In Psalm 73 the writer complains bitterly about his lot. He has the dirty end of the stick while his wealthy neighbour has all the pleasure. We remember the old song ‘She was poor but she was honest.’ With its line ‘It’s the rich what get the pleasure. It’s the poor that get the blame.’
‘My feet had almost slipped,’ writes the poet. He lists the benefits that practical atheism has brought his neighbour: ‘Their talk is all mockery and malice.’ He himself had obeyed the law for nothing. Then he remembers that God is his refuge. Only God can deal with his bitterness.
Memory helps us here. That was psalm 73. We also have psalm 37. ‘Better is the little which the righteous person has than all the wealth of the wicked.’
Like our hymn-books, the Psalms were songs for various occasions. (Some were all-purpose songs.) Like our hymn-books, many contributed and were edited to suit contemporary needs. That means a mismatch in many cases. But the strength of the psalms is not in their contemporary relevance in a land flowing with milk and honey. Their strength lies in their insight into human nature and a capability to express that in words – words in the form of metered language.
Comedian Billy Bennett performed ‘She was poor but she was honest’. ‘It’s the same the whole world over,’ he sang, ‘It’s the rich what get the pleasure; it’s the poor what gets the blame. Isn’t it a blooming shame?’
The irksome details suffered by the poet are not the same as the bureaucratic box-ticking that gives grief to us today but the context of the poet’s complaint is a tangled web we can all understand. Life is unfair. No wonder people complain. If they did not, they would scarcely be human. But the psalmist saw beyond that and so can we.
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