lockstep and the places where they rub against each other.

You can catch up with previous posts here: 1, 8, 14, 19, 22, 29, 32, 34, 42, 46, 51, 53, 73, 74, 84, 86, 88, 107, 121, 130, 137, 142, 147, and the Guided Tour.

Rendition of Psalm 31

Lord, I flee to you for shelter
And you set aside all my shame.
Your righteousness is forever my escape.
Stretch yourself toward me and hear me.
Hurry to snatch me away
From these darkling glamours.
Be my mountain stronghold. I need a house
Strong enough to hide in.
All my life you have been
My rock and my fastness.

For the sake of your name
Take my hand and lead me out of these lesser loves.
Release me from the pits that I keep
Tipping into and loving the fall.
If there is safety, if there is rest,
If there is a home it is only you.
So into your hand I commit my spirit,
For you are my ransomer and my ransom.

So many cultivate the vanity of things
And swear themselves to other gods,
But I have given my trust to you, Lord.
I have drawn my gladness from your steadfast love
Because you have watched my affliction.
You have known my fear as if you hung in my own place.
You have not given me over to the hands of my devourers,
But have stood me on the rock
And given me a place to live.

Now, Lord, show me your favor, for I writhe.
I waste. I am washed in the amber grief light.
I do not have another try in me.
My years have come to this.
The things I have done have rattled me to bones.
When my friends see me they are afraid
And I can see their fear.
A dread stretches behind me and I will not look back
To watch the people I love scatter and turn away
As if I was not a living man, but one of the forgotten dead.
Beyond that, I can hear them, my enemies.
They are devising together a death for me
That they will call good.

But you are still my God, my place,
My refuge. All these worries run
Inside the circle of your hand.
Rescue me now. Make me see
Some light, some bigger love. I am still yours.
Make all the things that hunt me
Slip soundlessly into the hungry ground.
Double their plotting back against them.
Silence them and make the truth speak out.

Despite all of it
You have hidden so much goodness away
For those who fear you. You have built
Such a shelter for any who would come.
They are hidden at your side,
Kept like treasure from the strife of tongues
And the brokenness that would not let them go.
When disaster set up its black banners all around me
You showed me marvels greater
Than the plain fears in front of me.
Even when I panicked and knew for certain
That I was cut off from you at last,
You showed me again that you hear, you see,
You mind, and stand beside me.

People of God, give the Lord all the love you have to give.
He is your guard and he keeps watch
Over those who have given themselves to him.
But he collapses the towering works
Of the proud down all around them.
So be strong and take courage
All you who wait on the Lord.

Notes on the Rendition

The Fortress/Rock Pattern: “Lord, I flee to you for shelter…”

The idea that God is a rock and a fortress has a long lineage in the Bible, going all the way back to Genesis 1.

In the opening crescendoes of the Bible in Genesis 1 and 2, God founds a mountain in the midst of creation’s archetypal chaotic sea. God makes his holy mountain rise from the primeval ocean and plants Eden, his garden paradise, at the top as a place where his image-bearers can grow and spread his flourishing throughout the earth. From then on, mountains and high rocks are associated with God’s presence, with God’s communication with humankind, and with his redemption in the world.

For instance:

• The Song of Moses after crossing the sea (Exodus 15:17, 18) “You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain, the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established. The Lord will reign forever and ever.”

• God gives the law the Moses at Mt Sinai (Exodus 19:20) “The Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. And the  Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up.”

• God shelters Elijah at Mt. Sinai (1 Kings 19:12, 13) “And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”

• God sets his king on top of his holy mountain (Psalm 2:6, 7) “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you.’”

• God promises to end death forever on his holy mountain (Isaiah 25:6-8) “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces…”

• God will bring his sheep to his mountain (Ezek 34) “My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill… I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness… And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel…”

• Jesus sacrificed on a hill outside Jerusalem (Luke 23) “And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull)…”

• The church is to be God’s new mountain refuge and renew the redemption-making mission of Eden (Matthew 5:14) “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.”

And finally,

• When John sees a vision of the New Creation, it is pictured as a holy mountain/temple being founded on earth (Revelation 21, 22) “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God.”

So when the psalmist cries out that God would be a “rock of refuge and a strong fortress” (Psalm 31:2, ESV), he is tapping into an image that God has chosen in order to reveal to us his core characteristics of strength, love, and care in a world that often goes badly wrong.

The Innocent Sufferer Pattern: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

In his gospel, Luke depicts Jesus quoting Psalm 31 as his last words from the cross. After Jesus says, “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” Luke concludes, “And having said this, he breathed his last.”

Often in the Psalms, the writer laments the undeserved afflictions of his enemies while proclaiming his innocence, the “Innocent Sufferer” pattern. David, who knew a lot about being opposed by hostile enemies and who wrote much of the book of Psalms, is the most frequent writer to give voice to the Innocent Sufferer.

In the New Testament, the gospel writers seem to view many of these Psalms as being related to Jesus to the degree that many of David’s first-person lamentations they apply to Jesus’ sufferings as if Jesus was the psalm’s true object all along, the ultimate Innocent Sufferer.

You can see one such connection right here in Psalm 31 when Jesus quotes it from the cross, but there are many others. For instance, David stands in for the suffering servant in Psalm 69 when he says, “For zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.” John ties this verse to Jesus in John 2:17 after Jesus cleanses the temple.

A similar thing happens in the connection between Psalm 41:9 and John 13:2. In Psalm 41, David writes, “Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.” John creates an echo of the psalm in the betrayal of Judas when he writes, “As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him. So Jesus told him, ‘What you are about to do, do quickly.’”

So we can see how the writers of the New Testament wove the words, figures, and themes of the Old Testament into their writing in order to make new connections that resonate with the force of the Scripture that preceded them. As is the case with Jesus’s quotation of Psalm 31, the connection illuminates and deepens both the meaning of the gospel passage and the meaning of the Psalm.

Notes on the Poem

As I said above, Luke took a line from Psalm 31 (“Into your hands I commit my spirit”) for Christ’s last words from the cross, so it was perhaps natural that this poem seemed to want to become a crucifixion poem. I structured the poem below in six short sections, each one is connected with an image that is associated with God in the Bible—blood, rock, bread, dark, light (and bone, which God does not seem to use as an image associated with himself, but I just liked it for the poem).

I’m noticing a pattern with these crucifixion psalms. When I come to the task of writing a poem about a psalm that the gospel writers cite or allude to during the crucifixion (like Psalm 22), I reach for images from the weird events that happened during and immediately after Jesus’s death. So in both this poem and the one for Psalm 22, the sun goes dark, people rise from the dead, the earth shakes, etc.

The poem is told (to some degree) from the perspective of the apostles and is (to some degree) about their experiences during the crucifixion.

Give the Poem a Title

I’ll title this poem in a couple of days if I don’t hear from you, but I’m leaving the first pick for readers. The naming convention for these poems is that the title must come from a line of the poem.

Send your suggestions to andymatthewpatton@gmail(dot)com or leave them in the comments.

Poem for Psalm 31—Hammered Between Bone and Bone

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.” [Luke 23:46]

I. Bone

These memories remain. Hanging there
Hammered between bone and bone,
Each of us was sorted, separated.

We were sifted and rattled like teeth
In a cup, dice flung at the skull’s place. 
We all fled the grisly show. 

We writhed all night, to the cock’s crow.

II. Blood

Did you forget about the water
And the spear? The three trees
On the low hill? His mother

Crying there? The way they took him down
And how the earth shook?
How time itself opened wide,

And the blooded lamb slipped inside.

III. Rock

We waited and prayed but it barely mattered. 
We asked for peace but were only hewn.
We hid ourselves from the hillside scene.

He was pressed to the stone, the knife raised.
He begged that it would pass, but was only given
A cup, a robe, a cruciform crown.

He was the rock your love shook down.

IV. Bread

We gathered what we could while
Deep heaven’s snowflake bread
Flickered and fell around us.

The holy grain was threshed and staggered,
Kernel crushed and chaff blown,
Flayed and flying, flesh flung down.

He was the seed that fell to the ground.

V. Dark

The crystal stars broke far, fast,
And late. The bent earth held itself
Sun-black and beaten.

We all looked around for sackcloth.
The man was gone, the hill was quiet. The noonday
Was cool as death, dark as womb

The Saturday world waited for word from the tomb.

VI. Light

The next day, friends we thought long dead
Walked the bright streets of Jerusalem
And shook their shoulders and held each other.

They told us secrets and laughed.
They shielded themselves from the light.
They asked us why we wept

And what had happened while they slept?

---

Support the Project

Any work of sufficient length is only sustained contact with by those who benefit from it.

An idea can be a fragile thing and 150 poems and translations is a big idea. I meant this project to be ambitious though and, if it is ever complete, it will be the work of years.

I know the only way I’m ever going to finish this project is if I know people read, value, and support it. Whether you subscribe or not, if you like a poem or find a rendition of a Psalm helpful, drop me a line (andymatthewpatton@gmail(dot)com) or leave a comment and let me know.

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash