Trouble With Affliction

by Laura Urban, Board of Deacons

Psalm 102

This psalm of affliction gives me trouble. I read the opening verses, and I realize I am not a person who is “afflicted.” My heart is not “withering like grass.” I am not “too wasted to eat my bread.” These images of affliction continue through the first 11 verses with a graphic, visceral intensity.

This psalm is not my voice.

But I am sure it is the voice of those in the midst of despair and destruction in Japan, Libya, and other areas of the world stricken by disaster, in calamities driven by man or nature. Surely many feel “like an owl of the wilderness, like a little owl of the waste places.” (I picture one who feels forced to search alone in darkness for the basic necessities of life.)

I also feel sure that these verses are the voice of Christ: “All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse.” (v. 8) Jesus knew affliction, loneliness, and despair. It is jarring to remember that Jesus was not the comfortable suburbanite that I am. This Lenten season, it is humbling to meditate on these verses and to enter into His anguish.

Yet, for all its words of affliction, this psalm is one that ends with a note of triumph. Indeed, it is even Christ’s triumph that is celebrated. The author of the Book of Hebrews quotes Psalm 102 (v. 25-27) to introduce his argument that God has exalted Jesus as his Son. Fully consecrating the Incarnation, this author presents the psalm as the words of God the Father to the Son:

“In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth,

and the heavens are the work of your hands;

they will perish, but you remain;

they will all wear out like clothing;

like a cloak you will roll them up,

and like clothing they will be changed.

But you are the same,

and your years will never end.”

(Hebrews 1:10-12; from Ps 102: 25-27)

May we, too, worship at the feet at the one who has known affliction, yet forever endures. Our hope is in the one “who does not wear out like clothing.”