Psalm 73

In his influential treatment of the Psalms Walter Brueggemann describes three types of psalms, psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation, and psalms of reorientation.

Psalms of orientation are songs that describe a well-ordered moral universe. The righteous are thriving and the wicked are getting their just deserts. Psalm 1 is an example. The righteous person is blessed but the wicked person is like chaff the wind blows away.

Psalms of disorientation are the songs of lament. The cry of these songs concerns the moral disintegration of the world. The wicked are thriving and the righteous are suffering. Consequently, the singer calls out to God asking the Lord to act and bring the world back into moral order and coherence. 

Psalms of reorientation display a journey, orientation through disorientation and culminating in a new reorientation. In these songs we hear about a season of struggle recently experienced. We've returned to faith, but only after undergoing a dark night of the soul. Psalm 73 is an example of this. As a psalm of reorientation the song takes us on a journey.

The psalm begins on a note of orientation:

Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.

From here, the song quickly moves into the season of disorientation. Faith begins to falter as confidence in God turns to doubt: 

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.

What causes the doubt? What is the source of the disillusionment? The trouble comes from the moral incoherence of the world, how the wicked live easy, untroubled lives:

For I was envious of the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death;
their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.

Witnessing the flourishing and prosperity of the wicked, the singer despairs over their pursuit of virtue. Following God, doing the next right thing, being a good person...what's the point? Struggling after goodness in a world where no one cares and where virtue won't be recognized or rewarded seems futile and pointless:

All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.

Making things worse, trying to penetrate into the mystery of why God allows wicked people to become successful is an exhausting task, like banging your head against a wall:

When I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task.

Let me pause here to say that a lot of us are about to undergo this very trial. On November 6 half of us, if the polls are to be believed, are going to wake up to what we'll experience as the victory of the wicked. And beholding that victory we'll step into the experience of Psalm 73. A sense of despair, weariness, and futility will threaten to drown us.

So, what do we do in that moment?

In Psalm 73, the psalmist enters the temple and experiences worship:

I went into the sanctuary of God...

There, in the midst of the worship of God, the singer perceives the precarity of the wicked. They may be flourishing now, but it will not last. God will bring them low:

Truly you set them in slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!

If not in this life, then the next. But the truer and deeper reorientation of the song isn't found in seeing the wicked finally get what they've got coming. "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord. So we'll leave that work to him. 

No, the deeper and truer reorientation is experienced when the singer comes to realize that God is our reward. We observe how the prizes of life are unevenly allocated. We experience elections won and lost. And in all this we come to realize that our happiness isn't found in any of these things. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, we've attached our hearts to the things of earth. Our joy had become connected to all that is fragile and fleeting, events and objects that I do not control. Because of this, our mental health has become very precarious. True and sturdy ground is found in Psalm 73 only after the singer finds his home in God:

Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

This is the shape of joy. Here is the geometry of mental health. As Psalm 73 concludes, "it is good to be near God."