Psalm 123 (NRSV)
Read Psalm 123 on biblegateway.com
Verse 1To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens!
Verse 2As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us.
Verse 3Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt.
Verse 4Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud.
Devotion
How did we get here? Why is it that things are going wrong and falling apart? How long, O Lord?
These are the cries and the questions of the human heart, when faced with suffering—our own or someone else’s. These questions are present, implicitly or explicitly, in many of the psalms of lament.
Not today. This short psalm invites us to move from “fiddling” with suffering and the endless theological questions it can raise, to a place of stillness in the presence of God. The suffering is real. And while our minds imagine that hope and comfort will come only when we get answers to our questions, our heart knows: real comfort and hope is found in the presence of our God.
So I wonder: why does my mind divert me from the true source of all that my soul is thirsting for?
Prayer
God of mercy, when our souls are weary with the voices of scorn and contempt, whisper to us your words of welcome, and sing us back home to you. Amen.
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