The superscription places this psalm in the worst week of David's life: Nathan has just confronted him over Bathsheba and Uriah. David is the king of Israel, the anointed one, and he has murdered a loyal soldier to cover an adultery. There is no sacrifice in the Levitical code for what he has done — premeditated murder carried the death penalty. So David does not bring an animal; he brings a song. Psalm 51 is what repentance sounds like when the sinner has nothing left to plead and knows it. Israel later sang this psalm corporately, which means the king's worst hour became the congregation's prayer.

From the writers we read together

Brennan Manning

Franciscan priest and author of The Ragamuffin Gospel (1934-2013)

Manning wrote out of his own ruin. He was an alcoholic priest who relapsed publicly, hurt the people closest to him, and spent his last years insisting that grace had not flinched. He understood Psalm 51 from the inside — not as a theological exercise but as the only prayer a wreck can pray honestly. His refrain throughout his books is that God's love is not a reward for the cleaned-up but the agent that does the cleaning. David seems to have known the same thing. He does not promise reform first and ask for a clean heart after. He asks God to do the creating, knowing the asking is all he has.

What Manning helps us see in these verses is that the joy David asks back for is not the joy of having gotten away with something. It is the joy of being in the presence of someone who knows everything and has not turned away. "Cast me not away from your presence" is the line of a man who finally understands that being seen by God is the only thing that can save him. The sinner who hides cannot be healed. The sinner who stays put under the gaze, like David, like Manning, is the one God creates over.