Psalm 34:22

Thou hast seen, O Lord, be not thou silent: O Lord, depart not from me. (Psalm 34:22 DR)

Having just recounted the wrongs and injustices committed against him by his enemies, the Psalmist now turns directly to the Lord to defend his cause, and will in the three verses following this passage form this into a prayer for God to act on his behalf in certain ways.

There is a fine parallelism embedded in this final portion of the Psalm—among the other embedded parallelisms of this Psalm—in that the preceding three verses recounting his enemies’ actions against him will now be met by three verses that entreat God’s actions towards him. Not only this, but the following three verses are mirror images of the preceding verses, thus demonstrating God’s reaction, as it were, to the actions of his enemies. In this manner the present passage serves as a bridge between the two—or even the mirror—summarizing both sets in respect to God’s action on the Psalmist’s behalf.

The first clause is Thou hast seen, O Lord, which corresponds to verse 19 in which his enemies wrongfully rejoice over him and wink with the eyes. His enemies intended deceit and even indicated it literally with their eyes, but this deception and betrayal is of course seen by the Lord, to Whom nothing is hidden.

The second clause is be not Thou silent, which corresponds to verse 20 where his enemies employ their deception by speaking peaceably to him and devising guile. This injustice that they commit in their hearts and execute with their mouths is met by God not being silent, which is an expression of judgment:

Be not Thou silent, that is, “Do not postpone passing sentence,” a procedure carried out by speech, not by silence. (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, 34, 22, Ancient Christian Writers.)

As Cassiodorus notes, the judge vocally declaring the judgment and passing sentence is the manner in which we describe justice being done, and it is this vocalized (and thus public) expression which gives justice and judgment its embodied reality. There is a sense in which the judgment is already passed, for—as just mentioned—God has seen what they have done, and in His justice cannot but be just and pass judgment. As the Psalmist says elsewhere:

He shall rain snares upon sinners; fire and brimstone and storms of winds shall be the portion of their cup. For the Lord is just and hath love justice; His countenance hath beheld righteousness. (Psalm 10:7-8 DR)

It is the distinction between the hidden and manifest judgment of God which is now in view here, as we see more fully explicated in other Psalms:

The hidden judgment accordingly is the pain, by which now each man is either exercised to purification, or warned to conversion, or if he despise the calling and discipline of God, is blinded unto damnation. But the manifest judgment is that in which the Lord, at His coming, will judge the quick and the dead, all men confessing that it is He by whom both rewards shall be assigned to the good, and punishments to the evil. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 45, 1.)

The Psalmist—knowing that God sees what his enemies have done—is fully confident in God’s hidden judgment by which they store up wrath for themselves (cf. Romans 2:5), but here calls for its manifestation, which thus makes this prophetic of the Final Judgment. He transfers this manifest judgment to the present as part of his prayer for vindication, thus distinguishing between their guilt and his innocence.

The final clause of this passage is O Lord, depart not from me, which corresponds with verse 21, the latter understood specifically as prophetically speaking of our Lord’s Passion and Death on the wood of the cross. This was—as it were—our Lord’s departure in which he was mocked by His enemies as He—unbeknownst to them—gave up His life willingly. Their eyes have seen it, which refers to them seeing His death and thus imagining Him to be merely a man, rejected and despised by God.

The truth, however, is that our Lord in His Incarnation is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity hypostatically united to the human nature on the cross. He thus never departed from the Father, as that would introduce a fracture into the eternal unity of the Blessed Trinity. Rather, this prophetic utterance of depart not from me is in reference to His human nature, made subject to death:

As for His saying: Depart not from me, we must interpret this as spoken in His human guise, which submitted to the Passion. (Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, 34, 22, Ancient Christian Writers.)

We thus have here summarized the injustices brought against the Psalmist, as seen in the manner in which the Lord will respond to those injustices, each of which will be more fully fleshed out in the following passages.

The corollary of this is that the Psalmist recognizes in himself an inability to respond in kind to the wickedness marshalled against him. For he has been subjected to deceit and malice, things which a righteous man cannot do in recompense towards his enemies. In this life there is thus a seemingly uneven balance between the wicked and the just, for while there are things that the just can do in response to wickedness—ranging from capital punishment to just war—there are some things that the wicked will do that the righteous cannot. This is of course why St. Paul forbids revenge, as it will inevitably lead one to get down onto the same level as the wicked. Instead, the righteous are to leave it to God, Who will in His manifest judgement on the Last Day set all accounts right:

Revenge not yourselves, my dearly beloved; but give place unto wrath, for it is written: Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. But if thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat; if he thirst, give him to drink. For, doing this, thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good. (Romans 12:19-21 DR)

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This was a fairly simple animation. I split the text into two layers and precomped them, and then made another precomp with the sequenced textures and matted it to the “not” portion of the text. I put the main precomp into the main composition and applied Motion Tile and animated the Position so it would loop.

I finished by adding in some color correction, noise and distortion effects.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: