Catholic Commentary
Appeal to God's Mercy and Forgiveness of Past Sins
6Yahweh, remember your tender mercies and your loving kindness, for they are from old times.7Don’t remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions. Remember me according to your loving kindness, for your goodness’ sake, Yahweh.
Psalms 25:6–7 presents the psalmist's petition for God to remember His tender mercies and steadfast covenant love while requesting that He not remember the sins and transgressions of the petitioner's youth. The passage employs the concept of divine remembrance as active engagement—God is asked to enact mercy toward the supplicant while withholding judgment against past wrongs.
God's mercy is older than your sin—ask Him to remember who He is, not what you have done.
The second half of verse 7 introduces the positive counterpart: "according to your loving kindness remember me, for your goodness' sake, O Yahweh." The ḥesed that God remembers about Himself is to be the measure applied to the sinner. This is the astonishing theological move of the verse: divine goodness (ṭûb) becomes the standard of divine judgment. The sinner does not ask to be measured against the law but against God's own character.
Spiritual and Typological Senses
In the allegorical sense, the "sins of my youth" can be read — as Augustine and many Fathers read them — as the sins of humanity's early age, the fallen condition inherited from Adam, the childhood of the race before the maturity of Christ's redemption. The plea for God to remember His mercies anticipates the Incarnation itself, when God's raḥamîm took flesh. In the moral sense, the passage is a model for the interior disposition of the penitent — coming before God not with self-justification but with an appeal grounded entirely in His nature, not ours. In the anagogical sense, the verse points to the Last Judgment, where the mercy of God, obtained through Christ, will be the believer's only hope.
Catholic tradition reads these verses as a profound catechesis on the nature of divine mercy and the sacramental logic of confession. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God is "rich in mercy" (CCC 210–211), and that His mercy is not merely one attribute among others but the outward expression of His innermost being — precisely the meaning of raḥamîm that the Psalmist invokes.
St. Augustine, in his Confessions, hears his own voice in verse 7. He understands the "sins of youth" not merely chronologically but spiritually: they are the sins committed before the soul was illumined by grace, sins of self-will and misdirected love. For Augustine, to ask God to "not remember" these sins is to ask for the re-ordering of one's identity before God — a new creation act.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 113) teaches that justification involves God's mercy actively willing the sinner's good — precisely the ḥesed the psalm invokes — rather than merely suspending punishment. The psalmist's intuition that God's goodness is the measure of forgiveness aligns with Aquinas's teaching that grace is a participation in divine goodness, not merely a legal pardon.
Pope Francis, in his Apostolic Exhortation Misericordia et Misera (2016), echoes the psalm directly: "God does not remember our sins; He remembers us, always ready to forgive." The Jubilee of Mercy (2015–2016) drew heavily on precisely this Hebraic understanding of divine "remembering" as a covenantal act of love.
The Council of Trent affirmed that true contrition requires the penitent to approach God's mercy with firm trust — not confidence in one's own merits, but in God's goodness (Session XIV). This is the exact posture modeled in these two verses.
Every Catholic who has knelt in a confessional carrying shame about a past they cannot undo is praying Psalm 25:6–7, whether they know it or not. These verses teach a concrete spiritual discipline: when sin from the past resurfaces to accuse, the proper response is not self-flagellation or despair, but a deliberate redirection of attention — from the sin to the character of God. The psalmist essentially teaches us to argue theologically: "Lord, your mercy is older than my sin. Your ḥesed predates my failure. Act according to who You are, not according to what I have done."
For Catholics preparing for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, these verses are a pre-confession prayer of rare precision. They also address the common post-confession struggle: scrupulosity. Many Catholics receive absolution but continue to "remember" their sins in the way only God has the right to remember — as defining, condemning facts. The psalm invites us to align our own memory with God's: to let the mercy He extends in the sacrament govern how we hold our own past.
Practically: pray verse 6 slowly before an examination of conscience. Pray verse 7 as you leave the confessional. Let the logic of divine remembering displace the logic of shame.
Commentary
Psalms 25:6 — "Yahweh, remember your tender mercies and your loving kindness"
The verse opens with a direct address to the divine name (YHWH), signaling covenant intimacy. The psalmist does not merely ask God to feel compassion; he asks God to remember it — to let it govern His present action. The Hebrew raḥamîm (tender mercies) is a plural of intensity derived from the root reḥem, meaning "womb." It carries the connotation of a mother's visceral, instinctive love — fierce, physical, deeply personal. This word is no mere sentiment; it speaks of a love that is constitutive of who God is. Paired with it is ḥesed, usually translated "loving kindness" or "steadfast love," which is the great covenantal loyalty word of the Hebrew Scriptures. Where raḥamîm points to God's inner emotional tenderness, ḥesed points to His covenantal fidelity — the bond He has sworn never to break. Together, these two words form the twin pillars of Old Testament theology of mercy.
The phrase "they have been from of old" (implied in the Hebrew tense and made explicit in many translations) is crucial: the psalmist is not asking God to conjure mercy from nothing. He is asking God to act consistently with what He has always been — an appeal to divine immutability and to the history of salvation. This rhetorical move is deeply Hebraic: to invoke God's past saving acts as grounds for present intervention (cf. Exodus 32:13, where Moses appeals similarly).
Psalms 25:7 — "Don't remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions"
Here the logic of "remembering" is inverted. The same faculty of divine attention that the psalmist invokes for mercy, he pleads against in regard to sin. This is not a naïve request for God to become amnesiac; in the biblical framework, divine remembering is an active, consequential engagement — to "remember" sin is to allow it to stand as the defining fact of a relationship. The psalmist asks that sin not be permitted that defining power.
"The sins of my youth" (ḥaṭṭô't ne'ûray) is remarkably specific. The psalmist does not speak abstractly about sin in general, but about sins tied to a period of life characterized by impulsiveness, ignorance, and spiritual immaturity. This specificity resonates with the universal human experience of carrying shame over a past self. The word pesha'im (transgressions) carries a stronger force — deliberate rebellion, not merely moral failure through weakness. By including both, the verse encompasses the full range of human sinfulness: sins of inadvertence and sins of willful revolt.