When we were privileged to visit Jerusalem, by now three years ago, one of the first “holy sites” mentioned in the program was a Roman Catholic church named “St. Peter ‘in Gallicantu’”; the latter part translates as “the cock’s crow.” The reader will understand what is alluded to with this name. Among the many impressions of this first trip to Palestine, I still retain a special memory from this visit. What first struck me was the peculiar location. The church looks like it is glued to the southern slope of one of the mountains on which Jerusalem is built — a short distance outside the walls with which Sultan Suleiman surrounded the old city in the sixteenth century. It looks like it no longer quite belongs here. And the fact that the mountain slopes down rather steeply to the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom does not contribute to our appreciation either. We wonder: Would the disciple have denied his Master at this location? Would the house of high priest Caiaphas have stood here? The tradition insists on it, but tradition seeks to confirm so many other things. Serious scholars dispute it because they believe that someone like the high priest could not possibly have had his home in what must have been a poor neighbourhood at the time.

Be that as it may, the Augustinian Fathers of the Assumption associated with the building took us, my travel companions and myself, down a number of steps, as far down as it was possible to go, and showed us there in the depths an ancient prison, into which the prisoners were lowered through a hole in the floor with ropes tied under their arms. The history of Jeremiah 38 came to mind, said one of the priests, and our Saviour would also have spent the night—the hours between the two sessions of the Council (the Sanhedrin) of which Matthew speaks (26:57-68 and 27:1-2) — in this grim underground hole, where everything still recalls the tortures to which the prisoners were subjected. It was the custom, so he said, that when a pastor or a minister was among the “pilgrims” visiting this place, to ask them to read to the group from Psalm 88, which spoke of the deep suffering of Christ. We complied with this request. Why not? After all, we are convinced that this psalm does indeed speak of him.

I was reminded of this event and the Psalm that was read at the time when I was asked to write a reflection for this magazine, for the week when we commemorate Christ’s suffering and resurrection.

Christ is said to have spent the night, or at least part of it, in prison. It is characteristic that one reads about this in Roman Catholic commentaries, but that Protestants pay little or no attention to any time spent in prison. There are parts in this Psalm that point to a stay in prison; see verse 8: “I am shut in so that I cannot escape.” Yet we ask immediately: Is this reality or does it reflect the imagery of the psalmist? He may also have felt imprisoned in his misery, and there is more to be said for this explanation, especially since among the comparisons contained in the Psalm, those with death, the grave and the realm of the dead so often attract attention. Whether Christ was in fact locked up in a real prison or dungeon on that night, who can say? But that he really was among the dead is beyond doubt. And we do not want to ignore the fact that he was in the realm of death. He who was dead was raised to life again. The church celebrates this at Easter. Joy dominates here: a profound joy about the happy event of the resurrection. But this happiness only gets true meaning in the face of his bitter, sombre, and real death.

A veil hangs over death — over Jesus’ death and also over ours. The dead are hidden from view. Yet the church confesses this death: “he was crucified, died, and was buried.” The church continues to remember her Saviour also as the One who has died a real death. To confess means that we continue to speak of this death. But in order to say something about it, she needs to find words, even imagine something, however vague: to grasp roughly what it meant.

The Old Testament is of great help here. For although the Old Testament is now far behind us, the book remains a part of our Bible and that means that the Church must continue to occupy herself with it and work with it, no matter how imperfect the light that shines there may seem to her in comparison to how light was shed in the New Testament!

This is especially true of Psalm 88, which has been called the gloomiest in the entire collection. One might conclude this, but it is precisely this sombreness that I would like to explore in some more depth. It is true that it seems as if the author finds himself spinning in a vicious circle; at the end of the song he is still just as far as he was at the beginning. But in the darkness, in the sombre recesses of his mind, he surely has a thread in his hands. For listen: he does start off with calling out to God by his Name “LORD/YAHWEH,” and “God of my salvation.” One should not skip over this. After all, this wretched person who is crying out, does yet characterize God as a believer always does. And let us hold on to this thread today with him for whom it was such a dark experience. Not because every human being likes to see just a sparkle of light on his or her way, but because there is light, and this light is God: the God of his salvation.

This does not alter the fact that he who holds the thread in his hands in the darkness has to search for the exit. We see or hear this person searching. As he prays, he knows to whom he needs to turn, but his prayer is a groaning. He is crying out with great agony — during the day, and that is bad enough, but also at night. The night should be the time to sleep, to rest. When life goes its normal course, a person can also sleep, but the psalmist has sleepless nights.

There was a reason for this. We hear of disasters — in the plural. What kind of disasters were these? Some interpreters claim he had a serious illness, possibly leprosy. That may well be possible, although the text does not offer enough support for this assumption. But all in all it was bad enough. He was tired of it, his life was ebbing out; he was totally overwhelmed by all his troubles (verse 3).

He is still able to speak; he is not yet dead, but those who are in a state such as the man speaking here are no longer alive. According to Israelite understanding and the language used by the Bible, he is no longer alive. Even though he was still lying on his sickbed, he felt as if he was already in the grave, and with “grave” we should not think of a hewn and well-kept tomb, but of one that was hastily dug for the dead who had been left behind on the battlefield, more dead than alive. Like the dead he had come close to the pit, a term used for the grave, yes, but also used to refer to the subterranean world of the dead: Sheol. For the Israelite did not stop at the visible grave, but thought about the hereafter. No matter how bleak and desolate the picture, he tried to form an image of the life hereafter.

He is not quite there yet. He is still here and can speak to us, but his life is nearing the realm of the dead and he is already counted among those who descend into the pit. And that is what is so terrible. There is no more life there. The Old Testament believer clung to life, yes, to this life here on earth, and we should not criticize them in an overly spiritual manner for that attitude. To live was to be near to God. Not being alive, that is, no longer living here, meant being cut off from God.

That is how this child of God has sensed something of what it is to be forsaken by God; and of what Jesus Christ had to endure. His God no longer remembers him and forgets him. What he does experience from the Lord is that he is turning his power against him. He banishes him to the lowest parts of the earth: “the regions dark and deep.” If God’s presence can still be detected there, in the deepest pit, in those darkest places, in Abaddon (words fail to express this depth), it is surely in great anger. One cannot live with a wrathful God. Quite simply, that is no life. Because the line of communication has been cut. And for the Israelite of the Old Testament live meant above all to have and to practise communication with the LORD, his God, as well as with his fellow man; see verses 8 and 18. But even the latter shun him. He is an abomination to them; worse: it is like an accumulation of abominations.

How much this man resembles Job; he is like a second Job. Like Job he brings to our minds Jesus the Christ, who suffered and who died.

And so, when we consider everything: the suffering of Job, of this man, and later still that of Jeremiah, and as we look at everything in the perspective of the suffering and the death of the coming Christ, our conclusion is that the God of the Old Testament, coming to the day of Christ, who then still had to suffer and indeed would die (in order to rise again and to be able to speak of this dying), has marked out in advance the long road to this with those of his children who have already known something more about it. They have sensed and experienced something of the depth and horror of suffering, and have come to know death close-up. The Old Testament represents death as it was made manifest in their particular suffering in the midst of life, affecting both body and soul. For ultimately, what is the meaning of the suffering of Job and now again of the author of this Psalm, if they do not open our eyes beforehand to the great Sufferer who is to come—who has experienced all that there was to suffer; who was held captive by the jaws of death, the bonds of death, and then truly died; and who rose again to tell us more about death and dying than the believers of the Old Testament could ever have accomplished.

For Job, however sorely tried he was, even to such an extent that he could speak of death as a familiar one (see Job 17:13-14), continues to speak right up to the end of the book. However shunned he may have been, he is with us. And the author of Psalm 88 also speaks to the end; that energy is still left to him — the man who has no strength left (verse 4). Although he knew much more about it than many others under the old dispensation, he did not breathe his last, and we read nothing about a funeral. Another task was reserved for them, namely to bear witness in the midst of life to the misery of death, as they saw it coming to them in bodily and spiritual suffering — until the One came who could do it, who could die as none other could, but for whom death did remain a horrible reality: something very humiliating, the ultimate end, and the full measure of all disasters. Already in his life, but then also after he had yielded up his spirit, he was truly locked up in the silent, horrible grave, as in a prison.

The soul of the psalm’s author resisted this suffering of death, by which someone is dragged to his grave. He rebelled against it. Note well that he did not rebel against God, because God held on to him.

It is true that as a real human being, as a living person who loves life, he was not able to move beyond suffering in a super-spiritual way. And God’s children do not need to do so either. It goes too much against the life as it was granted to man from God’s creative hand. But the author does hold on to God — to his God!

“My eye grows dim through sorrow” (verse 9a). The eyes are the mirrors of the soul, especially for an Israelite. He cries out… to the LORD. He stretches out his hands… to Yahweh. The man, who has come into the grip of the realm of the dead, assails his God with questions: “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise to praise you?”

Especially at Easter, such a text speaks volumes to us. The church proclaims: Christ has risen! The vexing question has been answered. He, the LORD, can do it. He has proven it. The poet of Psalm 88 could not yet know or believe this. What could this man actually know? Yes, is he not even inclined to deny it right up front? And does he not therefore cling all the more strongly to this life, as if it were the one and all? This transient life is all that man sees with his limited vision. But fortunately, the Church today has transcended all this uncertainty and lack of knowledge. We may know more!

I would like to ask: Would we not rather stand beside this child of God from the Old dispensation, struggling as he was with the bitter reality of death in the midst of life? Someone who in the midst of life also really desired to live? Who desired to be with his friends and brothers; before and in the presence of his God?

Please, let us not detect or read any challenge here, in the sense of “You are unable to work any wonders for the dead.” He himself was like that dead person, someone who was condemned to die. When he speaks of wonders or miracles, his thoughts turn to all those saving deeds that God has performed in the past for his children, for his people whom he delivered time and again. Wonders are signs that accompanied Israel on the way of and to salvation. He called upon God as the God of salvation.

He speaks according to the knowledge of those days about the phantoms, those who have departed. What did he know of them (and how little do we still know of them), but I do detect a belief in some “shadowy” existence in what is said here; the depiction, however negative it may seem, is not a pertinent denial of an existence hereafter, that is, after death. That these departed would ever be raised, like a living person who is made to stand on his own feet, was not in his mind.

However, before the New Testament church starts to look at him in pity, they should read this psalm carefully and think about how he views this difficult matter from God’s side, or from the perspective of the relationship with God.

He is not at peace with his illness, with his misery. Not for God’s sake. Not for the sake of life. If this continues, he will soon be lying in the grave. And that is a terrible prospect — and we agree with him — because God’s mercy is not declared there. In the grave things are silent — an awful quietness. What appears in Abbadon—the place of destruction—of God’s faithfulness? Everything appears to clash with it. And in that place, where there is only darkness, what do you discover of God’s miraculous power such as the people of Israel could witness at the time of the exodus from Egypt — that place of exile and death? For miracles did not only start to appear in the New Testament. And then what about God’s righteousness, also such a beautiful word from the Old Testament, of which people already knew quite a bit back then, even though our understanding of it was made so much clearer later on, first in Isaiah and then later on through Paul? But this child of God believes in that goodness and faithfulness and he fervently hopes to see these turning into reality. He yearns for a day… even though he can hardly imagine it outside of this life.

And that is why this life needs to be restored. He has to be restored to life. May Yahweh perform a miracle to him who now counts himself as being among the dead! And do not say that he is only thinking of this life in “earthly” terms. For in his words he displays a very spiritual understanding of what the Spirit of God is, yearning for the very things that make life worth living.

This is how we identify with this poet today, especially because our Saviour prayed in and through him. He too loved life and because of that deep love of true life he suffered and passed through the sufferings of this life like no other. It came upon him all the time of his life on earth, until he succumbed to it and perished. For he experienced, even so much more strongly than the author of this psalm, how God had forsaken him. Yet he himself held on to God through all of it, also through the bitter anger of this God.

We hear more about God’s wrath in the third part of the Psalm (verses 13-18). A superficial reading of verse 13 might give the impression that the author has not made any progress yet. Is he starting to repeat himself? It is true that he voices the same complaint — yet this time “in the most poignant terms” (J. Ridderbos in his commentary). Repetitions often have their own meaning in the word of God. There are matters that need to be said two or more times—a misery that needs to be expressed. For this Psalm drives us to the great Sufferer of the New Testament, who, according to his own words, was forsaken of God. His words, “Why do you cast me away,” came from the depths of his heart. How much it hurt him that the Father’s face was hidden from him. While this praying individual in Psalm 88 says that he has been “afflicted and close to death from his youth up” so our Saviour and our Lord has indeed suffered all the time of his life on earth. He suffered.

He has known them and experienced them: the horrors, indicated twice here with different terms (terrors, assaults). If these were images of terror, visions of fear, that haunted the person praying this psalm, causing him great distress, for the Son of Man this fear was very real, especially towards the end of his life when the hand of everyone was against him. Also from his God he could expect only wrath. It is enough to make one utterly desperate, and the author of this song or prayer has also foretold this despair: the experience of being hemmed in on all sides and of seeing no way out, with no hope, no glimmer of deliverance...

The psalm concludes that everything has turned to darkness, which makes this into the most sombre psalm of the entire collection. But let no one smugly think, “We already knew this; go and tell it to someone else.” This suffering composer has told what he had to tell, and even if he started to repeat himself, he still performed a service for the coming Christ.

Because now that we remember suffering along with life, and the resurrection before and after death, we may know of the positive answer to the questions “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you?” We can know it within the clear context that the One who was greater than the poet of Psalm 88 has also experienced everything of the misery, the sadness, the abnormality, of death. His suffering casts its shadows forward. His resurrection receives relief and meaning against this so- macabre background. We do not rejoice with a Jesus who did not actually die. No, but we rejoice in the Easter event of the resurrection of One who truly died.

He was dead, in a very real sense, and this made his life, the life, into a so much greater miracle. All praise to God who has thus magnified and revealed his grace and goodness—through him toward us.