Psalm 99 Commentary

Psalm 99 might seem to be a better fit for the Reign of Christ Sunday later this year than for Transfiguration Sunday.  There is really nothing in the accounts of Christ’s transfiguration that point to God—or Christ Jesus—as King.  But that is what Psalm 99 is all about.  Probably if we wanted to make a Psalm 99 connection to the transfiguration, it would not be too difficult to do in that the glory revealed in Jesus on that mountaintop also points to his being the shining King of kings over all the earth.

Psalm 99 is indeed a celebration of God’s role as King over all the earth.  This is one of many places in Hebrew Scripture where Israel displays the audacity required to assert that the sovereign God of all the earth—of all creation—resides in the Temple in Jerusalem.  They called it “Mount Zion,” though in reality and compared to lots of other mountains in the world, Zion was not all that impressive.  Still, the claim is made that this is the earthly residence of Yahweh as he is depicted as seated on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant between the two golden cherubim that flanked both sides of the Ark.  From that royal perch Israel’s God is said to rule the heavens and the earth and so all the earth is called to hail Yahweh as God and to praise his holiness and grandeur.  Again, an audacious claim and one that did not sit well with most of the rest of the Ancient Near East.

Of course in lots of places in the world today there either is no king or queen or where kings and queens do still exist, they are often figureheads as the true governance of the land is carried out be a president or prime minister.  In the ancient world, however, the king was not merely symbolic but the actual ruler of the kingdom.  It was the king’s job to establish and defend the nation’s borders.  It was the king’s job to administer justice to all and to insure equity among all people regardless of their station in life.  Psalm 99 claims God had done that for Israel and was prepared to bring such justice to all the earth.

Alas as we know from the history of Israel/Judah, eventually the King on the throne in the Temple was not quite enough for the people.  They wanted to have a human king like the other nations and though Samuel was the first to try to resist this, God said to go along with it.  But even so, the human king was supposed to take his marching orders from the ultimate King who had established laws for the proper running of the country.  But also alas as we know, only a handful of the kings of Israel/Judah did this well.  Once David and Solomon had passed from the scene—and neither one of them was perfectly transparent to Yahweh as it was—most kings allowed various forms of injustice to trample the poor.  They even allowed paganism to flourish and rank idolatry—an idolatry that obscured Yahweh as the only true God and King over Israel.

Curiously Psalm 99 sketches on the one hand a pretty idealistic picture of Israel serving their God and King and on the other hand it admits that the idealistic picture was far from the whole story.  So verse 7 claims that when God gave Israel his law, they obeyed it.  But then only a couple verses later it is admitted that Israel needed their King to be a forgiving sovereign since they messed up a lot and even more concretely we are told that in his holiness and justice, God as King also had to go so far as to punish Israel for its various iniquities.

So in some ways although Psalm 99 summons all of the earth to worship God at his holy mountain in Jerusalem, it is clear even in this poem that Israel needed to be called to do this too.  It was not only those who were ignorant of Yahweh as the King over all the earth who failed to worship God’s holiness.  Israel failed too.  Again and again.

We could wish that making a nod toward that unhappy reality would not be necessary.  It darkens the mood of an otherwise upbeat psalm of praise to the King of kings.  But honesty compels such a frank admission of failure.  God is holy and our God in Christ is holy but we are, at best, only on our way to being made holy through the Spirit’s ongoing work of sanctification.  But on Transfiguration Sunday we are also reminded that in the end, this is why it was necessary to have the Son of God become truly human in order to redeem our broken humanity and restore us to a proper relationship with our God and King.  The transfiguration reminds us that all of the holiness, splendor, and power celebrated in Psalm 99 really did reside in the man Jesus and although it did not typically and literally shine and blaze forth as it did on the mountain that one day, it was nevertheless always there.

We need to see and celebrate that as we prepare once more in Lent to follow Jesus to his cross.  And we need Psalm 99 to remind us of the cosmic scope and sweep of the Messiah whom we worship.  The Kingship of Jesus is not a modest or local affair.  Nor can we overstate the glory of our one true King.  Too often we downsize all this. We focus on having a “personal relationship” with Jesus even as in worship we sometimes domesticate the power and glory of God in order to keep things neat and tidy.  But God’s true glory in Christ cannot be contained or tamped down.  We cannot merely project onto God our own preferences as though we have God cased and as it turns out, God is a lot like us.

No, Psalm 99 and the transfiguration burst through all that and in the end—and as Psalm 99 calls us to do—we can but bow down in gob-smacked awe over our one true King over all the cosmos.

[Note: In addition to these weekly sermon commentaries on the CEP website, we also have a resource page for Lent and Easter with more preaching and worship ideas as well as sample sermons on the Year C Lectionary texts.]

Illustration Idea

I will give credit to my former CEP writing colleague Stan Mast for giving me this idea from a Psalm 99 commentary he wrote some years back.  But many of us recall that in April 2024 parts of the U.S. saw a total eclipse of the sun and in many other parts of the country (including mine) a partial eclipse was on view.  I attended the event on the campus of Calvin University with several hundred students, faculty and staff gathered on the Commons Lawn and we all had the same thing on: eclipse glasses.

Not my best picture ever since I could not see well enough through the glasses to see if my phone was in the right position for this selfie (hence the look of concentration!).   But that was the point of those glasses: they needed to be so dark that the only thing you could see through them was the sun as it went through the phases of being steadily obscured by the moon.   Looking directly at it without the eye wear could seriously damage your eyes.

As Stan Mast noted, we also cannot stare at the glory of God the King in Psalm 99 or the transfigured Christ from the gospels without risk of being undone by the spectacle.  But we can safely see God’s glory through the lens of Jesus Christ or as John put it in the opening of his Gospel, no one had ever seen God so the Son of God came down here and explained God to us.