1 I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up
and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
3 O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones,
and give thanks to his holy name.
5 For his anger is but for a moment;
his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.6 As for me, I said in my prosperity,
“I shall never be moved.”
7 By your favor, O Lord,
you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face;
I was dismayed.8 To you, O Lord, I cried,
and to the Lord I made supplication:
9 “What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
10 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
O Lord, be my helper!”11 You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
12 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.Psalm 30:1-12 NRSVue
Jaw clenched, teeth set, tears stinging my eyes, I have responded emotionally to a number of personal setbacks in the past few weeks that make me see red and feel like smashing things. At 3 am, or even worse – 1:45 am, I struggle fitfully to break free of what Buddhists call the “monkey mind” and settle into the present moment in a manner that does not spiral off into free-floating anxiety. I hate everyone and everything. I ask God where the hell they are; this God who, I thought, had promised that at this stage in my life I would feel clarity and support, confident that I was moving in the right direction. Things were going to fall neatly into place. Deep in muck, I feel like I am living in the unresolved middle of Psalm 30.
Personal anger and resentment at things that are absolutely, definitely not going my way coexist with political grief over the loss of my childhood imagination of what the United States was or could be, and existential dread about the ease with which much of the country seems to casually embrace authoritarianism. My head knows that my personal hardships matter not at all in comparison with the vast number of people who are suffering both immediate and indirect loss of home, job, dignity, resources, access to health care, and basic human freedoms at the whims of a capricious dictator and his enablers. In contrast to those devastations, I am doing OK; I am not in danger. Tell that to my cortisol levels. Cue the world’s smallest violin. My heart aches, ricocheting back and forth between personal and communal pain. The news cycle brings stories of horrifying violence, murder of diplomats, killing legislators. Pictures of the President’s sparsely attended propaganda parade overlap with colorful posts with many millions of individuals uniting to declare their allegiance to a constitution, not a king. Pain coexists with protest. Although there is no end in sight, I hang to any and all glimmers that lament is not the end of the story.
The body politic is reeling and so I choose to read Psalm 30 as allegory as well as autobiography. Yes, the first heading (Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness) in the NRSV translation of the Bible states that the psalm is an individual’s personal ode to joy. The psalmist celebrates their new well-being (Psalm 30:2 and Psalm 30:3), reflecting on a time when God seemed absent or unfair, and praises the return of health and prosperity, attributed to God’s favor (Psalm 30:4 and Psalm 30:5). However, the second heading (A Song at the Dedication of the Temple) offers another context. This second heading indicates that Psalm 30 was also used as a hymn commemorating the reopening of the Second Temple after the Maccabean revolt in 164 BCE. Several years earlier, in 167 BCE, the Temple had been desecrated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes who usurped it for Zeus Olympios. The event that reclaimed the Temple became the origin of Hanukkah, meaning “dedication.” These events and liturgical use provide evidence that Psalm 30 has a long history of being read as the story of communal despair and celebration rather than the solitary story of an individual overcoming life-threatening disease.
Following the classification system of the late Hebrew Bible scholar, Walter Brueggemann, Psalm 30 can also be identified as a psalm of New Orientation that posits a normative counterworld against the material world of pain and suffering that human beings know all too well. Religion, as Brueggeman contends, can serve the goals of domination or it can serve the goals of liberation. The psalms of New Orientation assert that a different world is possible, one that embodies the imagination of a just and loving Creator rather than the inhumane designs of arrogant, selfish power-seekers. As a work of literary art, Psalm 30 teems with metaphor and imagery of juxtaposition and reversal, e.g. crying and healing (Psalm 30:2); exile and rescue (Psalm 30:3); anger and favor (Psalm 30:5), mourning and dancing (Psalm 30:11). In the topsy turvy landscape of U.S. politics today, where cruelty and domination are valorized by persons in positions of power, the vision of New Orientation to liberation and the possibility of Beloved Community feels like a balm for the soul.
This does not mean that understanding Psalm 30 is simple or unproblematic. Even as a balm, the psalm seems to embrace a troubling theology that associates bad times with God’s disfavor and prosperity with a divine intention to bestow blessing (Psalm 30:5). This is a theology that appears to blame the victim and about which suspicion is warranted. However, there are alternate readings of Psalm 30 that fit more fruitfully with the work of liberation. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. imagines not God’s anger so much as the injustice of racism and bigotry giving way to the joy of a community emancipated from hatred and singing songs of liberation. In a similar vein, speaking to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Hakeem Jeffries blends political strategy with his invocation of Psalm 30:5 “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” and riffs into “Don’t mourn, organize!” Both men deployed the rhetoric of the psalm to persuade listeners that by leaning on faith and through effective organizing, their foes, white supremacy and systemic racism, would not prevail forever.
During bad times, it can be painful to remember the complacency of good times. One traditional Jewish reading of Psalm 30 includes an assumption that the Temple was lost because, in their prosperity and self-confidence (Psalm 30:6), the Jews had failed to obey the will of God to do justice to one another, to care for the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow, to refrain from shedding innocent blood, and to not worship other gods. Decolonial readings of the Bible point to other, imperialistic causes for the destruction. Today, as colleagues, friends, and I engage in soul-searching about how the current authoritarian moment could be, we wonder what is the bad karma that might explain where we are today? How much do we lay at the feet of the Constitutional compromise made with slave-owners in the nineteenth century? How much does liberal white complicity with “polite bigotry” feed into the theology of those who believe that an authoritarian God is eager to establish a theocracy in the United States? What were white Americans too proud to see? With civil society on life support, will it be possible to keep the Republic? If our lament is genuine and our supplication profound enough, will there be joy in the morning?
Living in the middle of a psalm, in the pit and before any restoration of well-being, it is hard to see a way out. In dark moments it can be impossibly difficult to imagine that a moment of gratefulness might return. The last thing in my heart when I am grieving either personal or communal loss is thanksgiving. With today’s escalation and normalization of political violence, citizens and residents of this country cry out for grace and healing, looking to the day when this political nightmare might end and basic civil and political liberties restored. Not only does gratitude feel too distant in this moment, it also feels wrong. How do I find words for praise when I can barely breathe? Why engage in thanksgiving when cursing feels more in tune with material reality? Where is the sense, where is the compassion, in counting absent blessings?
Yet as counterintuitive as gratitude feels, my lived experience tells me that it helps. Sometimes the most I can be grateful for is that it is still possible to imagine an alternative. Telling a different story matters. People do not seek out and gather in their faith communities to assure each other that hope is pointless, but to claim sources of healing. Psalm 30 ends with a reversal of lament to a newfound joy for which the poet expresses eternal gratitude (Psalm 30:10-12). It is impossible to know where exactly we stand in the narrative arc of Psalm 30, but it is somewhere in the dark between despair and morning. I refuse to be grateful for pain and suffering, either personal or communal, but neither will I succumb to the delusion that the oppressed will be denied the blessings of liberty and justice forever.
