Reflections on Psalm 102
In my essay on Exodus 15 earlier this year, I looked at one basic religious practice: praising God. I argued that to praise God is both to recall his divine glory and to call it into being in the present. At root, the act of praise is simple but powerful: in his act of creation, God infused the world with his glory, or light; in our act of praise, we look for that glory, gather it into speech or song, and reflect it to its source. Like the mirrors in a sealing room, praise concentrates and amplifies divine light by reflecting it.
In that essay, I also gave readers an IOU. Exodus 15, for all its poetic power, only gives us an introduction to praise: it isn't difficult to worship on the far side of the Red Sea, with your feet on dry land and your enemies defeated. But just as God made fertile pastures and dry wilderness, he included joy and suffering in the created order. And so, if my theology is right, suffering must also be offered up to God as praise. I promised that I would tackle this more advanced version of praise when we arrived at the Psalms. The praise of suffering is praise for experts. And the Psalms are the canon's unsurpassed teachers.
The Psalter is not a random collection of poems; it is arranged into five books, traditionally understood to mirror the five books of Moses, and this week’s reading crosses from Book IV to Book V. The first three books are full of sorrow and lament, while Book IV (Psalms 90–106) begins a turn toward praise, and Book V (Psalms 107–150) completes the turn into joyous celebration. As a whole, the book of Psalms demonstrates how to use lament as material for praise. And this week’s chapters, which straddle books IV and V, zoom in on the turning point. In what follows, I’ll pay special attention to Psalm 102.
Certain psalms are classified, based on their form and content, as “psalms of lament,” and Psalm 102 is a great example. The German scholar Claus Westermann noticed that psalms of lament display a distinctive emotional arc: they move from a cry of distress to a petition for help, and finally to an exultant expression of praise. Building on the work of an earlier scholar, Hermann Gunkel, who first classified the psalms into types, Westermann noted that the transitions between these phases usually happen with no explanation: the psalmist begs for rescue from the jaws of death and then, in the next breath, praises God as if the rescue has already occurred. But the rescue itself is unseen.
Yet another German scholar, Joachim Begrich, had proposed an explanation for this puzzle. If the psalms were the liturgy, or prayer book, for ancient temple rites, perhaps the abrupt transition from petition to praise marks a gap in the performance. At the unlabeled turn from misery to joy, perhaps the temple priest, speaking for God, spoke an “oracle” or promise of salvation to the petitioner, who then responded with praise. Imagine the interaction between Hannah and the priest Eli at the temple in 1 Samuel 1:16–18, if only Hannah’s words survived: it would look something like the curiously abrupt shifts of tone in the psalms of lament. The hypothesis of the missing oracle is speculative, of course, but it offers an explanation for the sudden left-turns in these psalms.1
Let us pause for a moment to praise German biblical scholarship, which has flooded such light on the literary jewel of our canon, the Old Testament!
Psalm 102 illustrates the pattern worked out by these scholars. The first eleven verses are an acid bath of suffering. The psalmist expresses his grief in a series of metaphorical images: his days vanish like smoke, his bones smolder, he eats ashes like bread, he sits like a lone bird on a rooftop (see Psalm 102:3, 7, 9). Then, at verse 12, with no preparation, he bursts into praise: “But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations.” If Begrich is right, the priest would have uttered God’s promise of salvation in the gap between verses 11 and 12. The text we have is the petitioner's side of the exchange, with silence where God's promise used to be.
This is a compelling reading, especially for Latter-day Saints who know the powerful rhythms of a performed temple liturgy. But Westermann was after something more than a historical reconstruction. He wanted to understand the biblical text as present-day readers encounter it, unexplained gaps and all. Does the psalm as a written text, rather than an incomplete historical performance guide, have an implicit salvation theology of its own?
Taking the received text of the psalms of lament at face value and reading them as literary wholes, Westermann argued that these ancient poems transfigure the emotional registers of lament and praise by means of juxtaposition. With no buffering transition, it’s as if praise seeps into lament, and lament into praise. He wrote:
In the Psalms of the Old Testament there is no, or almost no, such thing as “mere” lament and petition, … By nature it cannot be mere petition or lament, but is always underway from supplication to praise. … no longer mere petition, but petition that has been heard. … no longer mere lament, but lament that has been turned to praise.2
The formal interpenetration of lament and praise in the psalms creates an emotional register in which grief can, always and already, imply praise, like a waning moon on its way to waxing. Conversely, praising God at the moment of deepest despair can paradoxically imply, not deny, the extremity of one’s pain.
Building on Westermann’s insight, I’d suggest that the psalms of lament are a training ground for the would-be praise expert looking to level up. They’re the perfect texts to practice an interpretive skill I think of as a kind of textual train-hopping; the ability to run alongside a scripture, pull myself into it, and then ride along to its destination.
Because the threshold between lament and praise remains unlabeled in Psalm 102 and the divine promise remains unspoken, the exact nature of the rescue remains unspecified. Was it God’s promise of safety, of healing, of comfort, of faithful accompaniment? A psalm of lament makes itself available for application to any of those needs. The poem can bear almost any interpretive burden a reader lays on it.
The superscription to Psalm 102 shows how this works. The superscription is the short line printed above the first verse of some psalms, indicating the type of psalm, the attributed author, a performance instruction, or occasionally a narrative setting. When a superscription names an attributed author, it most often gives a specific name—for instance, David, Asaph, or the sons of Korah. But the superscription to Psalm 102 reads: “A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the LORD.” Psalm 102 is not put in the mouth of a particular historical figure but instead leaves the identity of the sufferer open to anybody in the position it describes. The superscription to Psalm 102, in other words, invites anyone who is afflicted and overwhelmed to borrow its words free of charge.
Moreover, the psalm’s unlabeled blank space between verses 11 and 12, the exact moment of rescue, is a kind of entrance sign for readers: “Enter here to catch the train from affliction to praise.” I step into the poem at the space left empty for God’s promise; because that promise remains unspoken, it can apply to any present need. Then, gratefully sinking into the language of the psalm, I allow its emotional momentum to carry me up the mountain from misery to praise. The psalmist does the hard work of finding adequate words and offers his posture of consecration as my own.
The psalm itself seems to anticipate that this is how its language will be used; in fact, it seems that this kind of scriptural train-hopping is what it was designed for. Verse 18 reads, “This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.” The poem here states outright that it exists for readers who do not yet exist, readers like you and me. This is a text that I can climb aboard in 2026, load up with my twenty-first-century heartaches, and ride from desolation to praise, especially as a beginner. The psalms of lament help a prayer novice like me utter expert-level praise.
Notes
1. See Hermann Gunkel and Joachim Begrich, Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel (Mercer University Press, 1998).
2. Westermann, quoted in Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 316.
