This psalm frightens me, Lord. Your image as a strict judge with the cup of retribution in your hands, holding it forcibly to the lips of sinners to make them drink the dregs of damnation while no power on earth can save them from your wrath.

“No power from the east nor from the west,
no power from the wilderness,
can raise a man up.
For God is judge;
he puts one man down and raises up another.

The Lord holds a cup in his hand,
and the wine foams in it, hot with spice;
he pours it,
and all the wicked on earth must drain it to the dregs.”

Frightful image of judgement and punishment. Yet I don’t want to forget it, Lord. I don’t want to pass it by, to gloss it over. Your justice is also part of your being, and I accept it and worship it as I do with your mercy and your majesty. You are a just judge, and the cup of retribution is in your hands. Let me never forge that, Lord.

I don’t want to claim exemption for myself; in fact I don’t dare. I know my wrong deeds, and I know my lips have condemned themselves to touch the brink of the cup of malediction. I cannot hide in east or west or even in the wide wilderness or in the very ends of the earth. I don’t want to hide either. I dread the cup, but I trust the hand that holds it. I wait for the coming of the judge.

I wait in hope because I think of another cup, remote in time but not unrelated in content. A cup of bitterness, of sufferings and of death. And that cup was also in your hand in the solitude of a garden where the rays of the full moon filtered shyly through the clustered leaves of olive trees on to a figure that prayed in agony. The cup was full of the dregs of death, and the cup did not pass away. It was drunk to the full. Mystery of the cup in the garden which cancelled the cup destined for my lips.

This, O Lord, is the greatness of your mercy and the glory of your redemption. If I have praised you for the heavens and the earth, for the sun and for the moon, I praise you now much more for the greatness of your wonderful works, your redemption of man through the life, death and resurrection of your own Son.

“We give you thanks, O God,
we give you thanks;
your name is brought very near to us
in the story of your wonderful deeds.”