Psalm 98 is nine verses, and most of them are instructions to make noise. Sing. Make a joyful noise. Break forth. Bring the lyre, the trumpets, the horn. Let the sea roar and the rivers clap and the hills sing together. By the time you reach the end you have the whole earth shouting.
Verse 3 is the only place in the psalm where God does something, and it is quiet.
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.
The Hebrew word is zakar, and it does not mean what our word means. When we remember something we have it come back to mind, and that is the end of it. In Hebrew the remembering moves. God remembered Noah, and the waters went down. God remembered his covenant, and the exodus began. The word almost never stops at the thinking. It carries on into the doing, and the doing is the evidence that the remembering happened at all.
So verse 3 is not God being reminded of an old affection. It is the loyalty in him coming out into the open, where the nations could watch it. And the word for that loyalty is hesed — the word he uses of himself.
He remembered his steadfast love.
In the mid-eighties I was the administrator of a mission and church in Port Moresby, which meant the money went through my hands.
There was a women's convention coming up in the city. Some of the women wanted to come in from the provinces, and the airfare from the highlands was not a small thing. They did not have it. They asked whether the mission would buy the tickets and let them repay the money when they arrived.
I had been in the job long enough to know how that generally went. Money lent in those circumstances came back slowly or did not come back at all, and it was not dishonesty. It was distance and harvest and school fees and a dozen other calls on the same few kina. I expected we would not see it.
The director approved the request. He approved it on one condition, and he was clear about the condition: the money was to be repaid as soon as they arrived.
Then he told me to make sure I got it. No exceptions.
My fear was not that they would fail to pay. It was that he would let them off.
He had set the condition himself and I did not doubt he meant it when he set it. But I had watched him with people. When somebody stood in front of him with nothing, his inclination was to mercy, and the arrangement made in the office stopped being the arrangement.
They arrived without the money.
He went soft on them.
And he told me to demand it.
I went back to him about it.
My complaint was not that the job was unpleasant. It was that he had handed me the responsibility and kept the discretion. I was to manage the arrangement, hold the condition, do the asking. He had reserved to himself the one thing that would have made the asking bearable — the freedom to look at the person in front of me and decide.
You have delegated the responsibility, I said, but you have not delegated the provision to be merciful.
I thought that was unanswerable.
The asking was the turning point.
I went and did what he told me. I stood in front of those women and asked them for the money, and somewhere in the middle of it I heard myself.
I had been so sure I was arguing for mercy. I was not. I had never once wanted to be merciful to them. I had wanted the ledger to balance, and I had wanted him to stop making my job harder, and when he went soft what offended me was not that he was merciful but that he was merciful and I still had to collect.
His inclination was mercy. Mine was not. That was the whole of it.
We were not even working in the same currency. I was counting kina — what was owed, what had been agreed, what would show in the books at the end of the month. He was working in something else altogether, and had been the whole time, and it had not occurred to me to notice.
Standing there, I wanted to be able to do what he did. That is not the same as being able to do it.
Jesus talked about money more than almost anything else, and I have never found a parable where the money was the point.
A servant owes ten thousand talents, which is not a debt anyone could carry, and he is forgiven it. Then he takes a man by the throat over a hundred denarii. The numbers are absurd on purpose. What the story is measuring is not the gap between the sums but the fact that he had been handed something and used the other thing instead.
A man finds a treasure in a field and sells everything he has to buy the field. On paper that is a poor transaction until you know what is in the ground. A woman sweeps the house all night for one coin and then spends more than the coin on a party when she finds it. The arithmetic is wrong in every one of them.
I was doing the arithmetic. I was doing it well, and I had it right, and I was using the wrong currency.
The money never came back. I knew that at the time; it was the outcome I had predicted and I took no satisfaction in it.
It was not a mission with anything spare. Every kina was counted and there was never a surplus, so the shortfall did not vanish into an account somewhere. It came out of what we had, which was never enough for what we were doing.
What took me longer to see was that he had understood something about the money that I had not. I was treating the airfares as a loan the mission had made. He knew what the money was for. Getting those women in from the provinces was the work — it was the thing the money existed to do — and once they had arrived it had already done it.
He let the debt stand and made me ask for it. But he was never going to collect.
The judge in Psalm 98 is the one who remembered.
The psalm ends with God coming to put things right — he will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity. We tend to hear that as a change of subject. Six verses of shouting, and then something colder. But the subject does not change. The one who is coming to judge is the one who remembered his steadfast love. The nations he will judge are the nations who saw him keep his word.
He does not delegate the collecting to somebody he has denied the mercy.
That is what I wanted from my director, and did not get, and had no right to. I am still learning to count the other way.