Psalm 25:1-10 Commentary

The Revised Common Lectionary likes the first 10 or so verses of the 25^th Psalm.  Psalm 25:1-9 or 1-10 occur at least once each in Years A, B, and C.  The last time we saw this was earlier in 2024 when these exact same verses were assigned for the First Sunday in Lent in Year B.  And now here it is again for the First Sunday in Advent in Year C.  That right there is deserving of a few moments’ thought.

Can these same ten verses serve equally well as an introduction to a singular season of penitence and also for a season of anticipation and waiting?  Apparently the folks who put the Lectionary together seem to think so.  Perhaps a partial reason can be discovered if we recall that traditionally Advent also includes a penitential aspect.  Traditionally the liturgical color was also the same for Lent as for Advent: Purple.  But now some churches have switched Advent to a royal shade of Blue, pointing more to this being a season of heightened anticipation and preparation for the coming of the Messiah than something that might involve a repentance of sins.  Yet preparing to welcome the Messiah requires—as John the Baptist reminded everyone—repentance, a serious reckoning with our own sinfulness that required the Son of God to be made human to begin with.

That may be a partial reason why we are back in Psalm 25 in also Advent, although oddly the portion of this psalm selected by the RCL does not contain much by way of penitence.  There is a direct reference to confessing sin in verse 11 that technically is just outside the bounds of the assigned lection.  But even in the first ten verses there is talk about asking God not to remember the psalmist’s sins of old.

But unlike the other readings for Advent I in Year C, Psalm 25 does not include any mention of ultimate things like the coming judgment of God or the return of Christ.  Jeremiah 33 and 1 Thessalonians 3 contains references to the Day of the Lord or a time when God will ultimately fulfill his every promise.  And of course like all three years of the Lectionary, Advent begins (this year in Luke 21) with a part of Jesus’s apocalyptic rhetoric in the Olivet Discourses.  Those other three passages de facto summon up in us a sober watchfulness and a reminder that the way things go most days is not how things will ultimately go in the by and by.  There will come an end and with that will come a reckoning for all things.

Again, you don’t get that emphasis as much in Psalm 25.  But for sure you get a lot of talk about the need for guidance, for instruction, for being students of the ways of God and then seeking to lean into all that we learn as we go about our daily lives.  “Show me . . . Teach me . . . Guide me.”  In all of life there are right paths on which to walk and wrong ones.  In all of life there is such a thing as truth and such a thing as falsehood.  In all of life there is a righteous way to live before God and an unrighteous, corrupt and depraved way to live before God.  The dearest desire of the poet who penned the 25^th psalm is to be found in the former and not the later in all these matters.  God’s path is what counts.  God’s truth is what guides.  God’s righteousness is the straight line against which all gets measured and you either correspond to that line or your path is revealed as crooked vis-à-vis that straight line of holiness.

Recently following the death of our father, my brother and I spent long hours sorting through Dad’s woodworking shop.  Dad had taught himself to be a very skilled woodworker and he had the equipment to prove it.  Boy did he ever!  We were amazed at what Dad had accumulated over the years.  But one thing we noticed is how much of his tools had something or another to do with making sure Dad would measure, plan, cut, and assemble along straight and level lines.  If a piece of wood is cut crooked, it will never result in a well-built structure that will hold up and keep its structural integrity.  If you did not miter things just so, you could not make perfectly squared corners.  Thus carpenters and woodworkers have lot of tools to achieve straight edges: plum lines, spirit levels, laser levels, T-squares, tools with LED lights that turn green when things line up.

Psalm 25 is one of many places in the Bible that declares that in the moral life there are also a bevy of tools to keep everything on level and traveling along straight paths.  And maybe this ties in with our Advent anticipation too.  One of the great prophecies that gets included in all three of the Synoptic Gospels in connection to John the Baptist comes from Isaiah 40:

A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
⁵ Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.
⁶ And all people will see God’s salvation.’

The paths for God’s Coming One had to be made straight and once that happened, that Messiah would make what is now crooked straight, what is now rough smooth, what is now dangerous safe.  Everything would begin to line up the way God intended in the beginning and before sin and evil smeared and bleared and confused God’s good cosmos.  The haphazard crookedness of sinful chaos would be done away with.

And so cue once more Psalm 25: If we are to follow the Savior whose birth we anticipate and then celebrate in Advent and Christmas, we need to do what Psalm 25 exhorts us to do: repent of the crookedness of altogether too many of the pathways we forge on our own and then plead with God to show us his straight paths and then give us the strength and resolve we need to travel those roads and no others.

In John 14 Jesus tells the disciples “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  When you think about it, that encapsulates Psalm 25.  We need to stay on our Lord’s straight Way and we do that by having God teach us his Truth and the combination of that will lead to true Life.  The babe born in Bethlehem is that Way, Truth, and Life.  Psalm 25 reminds us that our only hope for true flourishing is when we hew close to that Savior alone.

Note: In addition to our weekly sermon commentaries that appear every Monday, we have put together a special Year C resource page for Advent and Christmas.  Visit this resource to find links to whole Advent and Christmas sermons in print and as audio sermons as well as other reflections and helpful ideas for preaching in Advent. 

Illustration Idea

Over the years the Star Wars series of movies introduced people to a once-common concept and practice.  For a lot of history until more modern times, most people knew that the path to becoming a skilled craftsman in any given field involved apprenticing yourself to a master.  In the Star Wars world of Jedi Knights, learners known as Padawans would be assigned to a seasoned Jedi Master (think Yoda) who would instruct the aspiring Jedi on every level both through active teaching and just as importantly (or more importantly) through active role-modeling.

But for many people in the more modern world, this did seem like a throwback to a long abandoned model of learning.  Being an apprentice and a journeyman and so on got displaced at some point with things like getting a college education or taking shop classes in high school.  This does still happen in some fields.  In Japan, for instance, you cannot become a certified sushi chef without a long apprenticeship with a master chef.  In fact, for the first year or two of such instruction, the apprentice chef is not even allowed to touch a knife!  He or she must first watch what the master does and only then be able to take up a sushi knife themselves and touch an actual fish.

Biblically and in places like Psalm 25, however, this is still a solid model to follow.  We apprentice ourselves as student to the ultimate Master who is Jesus Christ.  The Greek word for “disciple” after all means “student” at its most basic level.  And that is what we are: students who along with the psalmist plead over and again to learn the truth but also to be shown the way to do things as we travel with the Master down the straight paths he alone can show us.