Thomas Kleinert
Some of you may have seen Freaky Friday, a 1976 Disney movie featuring Barbara Harris as Mrs. Andrews and 13-year-old Jodie Foster as her teenage daughter Annabel. They each think the other has an easy life, and one Friday morning, when each wishes she could have the other’s life for just one day, their wishes come true. I didn’t see it; I saw the 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis playing mom and Lindsay Lohan as daughter Anna. Again, their perspectives on life are vastly different, and after a big Thursday night argument and some fortune cookie magic, they wake up in switched bodies the next morning. Lots of screaming and terrific acting ensue, as each gets to know the other’s life from the inside for a day. I read that another remake of Freaky Friday is in the works, delayed only by last year’s screenwriters’ strike. Clearly, the dramatic and comedic potential of mother/daughter relationships is perennial, as the daughters of mothers become the mothers of daughters, generation to generation. The remake plans also tell me that we enjoy imagining the playful possibilities of switching bodies with another person—why walk a mile in their shoes if you can live a whole day fully immersed in their world?
We like playing with the idea of switching bodies or trading social locations for a day, because we understand the difficulty of knowing another person, of really knowing them, and not just lots of things about them; the difficulty of really knowing them, and not just a composite of the snapshots, projections, and conclusions we have created of them in our minds. We are also all familiar with the mirror scenario: we want to be seen and accepted for who we are, rather than who others think we ought to be or need us to be. We know the deep desire to be fully known and understood by another person, and we know the struggle between that desire and the fear of being judged, the fear of being ridiculed for how we talk, or dress, or look, or feel. We want to be known—and we don’t, because we can’t bear the thought of appearing smaller, weaker, less together than the role we have learned to play on the small stage of our world. And some go to great lengths not to be known for who they are for fear of getting hurt.
Psalm 139, the psalm for this Sunday, is a moving meditation on the desire for, and the reality of, being known.
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
When you step into this psalm, and try on these words as your own, what do you notice? Do you enjoy saying them? Does the thought of God discerning even your thoughts give you peace? Or does it feel creepy and intrusive?
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
Again, does this feel like finally no longer needing to hide who you are, and what you say, or think, or do, or does it feel like living under constant surveillance? The writer of the psalm leaves plenty of room for this ambiguity.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
“You hem me in” carries connotations of feeling protected, but also of being under siege or confined. And “your hand upon me” can be a blessing or a shield, or a burden. This is where the psalm moves from reflecting on divine knowledge to the theme of divine presence, and ambiguity continues to color every line:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
The divine presence is inescapable: it fills the earth from east to west, and every layer of reality from the highest heavens to the depths of the realm of the dead.
Even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night as bright as the day.
“There is nowhere far enough away to escape from God, no darkness thick enough to hide,” writes Jason Byassee.[1] In this all-encompassing reality of divine presence and knowledge, do you feel safe and sheltered or uncomfortably transparent? The third movement of the psalm is filled with awe and wonder as the psalm writer’s entire lifetime comes into view:
It was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
… intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
This psalm if full of declarations about God, but none of them are conceptual or abstract; none of them are general statements about God’s knowledge and presence. All of them are deeply personal and relational. The entire psalm is an intricately woven fabric stretching between the writer’s “I” and a divine “you” that is known, named, and praised. To me, it is an ode to the joy of being fully known by this eternal You.
Yes, to be fully known is to be completely vulnerable. It is a reality we desire with our whole being and at the same time fear, because we bear the scars of violation, and abuse, and shame, and abandonment. The testimony of Psalm 139 is an invitation to risk this vulnerability in our relationship with the God we have come to know in Jesus, the God who became completely vulnerable for our sake, the God who desires to be known by us, even as we are each fully known.
Toward the end—you all heard it and swallowed hard—toward the end, the psalm suddenly takes a disturbing turn with talk of killing and hatred. To some, these vehement sentiments seem so inconsistent that they can only be explained as a crude addition, writes Jim Mays, and “so unacceptable to religious sensibility that they are customarily omitted in liturgical… use.”[2]
O that you would kill the wicked, O God,
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—
those who speak of you maliciously
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
In any time and place, those who seek to live in righteousness face wickedness, bloodthirst, malice and evil, but notice that the writer of the psalm does not ask God for the authority to commit bloodshed in return, but for God to deal with the reality of evil. On the weekend when the people of the United States honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and in this moment when hate and violence are once again on the rise around the globe, it is crucial that we who wish to serve the kingdom of God on earth, serve in the name and Spirit of Jesus, and do not serve the urges of our own violent fantasies.
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I sure do, sometimes, and perhaps you do, too. And that’s why I do all I can to remember that the Lord does not hate those who hate the Lord, but does indeed love them. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it, but I entrust myself completely to it, in the name of Jesus, the Crucified One, risen from the dead.
In the end, the writer of the psalm asks God for one thing: to continue to do what God has done. “Search me, O God, and know my heart,” he or she prays, in what is almost an echo of the opening line, “test me and know my thoughts.” Search me as you have searched me. Test me as you have tested me. See me as you have seen me.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
The last word is not the cry for God’s violent anger to be unleashed against the wicked, but for God to see, and to let me see, if there is any wicked in me, and to lead me in the way everlasting (for the way of the wicked will perish[3]). Psalm 130 invites us to try on these words and practice saying them as our own, and to receive an identity rooted not in the things we say about ourselves or the labels others assign us, but in the One who made us and redeemed us, the One who knows us more deeply and more graciously than we could ever know ourselves.
During the years of terror when the Nazis ruled in Germany and waged war in the name of empire, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was active in the resistance and was eventually imprisoned, sentenced to death, and, just a few weeks before the war ended, executed. In prison, he wrote this poem, titled, Who am I?
Who am I? They often tell me
I step out from my cell
calm and cheerful and poised,
like a squire from his manor.
Who am I? They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely, friendly and clear,
as though I were the one in charge.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bear days of calamity
serenely, smiling and proud,
like one accustomed to victory.
Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
Restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird,
struggling for life breath, as if I were being strangled,
starving for colors, for flowers, for birdsong,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness,
shaking with rage at power lust and pettiest insult,
tossed about, waiting for great things to happen,
helplessly fearing for friends so far away,
too tired and empty to pray, to think, to work,
weary and ready to take my leave of it all?
Who am I? This one or the other?
Am I this one today and tomorrow another? …
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, you know me; O God, I am yours! [4]
May we all know the peace of that final line.
[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-after-epiphany-2/commentary-on-psalm-1391-6-13-18-6
[2] James L. Mays, Psalms (Louisville: John Knox, 1994), 428.
[3] Psalm 1:6
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Wer Bin Ich?” Widerstand und Ergebung, 179. English translation based on versions found on the internet.