Undeserved Redemption

Heather Hutchings

Bless the Lord, my soul.
And bless God’s holy name.
Bless the Lord, my soul,
Who leads me into life.

It is God who forgives all your sins,
Who heals every one of your ills,
Who redeems your life from the grave,
Who crowns you with love and compassion.

The Lord is compassion and love,
Slow to anger and rich in mercy.
God does not treat us according to our sins,
Nor condemn us according to our faults.

As a father has compassion on his children,
The Lord has pity on those who fear him.
For God knows of what we are made:
God remembers that we are dust.

Bless the Lord, my soul, a setting of Psalm 103, has been my favourite Taizé song ever since I first encountered it several years ago. The peaceful chant and pretty counter-melodies make it a beautiful piece of music to sing, yet it has always been the rich theology in the verses that struck me.

In the first verse, we are reminded of our dependency. Personally, I find it can be all too easy to rely on our own resources in life, forgetting to look to God. It is even sometimes tempting to think that we might earn salvation and love by our own actions or strength of faith. But any such attempt is both misguided and impossible. We can never do enough to earn redemption: it is God alone who saves us.

In the second verse, we are reassured that we are not condemned or punished, despite our inadequacies. We need not fear judgement nor be crippled by guilt for our own failures, because God is merciful and forgiving. I find this a comforting thought.

And then we come to the third verse, with its exultant conclusion: For God knows of what we are made / God remembers that we are dust. Perhaps naïvely, I initially struggled to reconcile these lines with the rest of the piece. It always seemed to me incongruous, or at least irrelevant, to pair the reassurance of God’s care for us with a reminder of human mortality. It is only upon more recent reflection that I have realised that this final couplet does indeed belong. Our condition as creatures of dust is intimately connected to God’s compassion towards us.

We are imperfect creatures, limited by our very nature. We will always face temptation and we will often fail. Yet the Father who formed us understands our weakness and regards it with compassion. We are dust, and God loves us not in spite of but because of it.

Indeed, it is in our very imperfection that Jesus comes to meet us, becoming like us a creature of dust to experience our frailty face-to-face. In Lent we walk with Jesus in the wilderness. Or rather, he walks with us in our wilderness, as he came to do. The Son of God comes to share our temptations, to overcome them by his own perfection and, ultimately, by his sacrifice on the cross.

And so with the psalmist we praise the Lord, grateful that He understands us in and rescues us from our weakness, and we look to Easter with its promise of undeserved redemption.