Psalm 148 Commentary

Whether it is Lectionary Year A, B, or C, if it’s the first Sunday after Christmas, you will see Psalm 148 as the psalm reading.  Somebody along the way must have determined that this is such a fitting post-Christmas Day psalm that no Lectionary cycle would be complete without it. Many years that Sunday is also the final one of the year and if not, then that Sunday is the first Lord’s Day of the new year.  Either way Psalm 148 becomes for the Lectionary the last word on a bygone year or the first word for a new one.

As we close out 2024, some of us probably find ourselves worn out by the tumult of a good bit of the year.  In the U.S. the political season was brutal and included assassination attempts, a sitting President stepping down from the electoral platform, and yet another election that reveals the near 50-50 divide of the nation on almost every front.  The wars that broke out in recent years in Ukraine and Gaza continued and even widened.  And some of us experienced personal losses even as denominations like the one of which I am apart were almost as sharply divided on various issues as the wider nation.

All in all as we approach the final Sunday of 2024, perhaps a few of us have a hard time generating the praise and worship wattage we’d need fully to engage this exuberant song.  No one wants to end a year with a Psalm of Lament, I suppose.  But in some ways a few folks might find that kind of poem more befitting of the larger mood around us.

And yet . . . Psalm 148 summons us to try to take on a new perspective.  Five days after the 2024 celebration of Christ’s birth this psalm reminds us that despite everything else we may have gone through or may still be going through, there are reasons aplenty to praise God for all God’s worth.  God’s works in creation and redemption are splendid.  God has revealed both God’s almighty power and God’s tender grace in myriad ways.  God’s goodness really is all around us even if on some days or during certain seasons it becomes easy for us to miss seeing that goodness since we are being bombarded with so many contrary feelings and experiences.

So great is the splendor and holiness of God that the psalmist here exempts no one from joining the choir.  The praise imperative of hallelu yah is directed at heavenly beings and at every created thing imaginable.  Sea creatures and land animals are ordered to sing praises but so are things we ordinarily regard as inanimate like mountains, storms, wind, trees, clouds.  And if both animate and inanimate creatures and things must praise God, it goes without saying people must do so and Psalm 148 addresses everybody: the mighty rulers of the earth all the way down to the most ordinary of people.  People of all ages are told to sing.

But then finally at the very end the real bottom line for all this praising is laid out in verses 13 and 14.  Why praise Israel’s God Yahweh with such exuberance?  Because his glory is all around us.  Because his name is very simply the greatest.  But what’s more, this huge and awesome God also has a tender heart and a gracious disposition toward his people.  This is something we see pretty often in the Book of Psalms and elsewhere in the Bible.  The real wonder of God is not just the obvious fact of his lofty majesty but rather the wonder of it all is this big God’s ability to see us and love us in all our littlenesss.  That God can see us and love us, that this giant God can stoop low really to see us at eye level is a wonder of all wonders.

Perhaps this, too, makes Psalm 148 a fitting follow-up to the just-finished celebration of Christmas.  Because if the psalms frequently marvel at God’s ability to bring himself near to our ordinary human lives, then where else have we ever better seen this gracious condescending to us than in Bethlehem’s manger?  The Son of God whose glory spans the galaxies let himself be made into a microscopic zygote in a young woman’s womb.  The Son of God became a real human baby.  What’s more, a real human baby whose true humanity would in the end serve exactly one final purpose: to die.  To die sacrificially for the people who are, in Psalm 148’s words, close to God’s heart.

The incarnation and all that it made possible for us and for our salvation is a gift and a wonder of divine grace that should only magnify our desire to sing Psalm 148 with everything we’ve got and to let it set the tone for life-long rejoicing.

It’s been a hard year in many ways.  And no one knows precisely what 2025 will hold.  These are things that can make us sad and anxious.  The reality on the ground in many of our lives could make the exuberant words of Psalm 148 stick in our throats a little.  But by God’s grace perhaps we can take stock of all the other things we have heard and seen and like the shepherds departing the cradle of the Christ we can find ways to go on our way rejoicing for all that God in Christ has done.  Done for us.  Done for the people close to his heart.

Illustration Idea

It’s a wonderful insight that has been used here on the CEP website more than a few times probably and in connection to more than any one passage of Scripture too.  Some illustration ideas are utility players who work in multiple settings.  The one I have in mind is from near the very end of the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.  At one point the characters who have been brought to the New Narnia (think New Creation biblically) enter what looked to be a modest sized building and yet when they enter it, it is a huge edifice.  “Its inside is bigger than its outside” one character exclaims.  This in turn prompts one of the humans to say that something very much like that once happened in their world.  One starry night inside a very small stable and contained in the narrow confines of an animal’s manger lay the Son of God incarnate.  The manger was small but it contained the whole world.  The inside of that stable was definitely vastly bigger than its outside.