This psalm of the penitent is divided into four parts. The first contains an exordium in which a life that has sustained punishments motivates the mercy of the gracious Judge. Then a two-part narration follows in which the psalmist recalls that his body has been afflicted with various punishments and also reports that his spirit has been seriously wounded by the accusations of his friends. Since he has no consolation in either of these parts, he prays to the Lord with all of his strength. In the third part, the consolation of salvation’s medicine is added; in the midst of multiple disasters, he has placed his hope in the Lord. Like a completely devoted servant, he says that he was prepared also for whippings, since he thinks that he is deserving of still more than he appears to have endured.

The thirty-eighth psalm resembles in its theme the sixth: just as that one is a confession of sin with Bathsheba and a plea to God, so here too [David] begs to be freed from the misfortunes arising from Absalom’s rebellion, which brought a range of tribulations on him, at the same time confessing the sin and giving evidence at every point of the sincerity of repentance.

David made this beginning to the sixth psalm as well, asking to be disciplined in the manner of a surgeon, not a judge, and to be treated not with harsh remedies but with mild ones.

The prophet . . . acknowledges his fault, recognizes his wounds and asks to be cured. One who wants to be cured does not shrink from correction. Still, he does not want to be chastised in the fury of indignation but in the word of God. God’s word is healing. As we read, He sent his word and healed them.^[1] David does not want to be corrected in wrath but to be disciplined in doctrine. It is as though you were to ask the surgeon not to apply his knife to your wound but to pour in ointment. He begs for the remedy but not for the knife. There is pain but not beyond measure. The remedy stings, but the patient’s blood does not flow.

We observe . . . that when Scripture speaks of the Lord’s hand, it refers to temptation that a person undergoes from the attacks of Satan. . . . When the devil wounds him, the arrows are the Lord’s, and it is the Lord who has given Satan the power of hurting him. . . . There is, too, that . . . reason why the Lord gives power to the tempter; it is so that one’s love might be tested by temptations. That is why there are persecutions, so that faith may shine out and virtue excel and the inner thoughts of one’s heart may be made manifest to all.

Lifting up one’s head is an act of levity; anyone who does so feels there is no burden to bear. But because the sinner finds it such a light matter to lift himself up, he is given a weight to squash him down. His enterprise will rebound onto his own head, and his iniquities will descend to crown him.^[1]

Our head is Christ. When we do something against his precepts, our iniquities go over our head, and we are pressed as a heavy burden on us.

If you wish to learn the foulness of sin, think of it after it has been committed, when you are rid of the evil desire, when its fires no longer cause disturbance, and then you will perceive what sin is.

Sin is more foul than putrefaction itself. What, for instance, is more offensive than fornication? And if this is not perceived at the time of its commission, yet, after it is committed, its offensive nature, the impurity contracted in it, and the curse and the abomination of it is perceived. So it is with all sin. Before it is committed, it has something of pleasure, but after its commission, the pleasure ceases and fades away, and pain and shame succeed. But with righteousness it is the reverse. At the beginning it is attended with toil but in the end with pleasure and repose.

Now look at some lascivious youth openly displaying his debauchery; his life is spent in love affairs; he lounges around like that rich man who was clothed in fine linen and purple; daily he enjoys the most sumptuous dinners; his pavements swim in wine; the ground is covered with flowers and strewn with fish bones; and the dining room is filled with the perfume of sweet-smelling incense. He is perfectly delighted with himself and flatters himself that he smells sweetly. . . . He does not know that his soul is bleeding and festering, and he will not accept that his wounds are foul-smelling. . . . But the holy prophet David found for himself a remedy of everlasting salvation. For he freely spoke of his own wounds and confessed that his sores were foul and festering because of his foolishness. . . . This world covers up its wounds and does not show them to the Lord. Better the foolishness that has eyes to see its sores than wisdom that has not.

Let not earth and ashes glory because in its life it has abandoned its inmost thoughts; wounded, let it not exult as if healthy concerning that which it thinks healthy in itself. But with the humility of an afflicted heart, let it meditate on the rottenness of its wounds in order that, crying out with the prophet, My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness, it can receive healing from the divine piety, not of its own merits but by a free gift. For what does a person have that he has not received? But if he has received, why is he glorying as if he had not received? Therefore, God alone can give to all to whom he wishes the means by which true salvation can be acquired. He alone is able to safeguard what he has given in the one receiving.

For as the putrid humors and matter of flesh, and all those things that corrupt it, are driven out by salt, in the same manner all the irrational appetites . . . are banished from the body by divine teaching. For it must . . . be that the soul that is not sprinkled with the words of Christ, as with salt, should stink and breed worms, as King David, openly confessing with tears in the mountains, cried out, My wounds stink and are corrupt, because he had not salted himself with the exercises of self-control and so subdued his carnal appetites, but [he] self-indulgently had yielded to them and became corrupted in adultery.

You only need a healthy sense of smell in spiritual matters to be aware how sins fester. The opposite to this reek of sin is the fragrance of which the apostle says, We are the fragrance of Christ offered to God in every place, for those who are on the way to salvation.^[1] But where does the fragrance come from? From hope. . . . We bewail the bad smell in this life, but already we catch the scent of the life to come. We bewail our stinking sins but breathe the fragrance of what awaits us.

The very best order of beginning every speech and action is to begin from God and to end in God.

If you humble yourself, you will be raised up; if you are proud and lofty, you will be bent down, for God will certainly find a weight to bend you down with. The weight he will use is the burden of your sins. It will be tied onto your head, and you will be bent over.

So, he means, my handling of desire not fittingly but wastefully proved the cause of these troubles. . . . From that desire [as he says in the next verse] I garnered the fruit, which was my stooping to earth, he is saying, and constant bewailing on account of my heart’s bitter pangs. For this reason I changed the force of desire and made it a minister to the divine will. . . . Since once I used it wrongly, I shall always apply it to the benefit of your commands.

The soul is brimful of deceitful fantasies. . . . So insistent are they that we are scarcely permitted to pray. If we think about material things, we have no way of doing so except through images, and often intrusive images rush in on us, ones we are not seeking. We are tempted to pass from one to another, to flit here and there. Then you want to go back to your starting point and rid yourself of what you are currently thinking about, but something else occurs to you. You try to remember something you have forgotten, but it does not present itself to your mind; something else that you did not want comes instead. Where had that thing you had forgotten gone to? Why did it slip into your mind later, when you were no longer looking for it? While you were looking for it, innumerable other things occurred to you instead, things that were not required. . . . These illusions came in as a penalty, and the soul lost the truth, for just as the deceitful fantasies are the soul’s punishment, so is truth the soul’s reward. But when we were locked fast in those illusions, Truth came to us. He found us immersed in them, so he took our flesh, or rather took flesh from us, from the human race. He made himself visible to eyes of flesh in order to heal by faith those to whom he meant to manifest the truth, so that once those eyes were healed, truth might begin to dawn on them. He himself is the truth, and this truth he promised us when his flesh was made visible, so that there might be implanted in us the beginnings of that faith whose reward is truth.

The chilling of charity is the silence of the heart; the blazing of charity is the heart’s clamor.

By these statements he implies two things: both the extraordinary degree of depression, by which the light does not even seem to be light, and the deprivation of divine care, which he rightly called light of my eyes.

People who cling to evil thoughts do not stand for truth but for falsehood. They do not stand for righteousness but for iniquity, because their tongue learns to speak lies. They have done evil, never pausing so that they could repent. Persevering with delight in wicked actions, they run to them without even looking back. They even tread underfoot the commandment about neighbors, and instead of loving them, they plot evil against them. As the ancient saint testifies, Those who plot evil against me have spoken lies and plan treachery all day long.

The just person will want to conform his life to the image and likeness of Jesus, and though accused, he will be silent; if he is hurt, he will forgive. Wrongs done to him he will cover up, not opening his mouth. In this way he will be imitating him who like a lamb was led to the slaughter, never opening his mouth.^[1] Though he could have made an answer, he preferred silence to speech. For the Lord Jesus was silent when they accused him, and when they struck him he did not strike back. . . . You too, my friend, if you are given cause to answer back with a sharp rebuke, be silent. It will be better so. If you answer back in the same tone as your aggressor, it could lead to uproar and loud wrangling. Better to hide the injury done to you than, by arguing back, to gain some point or other. Good is the dumb person who knows not how to speak evil and from whose lips no injurious words can pass. Truly blessed is this dumb person, for inwardly he is saying, Lord, give me a learned tongue when it is my duty to break into speech.^[2]

History teaches this more clearly. Even when Absalom mounted a case against his father and drew to his side those who had lost cases in judgment, blessed David was long-suffering. When Shimei berated him with voice and hand upraised, he took the abuse in silence; and he forbade Abishai to try to exact justice against the culprit in the words, Let him curse me because the Lord bade him curse David.^[1]

You should walk as one that is deaf and dumb and blind, so that, putting aside the contemplation of him who has been rightly chosen by you as your model of perfection, you should be like one who is blind and not see any of those things that you find to be unedifying. Nor should you be influenced by the authority or fashion of those who do these things and give yourself up to what is worse and what you formerly condemned. If you hear anyone disobedient or insubordinate or disparaging another or doing anything different from what was taught to you, you should not go wrong and be led astray by such an example to imitate him, but, like one who is deaf, as if you had never heard it, you should pass it all by.

He always trusted in the Lord who is able to transform sorrow into joy.

In this saying he has advised you what to do, if you find yourself in trouble. . . . Guard your innocence within yourself, where no one seeks to undermine your case. Perhaps false evidence has swayed the verdict against you, but this is so only in the human court; will it have any weight with God, before whom your case is to be heard? When God is judge, there will be no other witness than your own conscience. Between the just judge and your own conscience you will have nothing to fear except the state of your case itself. If your case is not a bad one, you need be terrified of no plaintiff, and you need neither rebut a lying witness nor call a truthful one. Simply arm yourself with a good conscience, so that you may say, You will hear me, O Lord my God, because in you, Lord, I have trusted.

In the conditions of this life it sometimes happens that our feet slip, and we slide into some sin. Then the wicked tongues of our enemies get busy, and from their reaction we understand what their objective has been all along, even though they did not admit it. They comment harshly, with no hint of gentleness, delighted to have found what they ought to have deplored. I said, Let my enemies never gloat over me; yes, I prayed so, yet perhaps for my correction you have made them speak unrestrainedly against me when my feet slip.

Every son or daughter must be whipped. So universal is this rule that even he who was without sin was not exempt.

Sin made me deserve whipping, he is saying; thus I submit myself to punishment. I long for treatment at your hands, pricked as I am by the pangs of sin.

Lord, you heal and are not polluted; you help and are not contaminated; for you are a God who saves. Your hands, O Lord, do not lose those that are your own but heal them.

This is the salvation the prophets sought to discover, as the apostle Peter says. They did not receive what they sought, but they inquired about it and foretold it, and now we have come along and found what they sought. Yet we have not received it either, and others will be born after us who will also find yet not receive, and they too will pass away, so that at the day’s end we may all receive together, along with the patriarchs and prophets and apostles, . . . everlasting salvation. Contemplating God’s glory and seeing him face to face we shall be enabled to praise him forever, without wearying, without any of the pain of iniquity, without any of the perversion of sin. We shall praise God, no longer sighing for him but united with him for whom we have sighed even to the end, albeit joyful in our hope. For we shall be in that city where God is our good, God is our light, God is our bread, God is our life. Whatever is good for us, whatever we miss as we trudge along our pilgrim way, we shall find in him.