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Notes -
The psalm promotes the Good of the community, even as it emphasizes the absolute weakness of the single individual, in the following ways:
Submitting humbly to God for salvation is a way to (implicitly) practice the emotional and cognitive state of submitting to other authorities generally, especially if your belief system tells you that all civic authority is ordained by God. If you want the greatest and strongest army, 99% of the men must submit to authority, and the remaining 1% must submit to Reason. Without our even knowing, the rehearsal of the psalm (from the heart) makes us more liable to submit to authority by increasing our familiarity and pleasure with a humble spirit. An army of the obedient will always win against an army of the strongwilled. Individual weakness (or the factual recognition of such) promotes collective strength, and this only increases as technology increases.
Living is experientially horrible at least sometimes for everyone, and more often than that for too many people. The psalm allows a man to suffer while still remembering his communal belonging and allegiance, which is beneficial lest you drift too far away from civic obligation & shared memory from excessive sorrow. Hence: Yet you are holy, enthroned in the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. And: I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! The psalm also allows the sufferant to externalize and dramatize his feelings, which may be cathartic, or at least enjoyable as complaining always is. (Perhaps another example of “redirecting an activity to the Common Good” is the Song of Songs: if it is really just a thinly-veiled allegory for sex, then it perfects the act of sex and flirting — dare I say gooning — by presenting it within the terminology of the Collective: You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners. Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me— Your hair is like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead. If you are going to be horny anyway, at least remember how awesome the Sacred is in the process, so that when you’re no longer horny, your memory of it has improved by 0.05%; perhaps, even, your interest in Jerusalem has increased because it has been associated with a beautiful woman?
For the person singing the psalm, the memory of suffering is shifted toward a struggle of good and evil, a dimension which it may not have previously had. When (or if) his health returns, he has a newfound hatred of evildoers and love for the good.
The psalm-singer will interpret his return to health as his plea being answered by the Almighty, and regardless of whether this is materially accurate it will promote an array of good behaviors. His vows must now be thankfully fulfilled: praising in the congregation; telling others of the goodness of God; perhaps some resources distributed to the poor as suggested by God elsewhere; perhaps more honest dealings in business; etc. The importance of conveying the goodness of God to others is not just so that the Temple’s income is increased, but so others will read the tropological stories of the Bible, fear evil, gather prosocially, etc. But the priests getting some extra meat doesn’t hurt either, after all they are literate and somewhat learned.
Humility, in at least one of its manifestations, is the valuation of other people more than yourself, and this implicitly makes our fulfillment of socially-good acts more satisfying. If you don’t follow other people highly, how satisfying is it to do good to them? But if you value them highly, more than yourself, then it is deeply satisfying and memorable. If you want to promote a society where the rich share resources with the poor, and the healthy help the sick, and the sane the insane, etc, it is helpful to promote humility even just because of the fruit of social peer value salience. Hence: I am a worm and not a man (and He will love you even if you are a worm).
Awe and trust are good in themselves, especially if there is nothing you can really do, like someone suffering in antiquity. Even if the psalm-singer dies, he is dying with trust and awe, which is preferable to dying in agony. If we have to pick our poison it should be the sweetest poison.
I enjoy unconventional theology, and so I am not Trinitarian, but IMHO Christ championing this Psalm does two things (apart from the obvious fulfillment of prophecy):
It inoculates the Christian from doubt and anguish. The Son of God, the Everliving Lord, experienced real doubt (in my view). The Christian then, when doubting, can look at the Perfect Lord and be strengthened in commiseration.
This greatly increases the tragic dimension of the crucifixion, which is an angle I find compelling lately as the grounds for the most impactful atonement theory. “Substitution” doesn’t quite cut it, IMO. There is a lot of power in the notion that God wants us to behold the very nature and consequence of sin by looking at the crucifixion; we can grasp, in a way, how God sees the invisible outcome of our evil intentions and misdeeds, through the hyper-salient Sacrifice of Christ. God, being all-wise, sees no difference between the evil of someone kicking a puppy and the evil of someone gradually introducing commensurate pain in the lives of others through the accumulation of small errors (calling your brother a fool; being unforgiving; being greedy and lazy; etc). We do not see it this way, because have limited human understanding, but this doesn’t quite absolve us of all responsibility. Christ, for our sake, became “sin”, clearly, in its full evil, so that we can see all the unseen pain that sin introduces in others. For this theory to work, though, the suffering of Christ must be perfect. He must experience genuine alienation, hopelessness, and despair, because these are some of the worst pains a human can experience (more than the physical!). And so Christ’s genuine doubt, and His genuine unwillingness (let this cup passeth), magnify the suffering, which magnifies evil, which magnifies errors, which magnifies our aversion to committing such errors beginning from the heart.
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