The God Who Stoops

At the edge of every village in the ancient world lay the ash heap. There people threw the ashes from the ovens, the shards of broken pots, the rotting refuse, everything nobody wanted anymore. And there, among the smoke and the flies, sat the people nobody wanted anymore: the leper, the beggar, the widow with no one. It was the lowest place a person could reach without lying under the ground. That is the place Psalm 113 is heading for. But the song begins on the other side of the world, and it begins by climbing.

It climbs, and it keeps climbing. From where the sun rises to where it sets one Name sounds, YHWH, high above all nations, His glory above the heavens. Then it goes higher still, until you grow dizzy: who is like YHWH our God, who dwells so high that He must stoop to see what happens in heaven? Even to see heaven He has to bend down. The stars, the angels, the throne rooms of light, for us the highest things that exist, lie beneath Him; He bends over them the way a person leans over the edge of a well to look at something on the bottom.

In that same motion the song plunges downward. The same God who stoops over the heavens keeps stooping in one unbroken sweep, past the clouds, past the rooftops, all the way to the edge of the village, among the smoke and the shards. He raises the lowly from the dust, He lifts the needy from the ash heap, to seat him among nobles, among the princes of His people. He gives the barren woman a home and makes her a joyful mother of children. It is Hannah's song, now become a psalm. The God for Whom heaven is a throne and the earth a footstool crouches down beside the beggar in the ashes and takes him by the hand. In this, the song says, He is without equal. The nations had high gods by the dozen. But a God who is so high that heaven is too small for Him, and who stoops so low that the filth does not disgust Him, who bridges the distance between the throne and the ashes in a single motion and scoops the lowest of all out of it: there is only One such God.

A second song shows that same God from so close that the cosmos becomes a face. Psalm 103, of David, begins strangely, with a man talking to himself. Praise YHWH, my soul, he says (as if he is grabbing his own weary insides by the shoulders and shaking them awake), and forget none of His benefits. He lists what that soul must not forget: He who forgives all your iniquity, heals all your diseases, redeems your life from the grave, crowns you with steadfast love. In the middle of that list David does something you only catch if you know the mountain. He quotes. YHWH is compassionate and gracious, he sings, patient and rich in steadfast love. These are almost word for word the words God proclaimed about Himself on the mountain. The Name that rolled across the summit there lies here in the mouth of an ordinary man, generations later, as a sentence he knows by heart because he has lived on it.

The image on which all of Psalm 103 turns is that of a father. As a father has compassion on his children, so YHWH has compassion on those who fear Him, for He knows what we are made of, He remembers that we are dust. The verb for compassion here is the womb-word that sounded on the mountain; this father loves like a mother. So the high God of a moment ago stands bent over a person, the way a father bends over a toddler who has just fallen on its knees. There are two ways to bend over a fallen child. One look measures: why again, when will you ever learn? The other look knows the child and sees how recently those little legs learned to walk. Psalm 103 says which of the two God is. When David wants to say how great that compassion is, he reaches for the only thing large enough, the distances of the cosmos itself. As high as the heaven is above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west (and those two never touch, no matter how far you walk), so far has He removed our transgressions from us. The dizzying height of Psalm 113 has become here the measuring rod of how far He has carried our guilt away.

For man is like grass, and David is sober about that: the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and the place where it stood no longer knows it. We are dust with an expiration date. But the steadfast love of YHWH, he sings, is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him. On the one hand a blade of grass that will have withered by this afternoon; on the other a love without beginning and without end. Yet these two do touch, because the Eternal One bends over the grass, as He bent over heaven and over the beggar in the ashes. Who is like YHWH our God? No one dwells so high, and no one stoops so low.

*A note on the source text. Psalm 113: the question "who is like YHWH our God" (113:5), the God who raises Himself high and lowers Himself (113:5–6), the poor from the dust and the barren woman as joyful mother (113:7–9; cf. 1 Samuel 2:5,8). The Hallel (Psalm 113–118) and the Passover; cf. Matthew 26:30. Psalm 103: the fatherly compassion and "He remembers that we are dust" (103:13–14), with richam (cf. Exodus 34:6), the cosmic measures of chesed and forgiveness (103:11–12), the grace formula repeated (103:8; cf. Exodus 34:6), the grass and the eternal chesed (103:15–17). "Praise YHWH, my soul": 103:1–2. The divine Name as YHWH.*