We find ourselves in an in-between place with Psalm 126, looking back and looking ahead.
The song starts with gratitude and remembrance for the Lord restoring the fortunes of Israel:
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Our mouths were filled with laughter then,
and our tongues with shouts of joy.
And then, in verse 4, attention shifts to the future with a petition to restore the fortunes of Israel:
Restore our fortunes, Lord,
like watercourses in the Negev.
In short, there is praise for a past deliverance (verses 1–3) and a plea for a future restoration (verses 4–6). Hope for the future flows out of a past provision. Though this present moment is sorrowful, God acted in the past and God will act again. Thus the hopeful expectation: "Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy."
I'm struck by the suite of emotions in Psalm 126: gratitude, joy, sorrow, hope. The sadness is rescued because it is surrounded by what psychologists have called "self-transcendent emotions." As I describe in The Shape of Joy, these emotions are self-transcendent because they are oriented toward a horizon found outside and beyond oneself.
For example, the hope we see in Psalm 126 has a eucatastrophic shape. Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy. This is the same eucatastrophic shape we see in the Beatitudes: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Hope flows out of an expectation that God will act within our stories, transforming sorrow into gladness.
From a psychological perspective, this is the genius of the Christian message. Because of the resurrection, there is a radical open-endedness to human life and history. A closed and fatalistic system was broken open. That's what you behold when you look into the empty tomb: the eucatastrophic shape of the cosmos. And it's that hope, that eucatastrophic shape, which allows the poet of Psalm 126 to sing, "Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy."
