This is a depressing psalm. For me, it calls to mind all kinds of popular music that records the pain of loneliness and depression: we are dust in the wind, I’m so lonesome I could cry, paint everything black. There is not much detail about the context of the psalm; it simply says it is a psalm for those afflicted. It does mention enemies, but overall it gives us the feeling of general despair at the shortness and difficulty of life. Jacob’s words to Pharaoh resonate here: “Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life” (Gen. 47:9).

In the middle section, the Psalmist remembers that God will favor his people; he heard their cry in Egypt and one day he will be recognized as the God of Israel and the God of the nations. This is a hopeful horizon and tilts the psalm away from total despair. But then, the psalm returns to the psalmist’s lament and plea for God to do something. You get the sense here that the psalmist is saying “you’ve helped your people before, why won’t you help me now?”

This brings me to a very important element in the psalms: they are not sentimental. Sentimentality is very difficult to define but Catholic novelist Flannery O’Conner has done a fine job. Here’s her description:

“We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.”

That is sentimentality; skipping the process of facing and living through the reality of suffering as one of God’s people. It is a kind of whistling in the dark that expects everyone to be in a positive, upbeat, happy-clappy mood all the time. The psalms teach us to disciple our emotions differently. We are to face them, to bear them, and through them allow God to teach us his ways and the cross over time. Paul tells us to mourn with those who mourn, not to try to get them to stop mourning. May the Spirit lead us into the sense of this psalm and allow it to shape our emotions to be like that of the Suffering Servant, our Lord Jesus Christ.