The prophet Jeremiah felt the scorn of those who sought comfort, not God’s truth, because he spoke of God’s irrevocable judgment on Jerusalem. The officials of the king decided instead to make Jeremiah’s death inevitable, and they threw him into the cistern intending for him to die there: “There was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud.” Ultimately, Jeremiah was rescued from the cistern, but the episode points to the reality of life. Speaking the truth of God and following the truth of God do not always lead to sweetness and light.

The truth is not always nice, for us or for others; and Psalm 40, a psalm of David, seems to speak directly to the muck that Jeremiah found himself in and God’s saving him in his distress. The first three verses read:

I waited patiently for the Lord;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
 

The promise of God is not that we will not suffer for him, but that God will not forget us in the muck and the mud of everyday life and will reach down to us and be with us in our need. It is a psalm that inspired Bono and the other members of U2 to write the song “40,” a meditation on Psalm 40, for their 1983 album, “War.” In U2’s version, Bono sings:

I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the mire and clay…
 

The biblical scholar Eugene Peterson, in a conversation with Bono, says of the song “40”: “It’s one of the songs that reaches into the hurt and disappointment and difficulty of being a human being. It acknowledges that in language that is immediately recognizable. There’s something that reaches into the heart of a person and the stuff we all feel but many of us don’t talk about.” There is a tendency when we read the Bible to think of it as speaking of people who are not subject to the same fears, tears, pain and hopelessness that we are, but Psalm 40, like U2’s “40,” reflects raw human suffering and concern.

Peterson, in his translation of the Bible known as The Message, offers this version of Psalm 40: “I waited and waited and waited for God. At last he looked. Finally he listened. He lifted me out of the ditch. He pulled me from deep mud, stood me up on a solid rock to make sure that I wouldn’t slip. He taught me how to sing the latest God-song.” Peterson says, “Praying wasn’t getting nice before God…. The Psalms are not pretty, they’re not nice… I think I’m doing it as close to the Hebrew as I can get it. But it’s not smooth, it’s not nice, it’s not pretty, but it’s honest. And I think we’re trying for honesty, which is very, very hard in our culture.”

Bono had said earlier in the conversation with Peterson: “Why do we need art? Why do we need the lyric poetry of the Psalms? Why do we need them? Because the only way we can approach God is if we’re honest through metaphor, through symbol. Art becomes essential, not decorative.” The psalms speak with honesty of our relationship with God, in praise, in lament, in anger, in despair, in joy, in wonder. The gamut of human emotion is on display, offered to God in honesty from the miry clay of whatever well into we have fallen into. But the psalmist always turns to God with this raw honesty and at the end of Psalm 40 seems stunned that God turned to him: “As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me./ You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.”

It is not weakness to cry out to God with your pain, your loss, your suffering, to ask it to come to an end. This is the truth God wants, a fiery soul that burns with passion for God, that does not let him go but puts him first in all things—not just joy and praise, but despair and pain.

This article appears in August 1-8 2016.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.