“The Lord is full of compassion and mercy* slow to anger and of great kindness” (Psalm 103: 8)
I love it that we start our Lenten journey with this passage of the psalm that reminds us that our God is a loving, forgiving God. Psalms are these songs of Ancient Israel that the people used to sing when they went up to the Temple to offer their sacrifices, although they were also used for personal piety. After all, they are mainly prayers. And they have this interesting structure: the first verse says something, and then the second one says the same thing but a little differently, under another angle: it develops the first idea. That’s the reason why we usually read the psalms responsively. The soloist says something and then all the congregation responds with something that says: Amen, indeed, this is how it is.
Leader: “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy“
All: Amen, indeed, the Lord is “slow to anger and of great kindness“
It works from half verse to half verse split by the asterisk, but also from one verse to another. This is a prayer, and a meditation that goes deeper in what it invites us to contemplate.
It’s important that, one the first day of Lent, we are reminded of God’s goodness. First of all, because Lent isn’t about us, it’s a time for God. And I think it is Jesus’s idea in this passage of Matthew we have just heard. Yes, Jesus isn’t happy about the religious people because they are hypocrites, but mostly they make their piety about themselves instead of genuinely trying to come closer to God. I don’t think these days we use so much our piety to show off, but it is still a temptation for us to make Lent about ourselves: it’s “my efforts, my devotions, my giving up, my giving away“, when it really is a time to come closer to God’s heart.
And, then the psalm is important because this is also how we are supposed to approach God: trusting in in God’s goodness. Maybe this is even all there is to faith: To trust that God is good. Christians who believe that God in the Old Testament is revengeful and even bloodthirsty have never read the psalms. As Christians, we like to think that we have “invented God”, a good God, but it really isn’t, in v.13 God is already compared to a Father who cares for his children, so we haven’t even invented that and I would like us to spend more time with the Old Testament during Lent.
And one of the things the Old Testament teaches us is that God’s goodness cannot be set apart from God’s holiness and righteousness. Maybe that’s also what we need to think about during Lent. The psalm tells us that God is “slow to anger”. It is actually in Hebrew a funny image, because the word actually says: God has a long nose. The image is that the nose is like a chimney where the fumes comes out off, something that happens, at least in cartoons, when people are very angry, when rage or indignation burn inside. But it takes time for the fumes to come out of God’s nostrils. Meaning: God is patient: “He has not dealt with us according to our sins” (v.10). And yet, if God is slow to anger, it also means that God can be offended and angry. Now maybe we don’t like that very much, but if we think about it, who among us does not get offended and angry when others are unfair, or cruel or negligent towards ourselves or towards the ones we love? So it’s easy to imagine that God, whose first attribute is to be compassionate, would get wounded. And if we make Lent about God, this is also what we are invited to think about. That God is good but also, and because God is good, God is wounded. Lent is a time for us to think about the reality of sin and how it hurts people and creation and how it hurts God who loves people and creation.
This is what it means to fear God (v13 and v17). We talked at length last Sunday about not being afraid of God, but fear of God is not about being scared, it is about awe and respect for God’s holiness. Respect for God’s holiness invites us to take a good look at the way we fall short of this holiness.
Now it’s often hard to look at our sins, maybe because our sins hurt ourselves first. It breaks our relationships, tarnish the image we have of ourselves, we feel regrets, shame, bitterness. And we don’t know how to fix it, so we might as well sweep it under the rug. But I think this is also the idea the psalm conveys: Yes, we make a mess of things, it’s our fault, but it is also the way things are just because we are mortals and such weak creatures. This is the symbol of the ashes. We are reminded that we are dust. But as we are reminded we are dust we are also reminded that God does not crush us, like in nature the powerful animal will attack the weak one. On the other way around: God has compassion for our weakness, because of our weakness, and wants to redeem us, heal our hearts and bring us new life. We can walk around with our ashes on the forehead as a sign that we are indeed dust and that’s the very reason why God will save us. It’s comforting to know that we are dust.On Ash Wednesday, the priest when imposing the ashes say “Remember that you are dust“ but the psalm says that God is the first one to remember that we are dust (v14), and because of that, God has mercy. In the same way that God has compassion and all those suffer, God has compassion on sinners who suffer too.
During this Lent, we will be invited more specifically to practice compassion. In our booklet, on today’s page it reads that Lent “is the opportunity to reflect on the ways we participate in the brokenness and suffering of the world while holding ourselves and others with love and compassion as we seek healing“. It also reads that it starts with “praying for the awareness of God’s loving gaze that is cast upon the hurting and vulnerable, even and especially ourselves, is one way to begin“.
So let’s begin.