Catholic Commentary
The True Sacrifice: A Broken and Contrite Heart
16For you don’t delight in sacrifice, or else I would give it. You have no pleasure in burnt offering.17The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. O God, you will not despise a broken and contrite heart.
Psalms 51:16–17 conveys that God does not value ritual sacrifice divorced from genuine inner transformation and repentance. David asserts that a broken, contrite spirit—complete self-surrender and remorse stripped of pride—constitutes the only sacrifice acceptable to God, whom worldly standards would despise such brokenness.
God rejects ritual without repentance—he takes only what the proud would hide: a crushed heart.
Catholic tradition reads these verses with remarkable precision. The Council of Trent (Session XIV, Doctrina de Sacramento Paenitentiae, 1551) taught that contrition of heart — defined as "sorrow of soul and detestation for the sin committed, together with the resolution not to sin again" — is the most important act of the penitent. Trent cites Psalm 51 in this very context, anchoring the sacrament of Penance in David's interior movement. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1452) distinguishes between perfect contrition (motivated by love of God) and imperfect contrition or attrition (motivated by fear of punishment), teaching that perfect contrition "remits venial sins; it also obtains forgiveness of mortal sins if it includes the firm resolution to have recourse to sacramental confession as soon as possible."
St. Augustine, commenting on Psalm 51 in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, writes: "Sacrifice to God is a troubled spirit; what thou soughtest to slay by sinning, slay that by penitence." He reads the "broken spirit" as the spirit of pride — that which must die in us so that we might live to God.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae III, q. 85) identifies contrition as the first and indispensable part of Penance, and notes that it is a spiritual sacrifice that includes all the other acts. For Aquinas, what David describes is not a rejection of external sacramental form but the insistence that interior conversion is the form's soul.
Pope John Paul II, in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (1984, §31), invokes the interior dimension of conversion — "the most intimate transformation of the heart" — as the irreducible core of Christian penance, directly resonating with Psalm 51's vision. Ultimately, Catholic teaching holds that these verses are fulfilled in the Eucharist: every Mass is Christ's broken Body offered to the Father, and every communicant is invited to unite their own brokenness to his.
Contemporary Catholic life is surrounded by the temptation toward performative religion: attending Mass, completing novenas, making donations — all good things — while leaving the interior life untouched. Psalm 51:16–17 stands as a corrective that is not anti-sacramental but radically pro-interior. Before you enter the confessional, these verses ask: is there actual sorrow, or only the social habit of confession? Before Mass, they ask: are you bringing your brokenness to be united with Christ's, or merely fulfilling an obligation?
Practically, a Catholic can pray verse 17 as an examination of conscience: Where am I still unbroken? What pride, what rationalization, what self-protection am I still carrying? The "broken and contrite heart" is not a feeling to manufacture but a posture to choose — a daily act of dropping the ego's defenses before God. This is especially urgent in seasons of personal failure or moral shame, moments when the instinct is to hide. David's psalm — written after catastrophic sin — promises that God does not despise the person who comes crushed. That is not platitude; it is the foundation of every sacrament of healing the Church offers.
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Commentary
Psalms 51:16 — "For you don't delight in sacrifice, or else I would give it."
The Hebrew word for "sacrifice" here is zebach (זֶבַח), the standard term for a slaughtered animal offering — the most costly and socially significant act of Israelite worship. David is not dismissing the sacrificial system God himself ordained through Moses; he is making a sharply personal and pastoral claim: if external sacrifice alone were sufficient, he would have already offered it. The conditional phrasing ("or else I would give it") is a confession of impotence. No bull, no ram, no dove can undo what David has done with Bathsheba and against Uriah. The verse thus does two things simultaneously: it acknowledges the limits of ritual when severed from the interior disposition, and it deepens the sense of David's guilt — the wound goes beyond what ceremony can close.
The word translated "delight" (Hebrew chaphets, חָפֵץ) is the same root used elsewhere to describe God's pleasure in his people's obedience (cf. 1 Sam 15:22). Its negation here does not abolish sacrifice but reorients it: sacrifice without the right heart is no delight to God at all.
Psalms 51:17 — "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."
David now pivots from negation to affirmation. The plural "sacrifices" (zivchei, זִבְחֵי) may signal that the interior offering is not one act but an entire orientation of life. The two key adjectives — "broken" (nishbar, נִשְׁבָּר) and "contrite" (nidkeh, נִדְכֶּה) — both carry the sense of something crushed under weight. Nishbar evokes a shattered vessel; nidkeh (from dakah, to be ground down) implies pulverization. This is not mild regret. David is speaking of a self stripped of pride, of the ego's defenses fully collapsed before God.
The closing assurance — "you will not despise" — is quietly astonishing. God, who is high and holy, does not look away from what the world disdains. The very thing human pride hides — weakness, guilt, moral ruin — is what God receives. This reversal is structurally parallel to the Beatitudes: blessed are the poor in spirit.
Typological Sense: These verses anticipate the New Covenant sacrifice in two directions. First, they look forward to Christ, whose entire Passion was the ultimate "broken and contrite" offering — not because Christ sinned, but because he took upon himself the crushed condition of sinful humanity and transformed it into the perfect holocaust of love (cf. Isa 53:5). Second, they look forward to the sacrament of Penance, where the (contrition of heart) is identified by the Church as the very soul of the sacrament.