Psalm 146 Commentary

Psalm 146 is the Year B psalm appointed for November 10, 2024, which in the United States will be the first Sunday following the Presidential election.  No doubt even those of you reading this commentary who do not live in the U.S. have been aware of this election and maybe you have even paid some attention to it.  Who knows if the world will know by November 10 the firm and final outcome of the contest.  One thing we do know: whatever the precise process and mechanism for choosing new political leadership in a given nation, everyone senses that such decisions and outcomes can be hugely consequential.

Given all of that and for certain given this particular moment in the United States, Psalm 146 seems poignant.  When some preachers read Psalm 146 in a worship service on November 10, people will hear the words of this psalm about not putting our trust in earthly leaders in a very fraught context.  In the present atmosphere, we will not receive such sentiments in some neutral way.  It may even be that we will feel such words are aimed straight at each one of us whether we are satisfied with the U.S. election results or extremely upset about the results.

That first part of Psalm 146 is not per se meant to be heard as a word of judgment.  However, if any of us ever do find ourselves pinning far too much hope on any given political leader, then these words can come to us with an edge to them after all.  As believers in God through Christ Jesus our Lord, we definitely want to make sure our priorities are straight.  And if nothing else, Psalm 146 is chiefly about getting those priorities in good order in our hearts and minds.

This psalmist cautions against putting trust in princes and grounds that chiefly in their mortality.  Leaders and even very powerful people will sooner or later die the same as everyone else.  The claim is also made that human leaders cannot save anyone in the long run, and that includes themselves of course.  Leaders may be gifted, they may be charismatic, they may possess the ability to whip up enthusiasm among vast throngs of people.  They may even do a lot of good (or, alas, a lot of evil).  Leaders are important—and the New Testament will remind us in places like Romans 13 that they are instruments of God for the good order of societies—and we do well to be highly discerning in figuring out which leaders to support.

But in the long run, they’re just folks.  They’re mortal.  They’re also flawed same as the rest of us, as prone to goof up as the rest of us.  And even those who get vested with great power have limits and, again, same as the rest of us, the clock is constantly ticking down for however much time they have left on this earth before they die.  They may leave behind a legacy.  It may be said of them that they made history.  But in the end they will also be history!

Much better, Psalm 146 assures us, to put your final and ultimate trust in the God of Israel.  To state the merely obvious, God is not time-limited.  Whatever plans God has for us and for this cosmos, he will be around to see them through.  God is not going anywhere.  As Psalm 146 says in its conclusion, the Lord reigns forever.

But it’s not just God’s immortality that makes him the proper target for our loving trust.  God also has almighty power and if you doubt that, look around you in this creation.  God made everything that exists and maintains everything that exists, too.  Like Genesis 1, Psalm 146 uses a merismus—the heavens and the earth—as a stand-in for everything in between heaven and earth.  When biblical writers use a merismus in which they invoke two extremes, what they are essentially saying is that God made everything from A to Z, the whole shebang, the whole kit-n-kaboodle.  And if the one true God can do all of that, we can be assured he can pull off most anything else God has in mind to accomplish as well.

But God and God’s power are visible not only in only the big things of creation.  God cares for each one of us.  Like Psalm 8 that begins with the majesty of God in huge things but then goes on to celebrate how this huge God nonetheless sees us in our littleness, so also Psalm 146 pivots from the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in it to the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the sick.  God does what earthly leaders at their best are supposed to do (but too often do not): care for the weak.  See the invisible people.  Work justice for all and not just for the rich and the powerful.  God’s greatness is seen in this work among us no less than in the majestic spectacle of a vast nebula in space or a giant California Redwood tree.

The psalm also says God frustrates the plans of the wicked and although that is indeed going to be the longer-term outcome of God’s ruling the universe with justice, we all know that sometimes in the short term the wicked get away with far too much for far too long.  (And some of those wicked people are among those who rise to be leaders of nations and a few such unsavory folks even rose to become kings in Israel!).  But precisely because that is true, that only counts as one more compelling and vital reason to put our final hopes in God alone.  The arc of the universe is long, Martin Luther King Jr., famously said, but it bends toward justice.  And at the end of the cosmic day, we want to be on the side of that justice and of the God who insures its coming.

Again, for the socio-political moment in which this appointed psalm may be heard in churches around the world and certainly in the United States, this psalm may both confront us to align our sensibilities aright and be a source of great comfort that no matter what things look like around us right now, God alone will have the final say.  And so yes: put your trust in God alone.

Illustration Idea

Most of us remember the iconic campaign poster pictured above from the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.  Indeed, many people did see Barack Obama as a once-in-a-generation transformational leader.  Potentially anyway.  But if after getting inaugurated Obama did achieve some of the things people hoped he would do, he did not and realistically could not achieve every hope with which he had been imbued.  And thus by 2012 the former Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin mocked Obama supporters while campaigning for Mitt Romney when she asked “How did all that hopey-changey stuff work out for you, people?!”

Obama himself would probably be willing to admit where he may have let some folks down.  In fact, you can scour the Index of his memoir A Promised Land but you won’t find the word “hope” in there anywhere!  Maybe that is a tacit admission that he’d just as soon not engage what had become a fundamental slogan of the campaign that got him elected.  And perhaps the sobering realities of actually being President tempered some of the enthusiastic hope even he may have had for himself much less what his supporters had had.

Perhaps the more humble political leaders in the world would be among the first to agree that Psalm 146 is right: put your final hope in God alone.