This is the fourth entry in our series THE ONLY NECESSARY THING, in which we are learning what prayer is, how it “works”, and different forms of prayer we can implement into our spiritual rhythms. It was written by Ely Martinez.
Growing up in the Charismatic tradition, prayer was taught to me as spontaneous, raw, and always new. Once I graduated college, however, on the back of the Pandemic, George Floyd, and political upheaval, I found my spontaneous prayers were no match for the reckoning of my faith. I mean, when the state of the world seems at odds with the faith and God you cling to, what words could anyone muster up in prayer? In many ways, it was turning to the Psalms that saved my faith.
The Psalms are the prayers of the exiled people of God, confessing in faith that the LORD reigns in the midst of history’s afflictions.
The collection of the Psalms as we know it dates back to the Jewish exile to Babylon in 587 B.C. It is difficult for us to truly grasp how traumatic this event was for the Jews. Their whole identity as a people was centered on the God who claimed to rule the earth from Jerusalem and had adopted them as His own. But, the City of God was in ruin and the people of God became captives to a foreign empire who sought their total domination and submission. The dilemma faced by the Jewish exiles living in Babylonian ghettos was either to maintain trust in a God who had seemingly abandoned them, or to dissolve 400 years of national identity. In order to provide its people with a way to pray through exilic disillusionment—and eventual Greek and Roman colonization—the Jewish leaders of the day began gathering the psalms and hymns of their ancestors into a single collection from which the people could learn to converse with God in the midst of their suffering.
If the origin of The Psalter (the Book of Psalms) lies in the affliction of exile, then we must pray them as exiles. Though we live as citizens and residents of the wealthiest nation in history, an honest view of the world reveals it to be, at first glance, outside the reach of God’s jurisdiction. We occupy a world in which violence, greed, and corruption govern the land. As I realized in my own disillusionment, we do not have enough words in our vocabulary that can carry our pain to God in a way that leads us back to trust in Him. The Psalms, however, offer to us an honest, albeit jarring path to prayer. For example, look to Psalm 13 (NRSV):
1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
5 But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
This prayer does not shy from honesty before God. Whereas the prayers I was taught demanded that I come to the Father with only optimism and respect, this psalm grabs God by the shoulders, shakes him out of His apparent slumber, and cries that which bubbles inside every single human soul living in exile, “How long?”.
We might think of such speech before God as a sign of a lack of faith; yet I would argue that such honest talk to God is the ultimate demonstration of trust in His authority over the happenings of history. The Psalms encourage us to hold our God accountable to His promises to reclaim and make the world right precisely because we know it to be in His character to do so. It is our faith in God that brings us to present to God the afflictions of this world in full vulnerability, and it is this offering of vulnerability that turns us back to trust. Faith breeds the courage to lament, and lament breeds the courage to faith.
The challenge to pray the Psalms presents us with an immediate dilemma: these prayers are not our own. Just as your pain and joys are not my pain and joys, the pains and joys of David and the Sons of Korah are not our own either. Although the Psalms may be the prayer book of our Bible, we may find it deeply challenging finding any commonality in them.
The Psalms are our prayers because they are, first and foremost, the prayers of the Beloved Son, who embodies our exile before the Father.
What makes the Christian community “Christian” is its confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the God of Israel with flesh and bones. Because Jesus is human, He had to learn to walk, to talk, to work, and to pray. And if Jesus is doing the learning, someone is doing the teaching. Jesus, living in the land of His Israelite ancestors under ruthless Roman occupation, lived the all-too-familiar exile of His people, and thus was taught to pray the same way as they—under the guidance of the Psalms.
This is evident as you trace Jesus’ words and prayers from His last Passover to His crucifixion:
When foretelling that He will be betrayed by the dipping of bread in the Upper Room, Jesus pulls from Psalm 41, “Even My close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.”
When begging His closest friends to pray with and for Him in Gethsemane, He puts a spin on Psalm 43:5, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to death.”
As He hangs on the cross, Jesus shouts in sorrow the prayer of the psalmist in the opening line of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
And as He prepares to breathe His last, He gives Himself to His Father’s mercy by way of the 31st Psalm, “Into your hand I commit my spirit”.
The writers of the gospels do not include these psalms in their narratives as proof that the psalmists predicted certain moments of Jesus’ life. Instead, they portray Jesus—the representative of both the Jewish and human communities—as the embodiment of the life described in the Psalms: a life that holds in tension trust in God’s tangible governance of the world and the experience of that world as it currently is (or as it also known, the time of “Now, but Not Yet”).
Jesus gives life to the Psalms because each and every lament, cry for help, and shout of praise within them have found themselves woven into the very fibers of His own story. Jesus carries within Himself the entire spectrum of human suffering born from violence, corruption, and greed, and resurrects it as “New Creation”. He is the renewal of the world that the exiles anticipate in their prayers. Thus, Jesus both prays the Psalms and, at the same time, is God's response to all 150 of them. It is as N.T. Wright says, “Jesus is living the entire Psalter; He is dying the entire Psalter; He is rising and ruling and raising the entire Psalter."
To you and I, the Psalter is no longer just a collection of ancient liturgy telling us what to pray—they are the reflection of the vibrant relationship between God the Father and God the Son, a life into which we are now invited. Thus, Jesus leads us to pray the Psalms alongside Him, that we might present the pains and joys of our exile to our Father without any mask. Praying the Psalms challenges us to trust that God will respond to our exile as He did to His Son: faithfully.
But, if these are Jesus’ prayers, and thus our prayers, then what do we do with psalms such as Psalm 137 that read, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”? If the Psalms are the prayers of Jesus bringing His whole self before our Father, then they — in all their grief, joy, and violent rage — must be the prayers that lead us to Him as well.
As I alluded to earlier, my college graduation brought with it a reckoning of faith. In a time of political disarray, racial turmoil, and a health crisis, the churches that had raised me showed themselves to be communities that turned away from the suffering of the world—and in some cases, brought more gasoline to what was already a bonfire. I remember sitting in a park with a notebook in hand as I jotted down my prayer. Concerning a specific church in mind, I wrote, with hesitation, “God, I hate this church. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.” Many would consider me an even-tempered, glass-half-full kind of guy, so you could sense the awkwardness that I felt when I wrote that sentence. But I truly believe that it was that confession of contempt toward my tradition of origin that started me on the path to reconciliation and to trust that God did not despise my indignation, but that He would do something about it.
The Psalms might not give us the “why” of suffering’s existence, but they do teach us how to bring it before God in complete surrender. As Walter Brueggeman correctly observes, the only way to contend with a violent world without responding in kind ourselves is to utter those unfiltered, rageful sentiments to a God who does not wince at our raw emotions. Aware that dealings of justice belong to the LORD, the psalmists never carry out the retaliation they speak of. Rather, in resistance to the violent culture around them, they entrust their rage at evil to God. These types of psalms present to God the world as it is, as it ought not to be, precisely because we who pray them know that God cares more about the suffering of the world than we do. To pray these psalms alongside Christ is to practice trust in its most vulnerable form. It is to discover language that confesses in faith that God, and not evil, is the true protagonist of history.
Here are some closing thoughts for you to consider as you journey into the Psalms:
1) Pray the Psalms daily—not simply for the sake of repetition, but because in praying them daily we engrain in ourselves, over time, the prayers that brought Jesus to confess trust in the Father—even in Gethsemane.
2) When you pray the Psalms, bring alongside them your own story so that you actually engage in prayer and not just recitation. When the Psalms lament, we too must bring our own individual laments; and when they sing praise, we must find our own reasons for praise.
3) Repeat the Psalms after Jesus. I mean this quite literally: we cannot possibly pray “The LORD is my shepherd” unless Jesus does not pray it before us. We should remember that Jesus is always present and leading us in our prayers.
4) Be patient with the Psalms. It might take a decade before we notice the small, but mighty effect praying the Psalms has on the maturation of our trust in our Father.