03/08/2026 - Psalm 42-43, Third Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Psalm 42-43
As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God; when I shall come to appear before the presence of God?
My tears have been my food day and night, while all day long they say to me, “Where now is your God?”
I pour out my soul when I think on these things: how I went with the multitude and led them into the house of God,
With the voice of praise and thanksgiving, among those who keep holy-day.
Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
My soul is heavy within me; therefore I will remember you from the land of Jordan, and from the peak of Mizar among the heights of Hermon.
One deep calls to another in the noise of your cataracts; all your rapids and floods have gone over me.
The LORD grants loving-kindness in the daytime; in the night season the song of the Lord is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
I will say to the God of my strength, “Why have you forgotten me? And why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me?”
While my bones are being broken, my enemies mock me to my face;
All day long they mock me and say to me, “Where now is your God?”
Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
Give judgement for me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people; deliver me from the deceitful and the wicked.
For you are the God of my strength; why have you put me from you? And why do I go so heavily while the enemy oppresses me?
Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy oil and to your dwelling;
That I may go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy and gladness; and on the harp I will give thanks to you, O God my God.
Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
~
Was there any point in that passage above where you saw one Psalm end and the other begin? I’m going to guess that it’s pretty difficult to tell without the verses! And that’s because in our earliest manuscripts of the Psalms, these aren’t two separate passages. They’re together as one Psalm, and that’s how I’m going to be treating it for the most part. Psalm 43 serves as the ending five verses of Psalm 42, summarizing all that the song has talked about and then ending on the refrain that is present throughout.
And it’s this refrain more than anything that tells us that this is a psalm of lament. Like we touched on last week, psalms of lament are the most common psalm type in the Bible. In this one, the content seems to suggest that the lament is that the Psalmist cannot go to the Temple for some reason. This could be because the Psalmist is in exile, like the Psalmist last week, or because they have just returned from the exile and the Temple is still yet to be rebuilt. So while last week we talked about a psalm of exile with some characteristics of a psalm of lament, this week we have a psalm of lament with some characteristics of a psalm of exile.
And it’s a beautiful one. There are three sections to this song, each containing five verses. And each section ends with refrain that takes on a new meaning each time it’s said:
“Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.”
The first section is Psalm 42:1-5, which conveys exactly what the Psalmist is lamenting. Like many of the other psalms of lament, they are expressing their longing to be closer to God. And not only do they feel as if they are far from God, everyone else thinks so too. Whether the question of “Where now is your God?” is meant to be mocking or genuine is up to interpretation. Either way, their despondency and the absence of God is evident to everyone around them. And this is genuinely distressing to the Psalmist as shown by their use of water and thirst as their primary image throughout this passage.
Now, I don’t know about you, but the closest I ever come to to feeling like I’m dying of thirst is when I’m on road trips. Growing up, I was in a family where the goal was to get to our location as fast as possible with as few of stops as necessary.
And if my brother and I were hungry or thirsty, that was not necessarily a reason to stop. Especially if we’d ignored our mom’s instructions to get water bottles before we left the house, then we were really on our own. Now as an adult, my husband and I are much more amenable to stopping at gas stations to get drinks and snacks, which to me is now a very important part of road trips.
But unlike the ease in which we can get to gas stations to quench our thirst on road trips, the Psalmist isn’t able to get to the Temple to quench their thirst for God. And this can be a little hard to relate to for me as someone who was raised in a church where I was taught that I could pray and be with God anywhere, not just in church. But in talking to my dad and some other people who was raised Catholic, my understanding is that in Catholicism, faith practices do revolve more around coming to church and participating in liturgy and receiving Communion.
And for the Hebrew people, all of their worship and religious practices revolved around being in the Temple. At this time the primary religious practice besides prayer and reading Scripture was conducting sacrifices, which couldn’t be done anywhere other than the Temple. These sacrifices were done for a variety of reasons, from repentance to celebrating the birth of children to symbolically marking the seasons of planting and harvest.
The Temple, like our churches, was also a place for the community to gather. Holidays would be celebrated, meetings would be held, and it was even just a place for people to talk as they waited to conduct their sacrifices. In verses 4 and 5 of Psalm 42, the Psalmist specifically talks about this communal aspect, how wonderful it was to celebrate the holy-days, or holidays, at the Temple with their community. Not having that community or place to practice their faith, even though they have other practices, is like the comfort of drinking the saltiness of tears when all you want is fresh water.
The Temple was central to the faith and life of the Hebrew people in Judah, and because of that, it was central to their faith and relationship with God. Just as water is central and necessary for life, the Psalmist is saying that without God, without being able to go to the Temple, they feel like their faith will die as well.
After this, the Psalmist then asks for the first time, “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.”
The last phrase rings hollow after all the Psalmist has said about how far they feel from God.
But then we start to get our first signs of hope in verses 8-15. In between memories of when the Psalmist was able to go to the temple, their pain of their present reality, and finding out that their enemies now openly mock them when they ask where God is, we get verse 10: “The LORD grants loving-kindness in the daytime; in the night season the song of the Lord is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.”
For the first time we have a glimmer of the Psalmist’s belief that even though they find themselves in a season of night, God is still with them. Once they affirm this, they go on to directly talk to God for the first time, asking God why they are being oppressed and mocked. These verses still read as full of sadness, but the switch from the Psalmist talking about God to talking to God, with the trust that God will listen, does give it more of a glint of hope.
And in this Psalm, at least, they don’t have God respond. Instead, the Psalmist pours out their heart to God for a few verses before repeating the refrain:
“Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.”
Now the refrain is starting to take on a bit more determination, a bit more fire. The Psalmist still is in a place of lament, first and foremost, but hope is starting to creep in. Because hope will always find a way to creep into whatever gaps in despair it can find, and once it’s taken root, it’s hard to dig back out.
And for those of you who were wondering, this is where Psalm 42 ends. Most likely these got divided into two at some point, because this division makes Psalm 42 a clear Psalm of lament. Even though there’s a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, the overall tone of the Psalm remains the same throughout. Because once we get to Psalm 43:1-4, the tone has shifted even more towards hope. The Psalmist has gone from lamenting their situation aloud to God, to demanding that God return to them and bring them home to the Temple.
But even in those steps towards hope, the grief never quite disappears. The Psalmist continues to ask where God is, even as they describe God as “the God of my joy and gladness.”
And I think the best example of this tension between hope and grief and sorrow comes in the refrain: “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God; for I will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of my countenance, and my God.”
Even in the midst of the grief and the sorrow that the Psalmist is living through and crying out to God about, the Psalmist is still finding comfort and reasons to give gratitude to that same God.
Because even though despair and hope are opposites of each other, that doesn’t mean they can’t exist alongside each other.
The presence of hope does not negate the presence of grief, and just because we are living with sorrow does not mean we don’t have hope.
One of the quotes that I’ve heard repeated over the past few months in response to all of the news is “Look for the helpers,” from one my favorite pastors in history, Fred Rodgers. But he actually wasn’t the person who came up with this idea; it was his mother, and he shared the sentiment with many parents and children over his TV show.
The full quote goes, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
But I don’t think that means that we should focus only on the helpers and completely ignore the scary, sorrowful things. And I don’t think Mr. Rodgers meant for us to do that either. We have to be able to have hope and be able to grieve at the same time.
We can grieve the ways in which our lives didn’t live up to what we wished for and dreamed about, while also having gratitude for the many blessings we do have in our lives.
We can be sad that our life’s plans have been derailed when get the diagnosis we weren’t expecting. While also finding hope in treatment plans, in people who bring dinners and prayer shawls, and even in plans to make sure we or our loved ones are comfortable in their final days.
We can cry and rage at the ending of children’s lives too soon, while finding hope in the ways we can work to make sure it never happens to any child again, from raising money for medical research to advocating for peace around the world.
And we can find hope in knowing that death is not the end. In just a few weeks we will celebrate the good news that God did not let death have the last word.
Because when Jesus was killed at the hands of the Empire, he was resurrected on the third day, which we now celebrate as Easter.
And while there are many things that can kill us with despair, we know that we have a God that is with us in our grief, and can resurrect our hope even in the midst of our sorrow.
Because death and despair do not get the last words. Hope does. Both in life, and in our Psalms today.
So why is your soul so full of heaviness today? And why is it so disquieted within you?
I invite you to put your trust in God; for even as we grieve, we will yet give thanks to the One who is the help of our countenance, and our God.