O Lord, Listen To My Prayer And Let My Cry For Help Reach You, Psalm 102

Dan Doyle

The problem of sin in our lives is real. It is a subtle prison. The worst part of the problem of sin is that we can become so accustomed to the ‘prison walls’ of our sinful habits that we no longer recognize those habits as sins, or that they are slowly strangling our eternal souls. Psalm 102 expresses both the psalmist’s deep recognition of his own sins and his desperation for God’s mercy and help. He cries out: “O Lord, listen to my prayer and let my cry for help reach you. Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress. Turn your ear toward me and answer me quickly when I call” (Ps 102: 2-3).

In recognizing his sins, the psalmist uses some very powerful metaphors to describe their effects on him and his relationship with God. “The bread I eat is ashes; my drink is mingled with tears” (v. 10). We can imagine that he has come to the slow but powerful realization that the way he has been living his life, letting his sinful habits shape his decisions and actions, has not fulfilled his desired dreams but, instead, has made his life as dry as ashes and has brought him nothing but tears. He has come to realize that these consequences belong to him and his sinful habits, and to no one else.

The psalmist understands that he, too, has damaged his relationship with God. In his humanity, he understands how his sinful habits have damaged his relationships with others and how that has caused them to become angry with him, and he, recognizably, projects that understanding to his relationship with God. His conscience expresses a profound, instinctual awareness that his sinful habits have been destructive to love and to the trust that he owed his family and friends and, more importantly, to God, who is love itself. Now, humbled by the clear recognition of his own sins, and the breach they have caused between himself and God, he cries to God, praying: “In your anger, Lord, and your fury you have lifted me up and thrown me down. My days are like a passing shadow, and I wither away like the grass.” And yet, he remembers this truth, too: “But you, O Lord, will endure forever” (vs. 12-13). Even under the burden of his guilt, he recognizes that God’s faithfulness to him, unlike his own faithfulness to God, endures perfectly, forever.

Then the psalmist offers this declaration to all of us, which arises out of his own experience of God’s forgiveness: “Let this be written for ages to come that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord; for the Lord leaned down from his sanctuary on high. He looked down from heaven to the earth that he might hear the groans of the prisoners and free those condemned to die” (vs.19-21). Do we hear this truth? Do these words strike our hearts? Do they awaken our conscience to the ‘prisons’ that our own sinful habits have confined us in? More importantly, do we believe in the reality of God’s kindness and mercy, we who now live in ‘the ages to come’ that the psalmist refers to here?

So much of the human suffering that we see and encounter in our daily lives, in local, national, and global news reports, arises from the dark cells, the ‘prisons’ of our shared, unrecognized, and often unrepentant, sinful habits. Wherever human suffering is encountered, it is often the consequence of our unrecognized sinful habits of selfishness, greed, undisciplined sensualism, or our prideful judgementalism. The habit of comparing ourselves to others as ‘better than’ them enables us to separate ourselves from their suffering, or to falsely legitimize their continued, unjust mistreatment, or to callously ignore their suffering altogether, all of which only deepens their suffering. What prejudices have we become imprisoned by that falsely allow us to diminish, or worse, to deny the God-given, transcendent dignity of those we judge through the prism of those unrecognized prejudices?

To recognize our sinful habits for what they are, and for their consequences to ourselves, to others, and to God as our own, is the first step back toward the real freedom we are made for by God. To believe in God’s infinite kindness and mercy frees us to repent of our sins and to turn back to Him and his generous grace, humbly, with confidence and hope in his forgiveness. In our humble repentance, we recover our transcendent dignity and are enabled, through the gift of his grace, to turn back to our arduous, purposeful, lifelong, wondrous pilgrimage along the narrow path to the kingdom of God with courage and faith.

Let us end here with the beautiful and hopeful words of the Canticle of Zechariah from Luke’s Gospel: “In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79). That tender compassion of God that Zechariah speaks of here has ‘dawned’ upon us in the Person of Jesus Christ. Praise God! Amen.