December 14

As Far as the East

A person can set out east and keep going for a lifetime, crossing every border and every ocean, and never once arrive at west. When Psalm 103 wants to say how far God has carried our sins from us, that is the measurement it reaches for.

The psalm opens with a man giving himself an order. He tells his own soul to praise God, tells it again, and then warns it against forgetting, as though the benefits about to be listed were the kind of thing that gets mislaid. Sins are forgiven and diseases are healed, and the one all of it happens to is addressed simply as you.

One line in the psalm is older than the psalm. Merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in loving kindness: those are the words God used when he proclaimed his name aloud to Moses on the mountain. The psalmist is passing God's description of God back to him.

Praise the Lord, my soul! All that is within me, praise his holy name! Praise the Lord, my soul, and don't forget all his benefits; who forgives all your sins; who heals all your diseases.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness. He will not always accuse; neither will he stay angry forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor repaid us for our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his loving kindness toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.

Psalm 103:1-3, 8-13

The comparisons in the second half reach as high and as wide as language can go, and then the last of them lands on something small enough to picture. In it a father has compassion on his children, and the psalm says God's compassion for those who fear him works in that way.

What is praised in these verses is behaviour. It has God forgiving, healing, holding back an anger he would be within his rights to spend, and having compassion on people who cannot mend their situation. In the Gospels that is what Jesus does. He forgives sins in front of onlookers who think he has no business doing it, he heals the ones who are brought to him, and Matthew and Mark both describe him looking at a crowd and being moved with compassion. Nothing about God's character changed between this psalm and Bethlehem. What David praised is what arrived.

If this December has something in it you would rather not carry as far as Christmas, take the psalm slowly, and say it in the first person until the pronouns land. Your sins are forgiven. The distance God has put between you and them is his to keep, and he keeps it.

Ahead of the comparisons, the psalm sets down a line that takes no measuring at all, that God will not always accuse, and he will not stay angry forever. No part of this December has to be settled first for that to hold.

You are merciful and gracious, Lord, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness. You have put my sins as far from me as the east is from the west. Have compassion on me today as a father does.