Psalm 65
OT Reading: Genesis 2.4b-end
NT Reading: Luke 8.22-35
When Luke was choosing stories about Jesus to illustrate his power over nature – a power that revealed his divinity to those who had eyes to see it – he may well have had tonight’s psalm in mind, addressed as it is to a God who, among other things, “stilleth the raging of the sea: and the noise of his waves, and the madness of the people”. Jesus has just done all that, and the man from whom the demons have been driven out is sitting at his feet, clothed and in his right mind.
Whether or not Luke had Psalm 65 in his mind, you can see at once why the lectionary gave it to us tonight. That being said, the awesome power of God is not in fact the dominant feature of Psalm 65. In the depths of winter it is a delight to celebrate the God of our harvest thanksgivings, who visits the earth and blesses it, who makes it very plenteous, who softens the ploughed furrows with the drops of rain, and crowns the year with his goodness. The little hills rejoice on every side. The folds are full of sheep. And I love the closing picture of valleys that stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing (v9-14).
But there is more still in this short psalm. As well as awesome power and generous provision, there is mercy and hope. Our misdeeds may prevail against us, but the psalmist knows that God will be merciful in dealing with our sins. We shall be received, chosen, blessed; the God of our salvation, who is the hope of all the ends of the earth, will show us wonderful things. Awesome power, generous provision, wondrous mercy, confident hope – this one short psalm reminds us of the breadth and depth of humanity’s perception of divine power, as well as the kaleidoscopic range of our intellectual and emotional responses. If there is so much in the 14 short verses of just one psalm, how much more there is to explore if we look at the whole collection. The psalms are in so many ways the perfect illustration of our own Mission Statement – Exploring our humanity, encountering the divine.
There isn’t time tonight to do more than dip into this rich chest of treasures, but I want to say something about the opening and closing psalms, and about the strange mixture of conflicting voices that we find in between, in particular the imprecatory psalms and verses of psalms, the raw edge of vengeance and violence that many of us find so difficult to regard as a word from God. One solution that is often adopted when psalms are being chosen or cut down for use in worship is to omit altogether the awkward verses that make us feel uncomfortable, or to draw the sting by treating them as allegories, but I have been reading a couple of articles by John and Kathleen Goldingay, in recent editions of the journal Theology, which suggest a different approach to understanding and using them, an approach which is perhaps more in keeping with the clear-eyed vision of our Mission Statement.
The structure of the book of psalms is perhaps even less coherent than the organisation of a modern hymn book. But the editors have clearly tried to give it some shape. Thus the first psalm sets the tone for the whole collection. The very first word is ‘blessed’ – blessed are those who delight in the law of the Lord and do not listen to the advice of the ungodly. Evildoers may seem to flourish, but they are doomed. The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: and the way of the ungodly shall perish. As the psalms explore our humanity, they constantly give honest expression to our human experience of pain and grief, opposition, failure and misery. At the same time they never lose touch with what the psalmist knew in his heart to be the real world, the world of tonight’s anthem – that place where God’s justice thrives, a world of mercy, peace, joy and hope, a place which makes us glad to go into the house of the Lord.
As Dylan Thomas said, ‘the world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it’. The psalms are good poetry, but can they, do they change the world? Once we take seriously their all-pervading ambience of God’s justice, as the psalmist repeatedly urges us to do, once we acknowledge the truth of that world, we become caught up in the psalmist’s engagement with the contrast between the empirical world that constantly frustrates us and makes us angry at others, at ourselves, even at God, and what is in another and deeper sense the real world, a place where it is safe to assert ethical values, quietly confident in the ultimate triumph of God’s just and gracious rule. Poetic justice indeed.
One of the great benefits of allowing ourselves to absorb the all-pervading ambient atmosphere of God’s poetic justice is the recognition that in God’s world, as we experience it in the psalms, God himself is the prosecutor who takes up the cause of the righteous, the judge who sifts truth from falsehood and pronounces judgment, as well as the executor who carries out the sentence. We read the psalms under the sign: Justice is mine, says the Lord, I will repay. We let go of our angry desire to take the law into our own hands, and leave it to him. One of the most gruesome of all the imprecatory psalms is Ps 137, which begins as a gentle lament for the exiles in Babylon, required to sing for their captors one of the songs of Sion. We are caught up with them in sympathy for their plight, and then their smouldering anger on behalf of Jerusalem, an anger which finally bursts into flame as we find ourselves calling down a blessing on those who would take the children of the daughter of Babylon and smash their heads against the stones. At this point Lewis takes refuge in an allegorical interpretation which sidesteps such appalling violence. He turns the little children into baby sins which need to be smashed against the stones, nipped in the bud. Many modern liturgies and lectionaries simply omit the difficult, violent verses. But the Goldingays are having none of that. They would rather have us go all the way with the sympathy that boils up into outrage and anger, and finally boils over into a violence and barbarity which leaves us deeply but perhaps cathartically shocked by the potential of our own emotions to tip over into vengeance expressed in monstrous evil.
Psalm 137 stops abruptly at that point, but we cannot leave our emotional response there. Glory be to the Father may seem an utterly inappropriate response. Yet, it is precisely as we remember who is the Judge, and leave any punishment to him, that we are driven to our knees to pray that God will never allow our emotional response to persecution and provocation to carry us away like that. Psalm 137 is an extreme example but it serves to show us how the psalms can provide us with a safe space within which to explore our humanity and encounter the divine. Saying or singing the poetry of the psalms is a performative experience. As we engage with the text, we experience first the human predicament out of which they spring, but then we set our human response, with all its rough edges, in the context of the grace and mercy, the power and compassion of the God who stilleth the raging of the sea and the madness of the people, and we wake to find ourselves sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in our right mind.
Just as the first psalm sets the tone for the whole book, so too the closing psalm sets the tone for our response. Exploring our humanity, we have encountered the divine. It may not have been a comfortable encounter, but as we reflect on all that we have learned about ourselves and about God, we respond in praise and worship. O praise God in his holiness: praise him in the firmament of his power. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.