Sour Wine
“Insults have broken my heart. I looked for pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none...”
One of the most inspiring things to me about Scripture is that one passage can be a conduit for multiple storylines. For example, the story of God making a promise to Abram in the book of Genesis is also a conduit for the narrative of the gospel, because it is a picture of a person being declared righteous through faith (Paul points this out in Romans 4). Scripture can also be a conduit for understanding storylines outside of the Bible — which, I think, is something that Paul gets at in Philippians 3, when he says that he wants to “know Christ and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, being conformed to His death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead”. Paul is saying we can relate to Jesus’ life through things we experience in our own lives. Much like our fellowship with one another can be deepened through common experiences, we can also deepen our fellowship with Him through relating our experiences to His.
And let’s just take a moment to appreciate that.
As someone who believes that Jesus is God incarnate, God in the flesh, it is a beautiful thing that He would encourage me to relate my little struggles and my little sufferings in my 21st century life to His. Because, of course, whenever I do relate my sufferings to His, there is always a voice inside my head that shouts about how there’s no comparison — what He went through was worse. And that voice is not incorrect — for one, I’ve never been crucified. It is always easy to minimize our own sufferings because we can point to someone else who has it worse. But I appreciate that when God took on flesh, He didn’t try to win the Suffering Olympics, and He wasn’t interested in making sure everyone knew He had it worse than them. Quite the opposite, actually! He encourages us to relate our sufferings to His, as a practice of growing in fellowship with Him.
Photo from Tucson, AZ
I digress. Or do I? Because I’m telling you about my song, "Sour Wine (Psalm 69)”, and here I am talking about Jesus. Ah yes, but I’m not the only one who is blending David’s storyline in Psalm 69 with Jesus’. John tells the story of Jesus chasing out the money changers in John 2, and follows it up with, “Then His disciples remembered that it was written,” — pssst: in Psalm 69:9 — “‘Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up'.” Or read what David says in Psalm 69:20-21: “I looked for someone to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. They also gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink,” — compare that to the scenes of Jesus being brought before the high priests while the disciples flee/pretend they never knew Him, or Him being offered vinegar/sour wine to drink while He is on the cross (John 19:29, Luke 23:36, Mark 15:36, Matthew 27:48). Somehow David’s story was woven into Jesus’ story, or vise versa, to the point where it feels like you’ll hear Jesus’ voice dubbed over David’s here, and David’s dubbed over Jesus’ there.
And now we’ve trodden into a new class of psalms that I feel even more unqualified to speak on than I do the imprecatory psalms: the Messianic psalms. Yeeeeesh. I’ll walk it back a few steps, and switch gears to tell you about my personal experience in writing this song.
Photo from Tucson, AZ
So what does “Sour Wine” have to do with me?
I am not being crucified and no one has offered me vinegar to drink (although I did buy some pretty crappy wine from Aldi a couple weeks ago…). But, after going through an especially difficult season in my life, I was reading through Psalm 69; so many lines that David wrote felt like accurate verbalizations of things I’d been feeling. And then I saw glimpses of Jesus’ story woven into David’s prose, and all of a sudden, my sufferings and experiences of being deeply betrayed could share in some fellowship with His sufferings. I see David say that he has become an alien to his brothers (Psalm 69:8), and I watch Jesus’ friends pretend they don’t know Him when he is at his hour of greatest need, and I catch a glimpse of myself in those plot points as well. I’ve experienced these themes, too! And oh, the comfort it brought me to see that these are themes that can be redeemed, because I saw them redeemed in David’s and Jesus’ lives. At a time when I couldn’t make sense of what I’d gone through, I saw David and Jesus there with me — and it was not the end of either of their stories, so perhaps this is not the end of my story, either!
It pays off to lean into our unpleasant feelings. And this isn’t some modern, secular notion that developed in the field of psychology (although I think that would affirm this, too). Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4), David says we should pour out our hearts to God (Psalm 62:8), and Peter tells us to cast all our anxiety onto Him (1 Peter 5:7). And herein lies the beauty of the imprecatory psalms: we feel these things, whether we want to feel them or not. When betrayed, we feel angry and left exposed. When rejected, we feel ashamed. When abandoned, we feel hopeless and alone. What good does it do to pretend like we don’t feel these things? What good does it do to compare ourselves to others and conclude that our suffering doesn’t matter because someone else’s was worse? Leaning into these feelings, and connecting them to stories that God has given us in Scripture can help us to process our pain and connect with Him through them. Not to mention the fact that it can help us empathize with others who have felt the same things — or even repent and make apologies when we’ve been the ones who’ve make others suffer in the ways we’ve suffered.
In conclusion
I’ve yammered on for long enough. I would invite you to listen to my song, “Sour Wine”, and also read Psalm 69, along with a few of the gospel accounts of The Passion. Maybe you’ll see what I’m getting at, and maybe you’ll be comforted by the beauty of Scripture, and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, like I have been!
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or on SoundCloud (below). Watch the lyric video for “Sour Wine” on YouTube (below below).