Psalm 51: Superscription

Prayer for Cleansing and Pardon

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

Most of us will know the background for this psalm. King David is home in his palace as his army is off fighting one of his wars. From his palace he spots a woman named Bathsheba bathing on her rooftop and he is overcome with desire and lust. He calls for her to be brought to him, and he “goes in to her.” Bible isn’t very shy, is it?

And Bathsheba became pregnant. As it turns out Bathsheba was the wife of one of David’s military men, Uriah the Hittite. So, in an effort to cover up his sin David had Uriah sent home from the battlefield to the palace. David has him come to the palace for dinner and gets him plastered. David then tells Uriah to go home to his wife, hoping Uriah will sleep with his wife and no one will know that anything untoward happened between David and Bathsheba. But Uriah is a more noble man even when he is drunk than David is sober. Uriah refuses to go home to his wife while the rest of his men are out on the battlefield. David has to come up with a new plan. David has his general, Joab, put Uriah on the front lines of battle so that Uriah will be killed. After Uriah has been killed David could then take Bathsheba as his own wife before anyone knew she was pregnant.

And David thought he had gotten away with his scheme…If it wasn’t for the meddling prophet, Nathan. The prophet comes to confront King David with his sin, but he doesn’t confront him directly. He is subtle, even subversive. Nathan tells the King a story about a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had a great amount of cattle and sheep, while the poor man only had one little ewe lamb that he raised, even sleeping with the lamb in his arms. When the rich man had a guest come into his house, rather than using one of his own sheep to prepare a meal for the guest, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man to feed the traveler.

David burned with anger and proclaimed that the rich man should be put to death and repay the poor man four times what was taken from him. The prophet turned to the King and said, “You are the man.” And the King’s eyes were opened. He confessed his sins. The prophets replied, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”

St. Augustine preached a sermon on this psalm in Carthage in the summer of 411. He begins his sermon saying”

We say this with grief and trepidation, yet since God wanted the matter to be written about, he does not mean us to hush it up. What I am going to say, therefore, is not what I want to say, but what I am forced to say. I say it not to encourage you to imitation, but to teach you caution.

Augustine’s primary concern as he begins his sermon is one I had never even considered as a preacher. That if we hear what the great King David did, we may find it easy to justify our own sins.

Augustine cautions his audience saying:

There are many who are very willing to fall with David, but unwilling to rise again with him. The story is not put before you as an example of falling, but as an example of rising again if you have fallen…Let all who have not fallen listen, to ensure they do not fall; and let all who have fallen listen, so that they may learn to get up again.

Psalm 51:1—2

Have mercy on me, O God

Augustine then makes the insightful point that this grave sin of David’s happened when he was exalted on the throne and in the palace—when everything was going well for him. We all fear adversity, but most of us are not afraid of prosperity. “Yet prosperity is more dangerous to the soul than adversity is to the body.”

David did not commit that sin while he was being persecuted by Saul. While the holy David was enduring Saul’s enmity, while he was hounded hither and thither by Saul’s pursuit, while he was fleeing from one hiding-place to another in his effort not to fall into Saul’s hands, he did not desire any woman who was not his, nor did he murder any man with whose wife he had committed adultery. The more wretched he perceived himself to be in his weakness and distress, the more intent he was on God. Tribulation is a useful thing, just as the surgeon’s knife may be more useful than the devil’s blandishments. But once David had defeated his enemies and gained security, the pressure was off him and his pride grew to excess. His example is therefore valid for us in this sense too, that we must beware of complacency.

Comfort and success can lead to pride, Augustine suggests. And pride is the root of all sin.

The medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul’s discussion of his “thorn in the flesh,” (2 Cor. 12) was convinced that Paul’s thorn was a habitual sin. But, he asks, why would God not remove sin from Paul? Surely God does not want us to remain in sin. But, Thomas says, God is a great physician, and any wise doctor knows you have to be willing to use a lesser disease to combat a greater disease (think: chemotherapy). Because God is the great physician he will allow even a grave sin to remain in our lives if it can keep us from the even more dangerous sin of pride.

Paul asked for the thorn to be removed because he doesn’t know what the doctor is up to. He knows the thorn hurts—it feels wrong—but what he is asking is for is for the doctor’s remedy would be removed from him. And of course, the doctor does not oblige.

I think Thomas’s reading has a lot of merit. Why does Paul say that the thorn was given to him? To keep him from being too elated—literally “puffed up with pride.” The thorn kept him humble, kept him in touch with his weakness. And, hearing the doctor’s orders, Paul decides he will boast in his weakness, because in his weakness Jesus’ strength is made perfect.

God refuses to heal us in a way that will lead us to a worse sickness.

King David has become comfortable in his palace. He is puffed up. There is no thorn in his flesh, and Augustine is suggesting that that’s part of his problem. Comfort and success is not bad, but it is perhaps the most dangerous sickness because we easily become elated—puffed up with pride.

Augustine continues:

This psalm warns those who have fallen in sin, but it does not leave those who have fallen in despair…Listen to [the prophet David] crying out, and cry out with him; listen to him groaning, and groan too; listen to him weeping, and add your tears to his; listen to him corrected, and share his joy. If sin could not be denied access to you, let the hope of forgiveness not be debarred. The prophet Nathab was sent to that man; and notice how humble the king was. He did not brush his mentor’s words aside… King in his majesty though he was, he listened to the prophet; now let Christ’s lowly people listen to Christ.

This is what makes the psalms so unique. That a king like David could hear God’s “No!” That David could have the humility to see that what he desires is not the same as what God desires.

The German philosopher, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, wrote an essay on the psalms giving voice to God’s divine “No” to humanity. The essay was entitled, “Hitler and Israel, Or on Prayer.”

Rosenstock-Huessy says that the psalms present to us a God who is free. He is free to come to his people Israel and tell them, “No. Not this way.” God’s freedom is what allows him to correct the desires and the will of his own people. This, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is right at the heart of the difference between Hitler and Israel. For Hitler there is no possibility for God to say “No” to Hitler’s plans, Hitler’s will, and Hitler’s dreams. In Hitler’s mind his will and his God’s will are not separable. They are one and the same.

Put another way: Hitler thinks that what he wants is always what God wants. And so he is not open to hearing God’s, “No.” This exhibit A of what pride looks like. Rosenstock-Huessy puts it like this:

[The psalms testify to] God’s ‘No’…

Hitler’s will and his God’s will are nauseatingly one… [but] God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal: My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.

[The Psalms are] the white heat of speech, during which man’s will is separated from God’s will, and men come to know God’s will as differing from their own wishes and from their leader’s will.

Psalm 51:4

Against you, you only, have I sinned

This verse can be misleading. It can sound as though David doesn’t think he sinned against either Bathsheba or Uriah (or his whole kingdom, for that matter). But of course he had. Sin is always the harm we do to our neighbors. We can’t truly harm God. Our sins cannot impinge upon him or violate him. Our sins violate our neighbors.

So how can David say this? If we see the truth of who God is in Jesus of Nazareth it becomes clear: God is not God all by himself. God is and always has been the God-human. But precisely for this reason he has taken who we are in our human weakness into himself. He is God as human, not in spite of being human.

If we follow the logic of God’s incarnation in Jesus, then we can say it this way: to harm any human being is to harm God, because God has identified himself with humanity in Christ. Our sins do not violate God by nature, but he takes it personally. This is why Jesus comes to Saul on the road to Damascus and says, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” This is why Jesus tells us in Matthew 25 that whatever you have done to the least of these little lambs, you have done to me. He is the Good Shepherd who has become the lamb of God.

David is witnessing to the truth that the Apostle Paul had to come to realize. On the road to Damascus Paul was saying, “What have I done to you Lord?” And Jesus’ response is that what Paul had done to the least of these he had done to him because he has filled all things with myself.

To sin against your neighbor is to sin against God because God has become your neighbor in Jesus of Nazareth.

Psalm 51:9

Hide your face from my sins

David says, “Hide your face from my sins,” but Augustine notes that David does not ask God to hide his face from himself.

God is concerned with you, not your sin. A lot of the preaching we have heard has caused us to think that God is really only concerned with our sins—that our sins are some massive problem for him, but they aren’t. God turns his face away from your sins, but never from you.

And here we have the confession portion of the David’s psalm. He has confessed his sins and pleaded for God’s great mercy. David is forgiven, and he is certain of it. How is he certain? It’s not simply because he feels innocent now. He is certain because he has heard a concrete word from God through the prophet Nathan. The prophet told him, “The Lord has taken away your sins.”

This is where we come up against a problem we face today. The modern churches many of us have known do not have any practice of personal confession and absolution. We are left on our own to confess to God and so we are left alone with our own perception of God’s assurance of pardon.

Robert Jenson puts it like this:

We do not have the arrangements the psalmist did. We confess, indeed, silently “directly” to God or in generalities with a group, under which we silently insert our actual sins.

But David doesn’t do this. He confesses his sins to Nathan.

Jenson's point is that because we have done away with the practice of personal confession of sins we are stuck in the situation that many of the psalms lament: If I keep silent about my sins, my bones will waste away. Put another way: if this Psalm 51 invites us to confess our sins along with David, to where will we confess? We are left by ourselves.

Jenson is saying that the believer in Israel could do something specific with his sin, and then be blessed by it. But we don’t have that anymore because we have forfeited the practice of personal confession to one another as James instructs (James 5:16).

This makes us uncomfortable. We think we should just be fine confessing our sins straight to God without anyone else involved. We think our relationship with God is private and unmediated. And there is some truth to that. For some of us that may be enough. But what about those of us who, after confessing our sins, are not sure whether or not we have been really, truly forgiven?

Are we missing out on a gift of God that we should regain?

Bonhoeffer and the Gift of Personal Confession

In one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s most famous books he makes just this case. He argues that we have missed out on one of God’s greatest gifts to us because our churches have disposed with the practice of personal confession—confessing our sins to one another. (You can read more from Bonhoeffer in the attached document below.)

These are his primary points:

* “In confession there takes place a breakthrough to community.”

“‘Confess your sins to one another’ (James 5:16). Those who remain alone with their evil are left utterly alone. It is possible that Christians may remain lonely in spite of daily worship together…the final breakthrough to community does not occur precisely because they enjoy community with one another as pious believers, but not with one another as those lacking piety, as sinners. For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner. Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community. We are not allowed to be sinners. Many Christians would be unimaginably horrified if a real sinner were suddenly to turn up among the pious. So we remain alone with our sin, trapped in lies and hypocrisy, for we are in fact sinners.

“However, the grace of the gospel, which is hard for the pious to comprehend, confronts us with the truth. It says to us, you are a sinner, a great, unholy sinner. Now come, as the sinner that you are, to your God who loves you.”

* “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to the cross.”

“The root of all sin is pride…Confession in the presence of another believer is the most profound kind of humiliation. It hurts, makes one feel small; it deals a terrible blow to one’s pride.

“And it is nothing else but our community with Jesus Christ that leads us to the disgraceful dying that comes in confession, so that we may truly share in this cross. The cross of Jesus Christ shatters all pride. We cannot find the cross of Jesus if we are afraid of going to the place where Jesus can be found, to the public death of the sinner. And we refuse to carry the cross when we are ashamed to take upon ourselves the shameful death of the sinner in confession.”

* “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to assurance.”

“Why is it often easier for us to acknowledge our sins before God than before another believer? God is holy and without sin, a just judge of evil, and an enemy of all disobedience. But another Christian is sinful, as are we, knowing from personal experience the night of secret sin. Should we not find it easier to go to one another than to the holy God? But if that is not the case, we must ask ourselves whether we often have not been deluding ourselves about our confession of sin to God–whether we have not instead been confessing our sins to ourselves and also forgiving ourselves. And is not the reason for our innumerable relapses and for that feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living from self-forgiveness and not from the real forgiveness of our sins? Self-forgiveness can never lead to the break with sin.

“Who can give us the assurance that we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins? God gives us this assurance through one another. The other believer breaks the circle of self-deception.”

I’ve attached both the handouts I distributed to the class. The first is a selection of excerpts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s chapter on “Confession and the Lord’s Supper” from Life Together. The second is the liturgy of the Reconciliation of a Penitent from the Book of Common Prayer.

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