NOTES for Psa 50

Practically every verse of this psalm is used by the Church in worship and included in prayer canons. It is difficult to choose the single most important thing in it, because just as no two days are the same, different words strike us each time. It is the quintessence of everything we try to say to God, to express in words or sighs. If we compare psalms of praise with this cry of grief torn from a person who realises all the consequences of what he has done, we see that praise uses few words. But grief finds a way to make itself heard; repentance and the impossibility of living in sin before the face of God, together with the thirst to see His gaze—all this compels us to find a path to God.

The appeal to God's mercy is a common place of several psalms. But what does it mean practically? The hope in the fact what God will close eyes on the human sins? But will man feel better from that? Because sin destroys the soul of the man and poisons his heart, quite as the disease poisons and destroys the body, and to close eyes on sin is the same thing as to neglect a disease. But another thing is also true: if for the Kingdom are needed only spiritually healthy people, then nobody of men being born in the fallen world can’t see it. God's mercy is then needed to solve this, seemingly insoluble contradiction. It does not of course imply condoning sin. But it makes possible the forgiveness of the sinner. It would seem that if somebody truly repents from his actions and asks for forgiveness, to forgive him is not so hard even to man, not to talk of God. But in the reality things are not also simple: because every sin committed by man, every evil made by him has its consequences, with which we can do nothing according to the laws of our non transformed world.

The ancients, especially in the East, spoke not at all accidentally about karmic links, of which it was impossible for man to break within the framework of the fallen world: for, the causes and the consequences exist here indissolubly, and every attempt to change whatever in the best, to correct the evil committed, only engenders new evil, while attaching even more firmly the one who tries to release himself from the evil in a bad infinity of sinful life. And only God's direct intervention in the situation is capable of changing the state of things dramatically. But what can be such an intervention? If God rewards each according to merit, nobody will receive anything good: because there are not "ideal", or talking the biblical language, people without sin in the world.

Therefore, it remains only to hope that God will give to each of us something that not only we did not deserve, but because of the nature damaged by sin we can never deserve, even with a strong and sincere desire. Of course desire is important, it is useless to propose alternative to the one, whom everything arranges in the world in its present state. But the possibility itself of the alternative in such case has to be contradictory to the fundamental laws of the fallen world, in particular, with the law of cause and effect relationship, which doesn’t involve reverse action. Here, this possibility of the undeserved miracle is the practical demonstration of God's mercy.

Of course, if God had simply wanted to repeal the law of the cause and effect relations, He would have probably needed to recreate the world again. But He finds another solution: to give to the world the Kingdom, where this law acts not as in our non transformed world. And to bring this Kingdom to the world, He entrusted to the One, Who from the beginning was free from sin. So God's mercy opens to each seeker of salvation the way to the Kingdom.