Psalm 146 Commentary

As we often note here on the CEP website and in our various sermon commentaries on the Psalms, we use the word “Hallelujah” as an expression of praise.  For us it is synonymous with the sentiment, “I am praising God right now!”  And sometimes we use it as a way to express gratitude and relief, as the equivalent of when we might say “Thank God!”  Someone tells you that something really bad had just gotten narrowly averted and so you respond with “Hallelujah!  Thank God!  Sheesh, that was a close one!”

What we probably never sense when saying “Hallelujah” is its original Hebrew meaning.  Because hallelu yah is an imperative, it’s a command, it is the issuance of an order to demand that someone render up praise to God, specifically to Yahweh.  We just don’t use the word that way and we don’t even read it that way in something like Psalm 146.  If you want to confuse someone, go up to them and bark out a strong “Hallelujah” while perhaps pointing with your finger in their direction.  We cannot conceive of this word as a summons or a command on a par with saying to someone, “Sit down!”

But that is what it meant originally.  And Psalm 146, like a number of other psalms, is bookended with “Hallelujah!”  The psalm begins and ends with a summons to praise and in the nine verses that come between that opening and closing we are filled in as to the reasons why it is only proper to command the world to render praises to God.  And those reasons tie in with the mighty works of God that we see all around us in the physical creation.  No matter what you are encountering on land, in the air, in the sea, you can always say “God made that!”

However, Psalm 146 also summons praise to God because of what we could call God’s dispositional qualities.  God is on the side of justice.  God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed.  As Martin Luther King, Jr., often said, the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.  Psalm 146 tells us that the reason that statement is true is because the God who forms the bright center to everything in this universe is constantly working for and motivating others to work for justice.  Verse 9 evokes what in the Old Testament is known as that class of people called the anawim, with the primary people who occupy that class being that oft-repeated triplet of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner (or the phrase I heard so often in church when I was a kid—and that I so often wondered about—“the alien who is within your gates”).

These were the most vulnerable members of society back then.  And let’s face it, widows and orphans and immigrants don’t have it very easy today in most societies either.  The Law of God as laid out in the Pentateuch in Scripture is littered with commands to show extra favor to the anawim.  The people of Israel were supposed to go out of their way to make extra provisions for such folks to make sure that A) They did not fall through society’s cracks and B) Were not actively exploited by unscrupulous or calloused people.  And over and over again when God told the Israelites not to abuse the vulnerable and especially the foreigners in their midst, God reminded them that they themselves had a history of such exploitative abuse when they were slaves in Egypt and so they must not do unto others what had been done unto them.  But just as often God rooted those commands in his own character with the Hebrew declaration, “Ani Yahweh,” “I am the Lord!”  Psalm 146 orders this God to be praised because his very character is rooted in justice.  This is simply who the God of Israel is.

The Bible even devotes one whole book to the importance of all this and that is of course The Book of Ruth.  When Ruth returns to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law Naomi, Ruth embodies all of the anawim in her one person: she is an immigrant, she is a widow, she is fatherless.  Ruth is triply vulnerable, she is vulnerable cubed. You could sum up her station in life like a math notation: V³.

Life’s deck was definitively stacked against her and as the story opens, there is no good reason to expect anything but trouble and hardship and abuse for Ruth.  Except that then there is Boaz.  And Boaz follows the Law of God including the gleaner laws that gave someone like Ruth a shot at securing necessary food and life-giving provisions.  Boaz is the Bible’s premier example of how good things can come when the poor and vulnerable are cared for.  In fact, by the time the Book of Ruth closes, we know that one of the good things that eventually happened because of Boaz and his loving care of Ruth was no less than Jesus the Messiah!  Ruth through Boaz became the Messiah’s great-great-great . . . grandmother!

Boaz was transparent to the God of justice and decency and care that Psalm 146 celebrates and the God to whom Psalm 146 demands we render up proper praise.  Of course, for now stories like Ruth’s do not always end happily and we can but lament to God that sometimes exploitation of the vulnerable happens and we can only wish to see God swoop in and take care of it.  Sometimes it seems God does, sometimes it seems for whatever the reason God does not.  If this were not true, then the Book of Psalms would contain only poems like Psalm 146 but in point of fact one-third of the Hebrew Psalter is in the modality of Lament.

Still, Psalm 146 bears witness to the hope-filled fact that at the end of the cosmic day, God will right all wrongs, he will deliver justice to all people, he will punish the wicked who fought against upholding justice.  That universal arc Dr. King spoke of is indeed long, painfully long sometimes.  But we know why it’s bending the right direction.  And to that what else can we say except “Hallelujah!  Get busy praising this great God!”

Illustration Idea

Astrophysics teaches us that objects in space with a very large mass cause space to bend and curve around those objects.  Things like our sun become giant gravity wells that pull other objects into orbit around them.  That is why our solar system’s planets whip around the sun—they are caught on the curving of space that the sun generates.  And that is why something like our moon whips around the earth: the moon is caught in the far smaller but nonetheless significant curve of space the earth creates.

Psalm 146 says God is like that.  God is a giant mass at the center of everything and what God mostly represents is a mass of justice.  The gravity well of God’s justice brings everything good into orbit around God.  When, as was noted above, Dr. King talked about a universal arc that bends toward justice, it is almost as though he were speaking in astrophysical metaphorical terms: God’s justice brings all other justice in the universe into orbit around him.

The CEP website also has commentaries on Psalm 125:

2018 from Leonard Vander Zee: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2018-09-03/psalm-125/

2015 from Doug Bratt: https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2015-08-31/psalm-125-2/