If God Is God At All

“Mercy, GOD, mercy!”: the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. In obedience we pray “Mercy!” instead of “Give us what we want.” We pray “Mercy!” and not “Reward us for our goodness so our neighbors will acknowledge our superiority.” We pray “Mercy!” and not “Punish us for our badness so we will feel better.” We pray “Mercy!” and not “Be nice to us because we have been such good people.”

We live under the mercy. God does not treat us as alien others, lining us up so that he can evaluate our competence or our usefulness or our worth. He rules, guides, commands, loves us as children whose destinies he carries in his heart.

The word mercy means that the upward look to God in the heavens does not expect God to stay in the heavens but to come down, to enter our condition, to accomplish the vast enterprise of redemption, to fashion in us his eternal salvation. “The root meaning ‘to stoop,’ ‘to be inclined,’ has been conjectured.”1 Servitude is not a vague woolgathering in the general direction of God and certainly not a cringing, cowering terror under the lash of God. Servitude is specific in its expectation, and what it expects is mercy.

A third element in the servant life is urgency: “Mercy . . . . We’ve been kicked around long enough, / Kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men, / kicked when we’re down by arrogant brutes.”

The experience of servitude is recurrent through history. And the experience has never been happy. The psalmist lived in a culture in which the slave and the servant were institutionalized, as they have been at different times in world history. As far as we can tell, it has never worked very well. Power breeds oppression. Masters get lazy and become scornful of those under them. The cry “We’ve been kicked around long enough, kicked in the teeth . . . kicked when we’re down” is believable. The psalm is part of a vast literature of outcry, a longing for deliverance from oppression.

We live in a similar slavery. True, we have, in Western countries, abolished the institutionalized forms of slavery and all but eliminated a servant class, but the experience of servitude is still among us and is as oppressive as ever. Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence? We live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts. Everywhere we turn we hear complaints: I can’t spend my money the way I want; I can’t spend my time the way I want; I can’t be myself; I’m under the control of others all the time. And everywhere we meet the addicts—addiction to alcohol and drugs, to compulsive work habits and to obsessive consumption. We trade masters; we stay enslaved.

The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. Recognizing and realizing that, we urgently want to live under the mastery of God.

For such reasons all Christian service involves urgency. Servitude is not a casual standing around waiting for orders. It is never desultory; it is urgent need: “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” And the gospel is the good news that the words of God, commanding new life in us, are already in our ears; “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”

The best New Testament commentary on this psalm is in the final section of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 12—16. The section begins with this sentence: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1). The psalm’s emphasis on actual, physical service (not a spiritual intention, not a desire to be of service) is picked up in the invitation to present our everyday, ordinary life. The motivation for service (not coerced, not demanded) is picked up in the phrase “God helping you.” But most significant is the remarkable last phrase logiken latreian, “place it before God as an offering,” which another translation renders “reasonable service.” Service, that is, that makes sense. The word latreia means “service,” the work one does on behalf of the community. But it also is the base of our word liturgy, the service of worship that we render to God. And it is precisely that service that is logical, reasonable. The service we offer to God (in worship) is extended into specific acts that serve others. We learn a relationship—an attitude toward life, a stance—of servitude before God, and then we are available to be of use to others in acts of service.

The psalm has nothing in it about serving others. It concentrates on being a servant to God. Its position is that if the attitude of servanthood is learned, by attending to God as Lord, then serving others will develop as a very natural way of life. Commands will be heard to be hospitable, to be compassionate, to visit the sick, to help and to heal (commands that Paul assembles in Romans 12—16 and many other places) and carried out with ease and poise.

As we live out the implications of a life of service, we are provided with continuous encouragement and example by Jesus Christ, who said:

Do you understand what I have done to you? You address me as “Teacher” and “Master,” and rightly so. That is what I am. So if I, the Master and Teacher, washed your feet, you must now wash each other’s feet. I’ve laid down a pattern for you. What I’ve done, you do. I’m only pointing out the obvious. A servant is not ranked above his master; an employee doesn’t give orders to the employer. If you understand what I’m telling you, act like it—and live a blessed life. (Jn 13:12-17)

God’s people are everywhere and always encouraged to work for the liberation of others, helping to free them from every form of bondage—religious, economic, cultural, political—that sin uses to stunt or thwart or cramp their lives. The promises and fulfillments of freedom are antiphonal throughout Scripture. The glorious theme has extensive documentation in the lives of the people of God. But there are also, sadly, numerous instances in our society of persons who, having been given their freedom, have at once squandered it, using it as “an excuse to do whatever you want” (Gal 5:13), ending in a worse slavery. For freedom is the freedom to live as persons in love for the sake of God and neighbor, not a license to grab and push. It is the opportunity to live at our best, “little less than God” (Ps 8:5 RSV), not as unruly beasts. The work of liberation must therefore be accompanied by instruction in the use of liberty as children of God who “walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:25 RSV). Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.

As Psalm 123 prays the transition from oppression (“kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men”) to freedom (“awaiting your word of mercy”) to a new servitude (“like servants, alert to their master’s commands”), it puts us in the way of learning how to use our freedom most appropriately, under the lordship of a merciful God. The consequences are all positive. I have never yet heard a servant Christian complain of the oppressiveness of his servitude. I have never yet heard a servant Christian rail against the restrictions of her service. A servant Christian is the freest person on earth.