This is the low point of the psalter. I don’t mean “low” in quality but in tone. Scholars have called this the darkest psalm. It is essentially one long cry of abandonment and it does not end on a positive note.

Our favorite Scriptures tell us a lot about ourselves. It is interesting, for example, that our favorite psalm in the modern West is probably psalm 23. We love the sense of comfort, joy, harmony, and familiarity that it brings. The early church, by contrast, loved psalm 110–a military psalm about the enemies of God’s anointed being crushed. They seemed to long for justice and universal acknowledgment of the Lord Jesus; we seem to want to feel better.

So, if we like comfort and warmth, we probably avoid or ignore psalms like 88. It is squirmingly uncomfortable to read. It offers no hope. It is the cry of a person who feels utterly abandoned by God and others. There is little information in the psalm to indicate when it took place or what were the circumstances of its composition. The writer could be literally imprisoned and/or dying or just feel that way. In church history, it has most often been used in church services on Good Friday or Holy Saturday to express the doubt, despair, and fear of the Lord in his abandonment and the disciples in their failure.

Many psalms that express such despair end with at least a glimmer of hope or silver lining. This psalm refuses to do so. In fact, it hardly ends, it just trails off in desolation. One translator puts it this way “you have put loved one and neighbor at a distance from me, my acquaintances… darkness….”

Of course, we know this is not the last word. We know God answers prayer and we know that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. Even the next psalm gives us relief from the sadness of this one. But we shouldn’t flinch from the message that this psalm brings. Paul says we are to “mourn with those who mourn” and perhaps we should learn to mourn with the psalmist here. Sometimes the life of faith is sad. Sometimes there are tragedies that no words can relieve. That too is part of faith. Psalm 88 rebukes our easy shrugs that would want to move on, embarrassed by the pain that we sometimes see in this life. Stay here a while, face the pain, and offer it up to God.

To me, the comfort is not necessarily that God will one day wipe away every tear. That is good news, of course, but I cannot now imagine what that will be like. My comfort comes from the fact that Jesus wept, that he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He himself knew, knows abandonment. I believe that every person who honestly lays their complaints before God in grief will find the man of sorrows their companion.