No and Yes

You know it’s important to write down insights when they come—which I’m doing now.

Ask for medical prognostication, and from any truthful physician you’ll get “Yes” and “No,” a mix of the probable and possible. Medicine is a mixture of miracle and maybe.

The Book of Common Prayer calls for psalm 88 to be read on the 17th a.m. Just my luck. 88 has to be one of the darkest psalms.

I often skip it, if my soul is already on the dung heap.

Today I read it, along with 89, 90, and 91.

91, of course, is one of the brightest psalms. One Satan quoted to Jesus in the temptations.

That confuses me. How am I supposed to claim ps 91 for my own, when Satan mouths it?

Anyway. Back to insight. Ps 88:

10 Do you work wonders for the dead, can shadows rise up to praise you? Pause

11 Do they speak in the grave of your faithful love, of your constancy in the place of perdition?

12 Are your wonders known in the darkness, your saving justice in the land of oblivion?

(New Jerusalem Bible, courtesy catholic online, it’s www.catholic.org/bible.)

What struck me here as I read is these rhetorical questions. The psalm is attributed to Heman, the native born, son of Korah, sick and suffering.

Heman answered these questions “No!”

Does God work wonders for the dead? NO

Can shadows rise up to praise you? NO

and so on.

Reminds me of Hosea 13.14, another instance of a rhetorical question with an anticipated answer of NO.

(NJB)

 This is as grim as it gets. Though Hosea 14 rummages through tradition for some scraps of hope, again it’s hard to look farther down from this pit.

This morning what struck me, though, reading the grim rhetorical questions put by Heman the sick and suffering, is what he doesn’t know: God’s answers are different from his.

To each of Heman’s questions, God in Christ answers Yes!

Do you work wonders for the dead? YES

Can shadows rise up to praise you? YES

Do they speak in the grave of your faithful love? YES

Of your constancy in the place of perdition? YES

Are your wonders known in the darkness, your saving justice in the land of oblivion? YES

Just ask Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God is “the God of the living, not the dead,” Jesus said.

As for Hosea’s words, when Paul quotes them in 1 Corinthians 15, the mood has transformed from judgment to resurrection and rejoicing:

When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
     Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

 1 Corinthians 15,54-57.

Scholars believe the people of the Hebrew Bible began to realize the resurrection very late in the Persian period two or three centuries before Christ, perhaps gaining insights from the Zoroastrians.

I don’t know what the hope of future life is in Judaism today.

But for me as a Christian, I know. The answer beyond all my questions is Jesus.

For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you …was not “Yes and No”; but in him it is always “Yes.” For in him every one of God’s promises is a “Yes.” 

Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!