Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16 Commentary

At first blush Psalm 91 seems an odd choice for the Year C First Sunday in Lent.  After all, Psalm 91 is one of those psalms that makes lavish promises as to the constant well-being and prospering of anyone who makes God their refuge and strength.  If you are on God’s side, God is constantly on your side and you will suffer no harm by day or by night.  The promises of divine protection pile up fast and deep in this psalm (including in the middle section that the Lectionary brackets out for some reason).

But that seems to be a pretty sunny picture for the start of what is supposed to be a penitential and sober season of reflection on our sin and our mortality and how Christ Jesus the Lord suffered and died to give us new life and to forgive us our sins.  But then you realize that Psalm 91 is being paired in the Gospel reading with Luke’s account of Jesus’s temptations in the wilderness.  And of course Psalm 91 comes into play in that story as the second temptation is for Jesus to let himself fall off the precipice of the Temple so as to cash in on the promise in Psalm 91:11-12 that God will not let his faithful one strike his foot upon a stone.

That explains the connection and why Psalm 91 was chosen.  Of course, the ironic thing is that Jesus did no such thing as fling himself into thin air because, as he told the devil, we are not to put the Lord God to a test.  Retrospectively then this alters how we understand Psalm 91 just a little. Yes, of course a person is not supposed to behave recklessly on account of the promises of this poem that God will not let anything bad happen to you.  Although the promises in Psalm 91 are grand in their scope and sweep, we ought not take them quite as literally as the devil tempted Jesus to do up on that Temple roof.

Perhaps that insight on the interpretation front opens up other perspectives here as well.  Because we all know that in this life and in this broken world, even those who do take shelter in the shadow of the Most High God as Psalm 91 recommends do not, automatically and on account of that, get spared the hard knocks of life.  If everything Psalm 91 claims were literally true for every follower of God at every turning of the way, then we would not have all those Psalms of Lament that take up fully a third of the Hebrew Psalter.  The Jesus who assured his disciples that they would have trouble in the world and that they would suffer persecution would not then point to Psalm 91 so as to say to those same disciples, “Well, actually, I forgot about Psalm 91!  So it turns out everything will come up roses for you disciples after all.”  No.

We are forced to deal with this kind of sunny-side-up psalm a lot in the Psalter.  And those of you who follow the sermon commentaries here on the CEP website know by now the somewhat standard way I deal with this type of psalm: namely, I suggest it is a psalm that is true but mostly in the longest possible run but not in the short run all the time.  Because Jesus did resist those temptations in the wilderness, and Jesus did go all the way to the cross, resisting the last temptation of the devil when he inspired those gathered at the cross to say the exact same thing the devil said repeatedly in the wilderness: “If you are the Son of God . . .”  “If you are the Son of God, jump down off that cross.”  In Lent we celebrate and honor the fact that Jesus did not do that.  He did not save himself.  He saved everyone else.

Because of that, the day will come when all of Psalm 91’s grandest promises will indeed all come true for followers of our God in Christ Jesus.  But also because of all that, there is a sense in which the things God says in verses 14-16 can be applied to Jesus himself.  Yes, he did go all the way to the cross and yes, he did die and descended into hell.  But, then along came Easter and everything God promises in the closing words of Psalm 91 are now eternally true for Jesus as the resurrected Son of God.  And because those things are true for him, they are going to be true for all who now have union with Christ by baptism and through the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps, then, Psalm 91 is more of a Lenten psalm than we may think, and not just because of its connection to the second temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.  Something of the very experience of Jesus is captured here and through that this speaks into all of our lives now and forever.  It is not that God never performs the actions portrayed in Psalm 91 already in this life.  God does do that sometimes.  It’s just not always going to be that way for now.  But in the longest run and at the end of the cosmic day, it will all be true.

[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 this year’s Year C Lectionary texts.  So visit our Lent and Easter resource page!]

Illustration Idea

First I will start with less of an illustration and more of a musical meditation on this psalm.  Although this song mostly centers on the part of Psalm 91 that the Lectionary skips, it is a lovely song that captures the main point of Psalm 91 very well.

Second I will borrow from my own Psalm 91 illustration idea from about 6 years ago as follows:

Lewis Smedes once wrote that we should avoid being fake or hypocritical and just admit that deep down what each one of us wants is some enjoyment in life.  Deep down we hope that the day may come when people will stand up and cheer over something we did.  We want the bells to ring and the Hallelujah Chorus to sound for us, too.  Smedes even said that anyone who claims otherwise, anyone who says he could care less about whether or not anything good ever happened to him, such a person is not only being dishonest but is probably a bit of a nasty person.

Our great God created us for joy and one day, as C.S. Lewis predicted, joy itself will be the serious business of heaven.  So as Psalm 91 reminds us, already now we can be confident that our God wants us to feel joy.  God wants us to make him our very home, the place we want to be more than anywhere else.