Psalm 71:1-6 Commentary

Even just the half-dozen verses that the Lectionary selects for us from the larger text of Psalm 71 capture the essence of most of the 150 psalms in the Hebrew Psalter.  Consider all of what is spoken and expressed in the span of just these few verses:

• Images of God as refuge and rock and fortress
• Pleas for deliverance and rescue
• A lament-like acknowledgment that the world contains bad people who count as enemies
• Firm trust gets expressed in God’s righteousness and his ability to save
• Promises that the psalmist’s praise of God will never cease

Taken together just those 5 items alone are touchstones for pretty much most any psalm you could name.  And the reason that is so is because all of this could be described as the default posture of us as believers before the face of Almighty God.  We live in a broken world.  We are ourselves a part of that brokenness.  And so prayer is as often as not in an intercessory mode as we seek help and deliverance from all that besets us about our own selves and about the people around us who are cruel and bent on creating havoc for good people.

But even despite this experience of brokenness within and without the believer leans into the iron-clad belief that the universe is presided over by a good God.  A righteous and holy God.  A God who is sovereign over all and who has the best interests of this creation and of God’s people at heart.  That is the reason both why we should ever and only bring our pleas before such a God and why this God deserves abiding thanksgiving and praise.

Of course, it would not be difficult to look around us in this world—the world writ larger and closer to home in the things we experience in our immediate day to day living—and come to the conclusion there is no God.  Or at least there is no good God.  We all know the classic syllogism on the problem of evil.

• If God is all-powerful, he could stop evil events and people.
• If God is all-good, he would want to stop evil events and people.
• Evil events happen and evil people succeed.
• Therefore God is not all-powerful or all-good.
• But since by definition God is both, therefore there is no God.

This way of framing things looks to be air-tight from a logical standpoint.  But it does not head off further considerations.  This simple syllogism cries out for the asking of other questions.  Could there be a reason why a God who is both all-powerful and all-good would not intervene to head off every bad person and event?  This is not a question that can be answered definitively or with something that would count as an unassailable counter argument much less a proof.  This is why in the field of apologetics, wise apologists proffer a defense of why a good and powerful God might allow unhappy events.  In the larger ways by which God chose to set up this universe it is possible and rationally defendable that a larger good is served by not having an all-good and all-powerful God so strongly control events as to intervene in every decision people make or every event that happens.  Maybe something like true love and true sacrifice would not be possible in such a world.

This sermon commentary is not the place to lay out all of the arguments of someone like philosopher Alvin Plantinga who did world-class thinking on this very subject in the 20^th century.  But suffice it to say that in one way or another all believers wrestle with such questions not at the highest levels of philosophical inquiry and apologetic defense but at the street level of parsing out what happens to us in God’s world.  In the end none of us can prove we know how this all works.  But this is where faith and trust come into play.  And if the Bible and in particular the New Testament are correct that faith is the first gift that God grants to us by grace alone, then we trust that what this faith tells us about God’s love for us and for this creation is right.  The psalmist embraced this for certain.

Psalm 71 in the Year C Lectionary cycle in 2025 falls very near the exact middle of the Season of Epiphany and so is in a way the pivot point of this season that begins with the baptism of Jesus and ends with his Transfiguration just before we once again turn decisively toward the cross once Lent begins on Ash Wednesday.  As such, Psalm 71 reminds us of several things.  First, why the Son of God had to be made human.  Second, the love of God for a fallen world and that it was out of the exuberant abundance of that love that God sent his only Son to die for the sake of the world.  Third, although we cannot always get our hardest questions answered about why bad things happen and why bad people thrive, the fact that even God’s Son had to die on a bloody cross tells us that this is all complicated even for God.  But fourth we are reminded that at the end of the cosmic day and in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Illustration Idea

As I concluded the sermon commentary above with the quote from Julian of Norwich, my mind went to a certain song.  It’s not a religious song.  At least to the best of my knowledge Beatle Paul McCartney was not imbuing his lyrics with any overt religious (much less Christian) ideas or sentiments.  But somehow this particular song, “Let It Be,” has always felt like it can easily take on Christian resonances.  Yes, the name of Paul’s mother was Mary (she died when he was young) but somehow I’ve never been able to avoid connecting the mother Mary in the song to also the Virgin Mary and her words to Gabriel after being told what was going to happen to her: “Let it be to me as you have said.”  And then apropos for what we have reflected on in all this regarding Psalm 71, these lyrics seem oddly apt too;

And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be
For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be

By God’s grace we can still thank and praise God as the psalmist does even despite of and even in the midst of cruel enemies and terrible events.  And as we do so as broken hearted people, we do believe in the end there will be an answer through Christ Jesus our Lord.  Yes, Lord, let it be.