Not One Is Broken

Psalm 34, pt 6

Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
but the Lord delivers him out of them all.
He keeps all his bones;
not one of them is broken.
Affliction will slay the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.
The Lord redeems the life of His servants;
none of those who take refuge in Him will be condemned.     -Psalm 34:19-22

There has, in our house these past ten months, been much wrestling with these parts of the Psalms - the ones that promise deliverance. These are the ones that, if it has not happened already, will quickly turn a person into a deep cynic, smirking at how such a thing could really be true considering all the facts.

What does it mean that this God redeems the life of His servants (Ps 34:22)? Does He really deliver him out of them all? Say, if you can, how He did such for Lauren Hannah Trotter? Can these promises be made sense of when looking at the empty chair at the table, the empty passenger seat in the car, the empty hands?

How can anyone suggest that deep, true consolation is some half-baked, silver-linings hollowness? “At least she was…” is of no substance to fill or explain such emptiness. It does not balance the scales in any substantial way. Nor does that kind of talk stand a chance against the monolithic weight of real sorrow—the kind that defies reason: the empty crib, the illness that carries on for years, the strife with no resolution for decades, the anger built up like walls. There is no “good news” in a gospel that begins with “at least.” It is only more weight on an already overburdened soul.

But even that would be bearable if there were not so many of these kinds of things promised in the Bible itself:

Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.     -Ps 50:15

Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name.     -Ps 91:14

Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, And He delivered them out of their distresses.     -Ps 107:7

The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul.     -Ps 121:7

What do you make of these - plagued as you are by all that life has dealt out? Have the lines fallen for you in remarkably unpleasant places? Have you brushed shoulders with the cold darkness of real, true pain? Have you found yourself face down in that icy water, suffocating from the days that bring nothing but more of the same?

How does the weight of living - the weight that buries you deep in the dirt - make sense when held up against these kinds of promises toward redemption?

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Part of this very Psalm 34 will come up in the Gospel account of Jesus’ death. It is worthwhile to gain an appreciation of the context.

The engine of Rome was uniquely skilled at cruel ways of death. It was, as history confirms, one of the key practices to grow an empire the way that Rome did. Creative ways of inflicting maximum pain over the maximum period of time were so central to Rome for so long, that her enemies would often choose suicide over whatever awaited them upon capture by the Romans. Crucifixion, though, stood in a different category of creative, horrific, and humiliating ways to die. The key was to allow a victim to keep themselves alive - or, more correctly, to put them in a situation where their body fought against their own willpower to remain alive. Hanging loosely on a cross prevented full exhalation, leading to slow asphyxiation. But the body would wretch against such a thing, and the victim would instinctively push up on their cross (often pushing on feet that had been nailed or bound to the splintering wood). But strength held out only long enough to catch a breath, and the whole thing would start again. The key was to parse those two things - the natural reaction and the mental desire - apart in a single means of torture. From there the victim could remain in the absolutely worst possible position: at the highest point of pain, fully desirous of death, and yet unable to die. And it went on like this for days.

A Roman historian, Seneca the Younger, described the horror of it all pointedly:

Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain on a cross—dying limb by limb, one drop of blood at a time—rather than dying quickly? Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly weals on shoulders and chest, and drawing the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony?¹

It is in this kind of torture that John makes special note of how Jesus dies. The lynching of this rabbi has gone on for long enough, and the Jewish Passover holiday is approaching (John 19:31). Pontius Pilate, knowing that this whole thing could last days longer, gives the order to end things by breaking the legs of the three criminals on Golgotha. Doing so shortcuts the whole thing to a quick, if still brutal, death. The victims suffocate in a matter of minutes.

But, as John notes, when the soldiers come to break Jesus’ legs, they find Him already dead. And, the Gospel writer notes, this kind of death was in keeping with what was supposed to happen to Jesus; as if it is a good thing:

For these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled, “Not one of His bones shall be broken.”      -John 19:36 

And what is the scripture that John is referencing? It is nothing less than this very Psalm of deliverance:

He keeps all of his bones;
not one of them is broken     -Ps 34:20

John is no fool. He is keenly aware that the reference being made seems twisted in more than one way. He points at the dead Jesus, suffocated and covered in his own blood, and then points to Psalm 34 as if to say, “See! All those bones were kept, even as all that body was broken!” The bloody body of a man, and the promises of Psalm 34 seem dramatically incompatible. What has John seen that we miss?

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Could it be that the gaze pain gives - the kind where your eyes are fixed so powerfully and directly on the horror that consumes your life - is the right kind of vision, but only from the wrong end of things?

It is not that Jesus’ death is any less horrible, tragic, or unjust. It is all those things, and quite more. But that, if we are to understand John, is exactly the proof that God is at work. Jesus’ death is not a marker against the intentionality of God, but the neon sign post which says it is all meant for something; all of it is being used to get somewhere. And that somewhere is so exponentially more beautiful that all the horror will come into sharp focus as the only way - the best way - to such a place. Is this not the very center of the Good News that Jesus brings? Sorrow is clay in His hands. It is the lump that becomes highest, truest Joy.

The cross - the very instrument of the most horrific way of dying - stands over churches, hangs on necks, rests above graves as the reminder of this very reality. Jesus comes to keep the bones, even as the body is wasted to breathlessness. Jesus does not come to keep you from any pain, but to keep you from the real pain, the deepest kind - that which has no meaning, no purpose, and no outcome from it. Such a thing is true hell: to see all your suffering laid out, and the sum of it be chaff in the desert.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous, 
but the Lord delivers him out of them all.    -Ps 34:19

It is easy to miss the depth here, and fall back into the same “at least…” kind of thinking. It is not just that Jesus comes to deliver from afflictions “eventually”, or “in a spiritual sense”. David has no interest in such qualifications. Why should we? The promise is steady: the deliverance is out of them all (Ps 34:19b). But real deliverance cannot just be a restoration to what once was. How would that be real deliverance for the woman who has carried the grief of her child loss for decades? How could the lifetime paralytic be fully delivered just by being able to walk for the last ten years of his life? Indeed it would seem to be enough, but what is to be made of all those years, of all those tears? Was there anything to that, or does it become only more dust to be blown around?

No, this crucified Jesus is out for more. He is out to do the greater miracle. He is out to make blooms happen not just where there were dead plants, but where the ground was poisoned. He intends to make the very pain itself come to mean something, just as the cross itself still does. What an impossible thing it is, and yet how easily we have come to accept that miracle in the crucifixes all around us. Beauty from the substance of suffering itself. That is what Jesus comes to prove. It is the only truly satisfying answer to lives that have carried true, real sorrow for any amount of time.

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Do you feel death in your life, in so many ways? Do you carry loss that cannot be consoled - lost life, lost time, lost youth and health, lost marriages, lost children? Have you come to the edge of the dock, and all that remains is fog and cold ocean - the boat gone on without you? Do you press against the nails every morning, just to get air for the day?

It is enough. The deeper promise is yours: that all of this be for something more.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (Matt 5:4).

1. Seneca. Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter 101. Translated by Richard M. Gummere, Harvard University Press, 1917.