These two psalms sit apart in the Songs of Ascents, but they share a device the psalms around them do not use. Both stop in the middle of a sentence and hand the microphone to the crowd. 1"If it had not been the LORD who was on our side," the cantor sings, and then breaks off: "let Israel now say." The pilgrims finish the line together. Testimony that begins as one person's memory becomes the nation's voice, spoken aloud in unison.
Psalm 124 pictures the danger three ways before it names the deliverance. Without the LORD, 3"they would have swallowed us up alive." Then come the flood, the torrent, and the raging waters, the ancient stock images for chaos overwhelming order. Then the gentlest picture, a bird in a trap. The psalm never says the enemy was weak. It says the LORD acted before the beast could close its teeth. The verb in the key verse is passive, the snare is broken, because something else broke it open. It ends with a confession the pilgrims have heard before, 8"Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth," the same words that answered a lone traveler's fear in Psalm 121. Now they answer a whole nation's near-annihilation.
Psalm 129 opens with its own shared refrain. 1"Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth." Then the difficult image. 3"The plowers plowed upon my back; they made long their furrows." Cruelty is pictured as a field deliberately worked, wound after wound laid down in rows. The psalm does not soften it. The furrows were long and deep. But the refrain has a second half, 2"yet they have not prevailed against me," and the reversal arrives at once. 4"The LORD is righteous; he has cut the cords of the wicked." Those were the harness lines that drove the plow, and when they are cut the plowing stops mid-furrow.
Both things are true in this psalm. Something afflicted Israel for a long time, and it did not finish what it set out to do. You do not have to pretend that a hard season did no damage in order to say that it did not win.
The last verses ask that those who hate Zion be 6"like the grass on the housetops." Rooftop grass grows in shallow soil and dies before it is tall enough to cut. No reaper fills his hand, and no one calls out the customary harvest blessing, because there is nothing there to bless. It can sound harsh for a psalm to pray this way. The prayer hands the whole case to a righteous judge and steps back.
So take up the habit these psalms teach. Name one specific rescue you could tell as a short story, a flood that did not sweep you away or a snare that broke, and say it aloud to someone. A story you can tell does more for present fear than a general conviction that God is trustworthy. And where someone has plowed your back, hand the case to the one who cuts the cords.
Prayer
Father, if it had not been you on our side, we would have been swallowed up long ago. Thank you that our escape is your doing. We confess the furrows some seasons have left on us, and we say with the psalm that they have not prevailed. Teach us to tell what you have done, and to hand the rest to you. Our help is in your name, the LORD who made heaven and earth. Amen.