A remark in the church car park. Half a joke about how long you have been going through it, delivered with a smile, and then they were off to lunch. Nothing you could report. Nothing you could repeat to anyone later without sounding thin-skinned. You drove home and it sat with you the rest of the week, and you could not work out why something that small kept its weight.
Psalm 123 knows. Four verses, sung by people walking uphill to Jerusalem, and this is how it ends: "We have endured no end of ridicule from the arrogant, of contempt from the proud" (Psalm 123:4).
The King James keeps a word the NIV smooths away: "the scorning of those that are at ease." The Hebrew describes a person settled and secure, with nothing pressing on them, no bad news pending, sleeping well.
Nobody in that verse is hunting him. These are people whose year has gone well.
Cruelty at least takes effort. Somebody who hates you has to keep thinking about you. What Psalm 123 names costs the mocker nothing at all. That is what makes it stick. You were a small item of entertainment on an otherwise pleasant afternoon. They have already forgotten. You have not.
Cruelty at least takes effort. Somebody who hates you has to keep thinking about you.
Church has its own version of this, and it is rarely delivered by anyone who means harm. The friend who has never lain awake at three in the morning, suggesting you pray more. The one whose parents were kind, telling you to forgive and move on, in the tone you would use to explain a bus timetable. None of it is persecution. You would sound ridiculous calling it that. So you file it away and carry it, and the pile grows.
The psalm does not treat that pile as nothing. "We have endured no end of contempt" (Psalm 123:3). The Hebrew verb underneath is the one for being full after a meal, satisfied, unable to take another bite. Stuffed with scorn until they were sick of it. Nobody chose that meal, and nobody was asked whether they were hungry.
The psalm starts alone and does not stay that way. "I lift up my eyes to you" (Psalm 123:1), one voice, and by the next verse it has become our eyes, and by the third, have mercy on us. Whoever began this was not the only one being looked down on, and found that out on the road. Off the road, nobody tells you that. Mockery of the comfortable does its worst damage in private, where you are left alone to decide whether you are being oversensitive.
Four verses is enough room for a decent curse. Plenty of psalms take that road, and take it hard.
This one does not. No prayer that the comfortable be made uncomfortable. No request that their good year collapse so they finally understand. The psalmist asks for one thing and asks it twice: "Have mercy on us, LORD, have mercy on us" (Psalm 123:3).
Whatever the mockers deserve is left as somebody else's business. The energy it takes to want them ruined is energy the pilgrim does not have, and the psalm seems to know it.
Instead the looking changes direction. "As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he shows us his mercy" (Psalm 123:2). Not the face. The hand. You watch a hand that closely only when everything you need has to come from it.
No prayer that the comfortable be made uncomfortable.
You are still standing in that car park in your memory, still holding a remark that would sound like nothing if you said it aloud. The God you are looking at has never once been at ease about your life. He has never found your long season mildly amusing. Nothing about you is a passing item on a good afternoon to him.
You kept walking uphill anyway, carrying what you were handed. That took more than anyone watching understood.
