Psalm 23 Commentary

Lately I have been in a phase of life where green pastures and still waters seem far away.  And though dark-ish valleys have seemed all-too-real, the prospect of being exalted over my foes likewise seems a ways off just now.  Maybe you as a preacher feel this way too.  I have been out of the regular parish ministry for now nineteen years and if I can recall that things became more socio-politically fraught after 9/11 and in the years leading up to my joining the Faculty at Calvin Seminary in 2005, it turns out that what I experienced then was the warm-up act for what has now become a toxic culture and yes, that includes toxicity inside congregations too.

Pastors are weary.  Two words that come up pretty often when I survey how preachers are doing these days are “scared” and “vulnerable.”  What’s more, we are preaching each week to a whole lot of folks who feel the same way in their lives.  Preachers are the traumatized delivering God’s Word to more traumatized people.  As I was listening to the great Simon & Garfunkel song “Bridge over Troubled Water” on YouTube the other night, I was struck by the lyric “when pain is all around.”  These days, pain is all around in the church, in society, in the world generally.  C.S. Lewis once said that after his wife died, he discovered that grief is like the sky above—when you are grieving, there is no place to which you can go for relief.  The pain of this moment is like that too.  There is almost no quarter to escape it.

And so cue up Psalm 23.  Unsurprisingly this is a poem that comes up a bit more often in the three-year Revised Common Lectionary schedule than most other psalms.  One would be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree with the statement that this is the best-known of the 150 psalms in the Hebrew Psalter.  It is the first Bible passage I remember being asked to memorize in my Christian day school when I was in Kindergarten.  (I had no clue at the tender age of 5 what it meant when I recited the line about being “in the presence of my enemies” but subsequent living in this world sooner or later lets a person relate to that idea just fine.)

All in all, Psalm 23 is a pretty capacious meditation that covers a lot of ground in its short half-dozen verses.  This brief poem captures the goodness of more lovely and happy seasons of life.  Yet at the same time it does not pretend that every day is a green pastures/still waters day either.  There is darkness.  There is death.  There is danger.  And there are enemies.  The psalm may conclude with a rich banquet being served in our honor while our foes look on but we should not miss that behind that upbeat image is the admission that the psalmist had enemies and altogether too many of us also yet today could acknowledge the same reality.  But then the poem bookends itself by returning in the final lines to the serenity of the opening lines as the goodness and mercy of God are depicted as the one constant in the universe that will go on and on and in the end have the last word for all of us, too.

In past sermon commentaries here on the CEP website I have pointed out that for all its hyper-familiarity, Psalm 23 traffics in imagery that is actually somewhat foreign to most people these days.  Most of us have never even met a real shepherd and even fewer of us have had any experience dealing with real sheep (and consuming an herb-crusted rack of lamb does not count!).  But it is clear that this fact that might otherwise be a firm disconnect for most people reading this psalm or hearing it preached is really no stumbling block after all.  Not fully anyway.  Because the core of Psalm 23 touches on things that are universal in the human experience.  We don’t need to know a lot about flocks of sheep or shepherds to relate to the deep longings and profound hopes depicted here.

It is often noted, also here on the CEP website in various sermon commentaries on the Psalms, that one always needs to read a given psalm in the context of the other 149 in the collection.  Because taken in isolation, the psalms that claim the righteous never have a bad day and that bad people always clearly and swiftly get their comeuppance seem out of touch with reality.  That is why we need to nestle those more upbeat musings next to the one-third of the Psalter that is in the modality of Lament.  And lest we let even the darkest lament psalm (cf. Psalm 88) make it sound like life is never any good and we can find no hope, those psalms likewise have to be in conversation with other more hope-filled poems of praise and thanksgiving and celebration.

Psalm 23, however, manages the neat trick of having that gamut of the wider Hebrew Psalter all packed down into its short span of six verses.  There is something for everyone here.  Maybe that is why Psalm 23 has managed to become the most famous psalm of them all.  Although stained glass windows and counted-cross-stitch wall hangings may focus on just the first two verses, the truth of the wider poem is more all-encompassing and thus more realistic.

In any event, Psalm 23 may be the perfect psalm to preach on during these fraught days inside of many congregations and outside the walls of the church as well.  When I preached on this many years ago, I titled my sermon “Everybody Needs a Shepherd.”  Indeed.

Illustration Idea

Was Psalm 23 the best known psalm already in also Jesus’s day?  Perhaps.  Did Jesus have that specifically in mind when he declared in John 10 that “I am the good shepherd”?  Probably.  But Jesus goes beyond the imagery of Psalm 23 when he adds that as the good shepherd, he lays down his life for the sheep.  That is not something you find within the psalm proper.  And so it turns out that the shepherd who pokes and prods and protects us in death’s dark shadow is himself not just a shepherd but a slain lamb himself.  And that is quite an advance on the imagery of Psalm 23!

Note: The CEP website also has commentaries on Psalm 89:20 – 37 from 2015: https://cepreaching.org/sermon-commentary/?_rcl_weeks=20150713

And from 2018: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-07-16/psalm-8920-37-2/