Psalm 63:1-8 Commentary

Even in the middle of the Season of Lent, the Lectionary would just as soon as have us turn a blind eye to anything having to do with punishments for sin and evil.  That has to be why they lop off the final few verses of Psalm 63.  True, there may be some due hesitation over celebrating what could be perceived as the psalmist’s glee at the notion of his enemies becoming food for jackals.  But the overall idea that sin and evildoers need to be dealt with—as well as the closing line that one fine day the mouths of liars will finally be shut—ought not cause an allergic reaction among us, most especially during a season that meditates on all that Christ Jesus the Lord had to suffer to atone for sin and evil.

What’s more, it seems fairly clear that the first 8 verses that lift up the poet’s confidence in God, his delight in the presence of God in his sanctuary, his taking cover under the shadow of God’s wings (lovely image) is prelude to the final verses that detail why all of this is such a good and comforting thing.  There are real enemies out there.  There are bad people who seek to do harm to good and righteous people.  It is precisely from these folks that the psalmist seeks the protection of those divine wings.  The more lyric parts of Psalm 63 and its lifting up of how good it is to know and to take refuge in God do not exist in a vacuum.  The closing verses give us the all-important context for what causes the psalmist to sing out the words he does in verses 1-8.

Yet all of this puts us in a curious space of reflection and wondering.  What are we as Christians to make of those parts of the Hebrew Psalter that appear to evince a bit of lip-smacking at the prospect of the wicked getting their due comeuppance or, worse, the more imprecatory moments in certain psalms that actively ask God to slay the wicked, break off the teeth in their mouths, turn them into a kind of ruin?  We follow the Prince of Peace after all.  We follow the One who early in his Sermon on the Mount told us to pray for those who persecute us, to forgive those who wrong us, to supply also our shirt to the one who sued us for our coat.  One could scarcely arrive at anything more the opposite of some of the psalms than all that material from Jesus himself.

I come from a tradition that has a long history of singing the Psalms.  In particular we Reformed folks of a more Calvinist stripe sang a lot of the Genevan settings of the 150 psalms.  For a long while in our history we believed we could sing only the psalms and were suspicious of hymns whose lyrics were not lifted straight from the Bible the way the musical settings of the Psalms were.  Despite this, however, a pastor who was my long-time predecessor at a congregation I served had as a rule for himself that he would not select any of the musical versions of the imprecatory psalms for worship services.  He found doing so to be ill-befitting those of us who follow the Prince of Peace who said the words we just reviewed from the Sermon on the Mount.

This raises a small cloud of issues no doubt.  But might there be within such a line of reasoning a way to handle those psalms that celebrate the punishment of the wicked and even directly call for God to rough up such folks?  Can we say that prior to the coming of the Messiah, calling on God to deal with sin, evil, and evildoers served a certain function stemming from the proper desire to see justice done?  In other words, in the run-up to the final revelation of God’s Christ, perhaps such sentiments as expressed in some psalms served as a kind of cosmic placeholder until God could definitively deal with sin and evil once and for all through the sacrifice of God’s own Son.  But if this were to be the case, then that means that following the incarnation of the Son and his suffering and death in which all the punishment for sin fell upon his shoulders on the cross, subsequent believers have perhaps no business reverting to language from the prior era.

Perhaps.  Certainly one would hope that something along these lines provides a way to address things like Christian Nationalism or any idea that the church today still needs to be in the business of using force or violence to achieve some ostensible Christian goals.  But even far short of such an extreme the musings above call for caution for each one of us in terms of how we speak and how we pray.

Does this mean we cannot hope and pray for the final coming of justice?  No, we must yearn for this.  In the same Sermon on the Mount where Jesus said what he did about enemies and those who persecute us, he also taught us a prayer that includes the petition, “Deliver us from evil.”  But notice two things about even that petition: First, it comes soon after the all-important petition “Forgive us our sins AS we forgive those who sin against us.”  Thus our primary posture is to seek forgiveness for those around us who may do us harm or wish us harm.  Second, in that petition we are asking our Father to deliver us from evil not for our Father to empower us to take care of these matters by taking them into our own hands.

If we can keep all of this in mind and take all of this to heart on a regular basis—and this may be no easy task these days—then that is the settled context of repose in which we can appropriate for ourselves the lovely sentiments here of resting in God alone and under the shadow of God’s wings.  Yes, we still ask God to deliver us from evil even if we now need to refrain from some of the more extreme pre-Christ rhetoric in certain psalms.  But one reason we can take refuge in God alone and have the hope that he will feed us with the richest of fare as expressed in the early part of Psalm 63 is our confident faith that in Christ Jesus the Lord, God has made his decisive move to make all things right and to make all things new.

In this Lenten Season of our lives, perhaps this is our fondest and most comforting hope.

[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

Fairly recently in a Psalm Sermon Commentary here on CEP I harked back to a famous scene from the first of the Lord of the Rings films by director Peter Jackson and based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s much loved books.  The Hobbit Frodo has been tasked to take the evil Ring of Power back to the Land of Mordor in order to destroy the Ring in the volcanic fires from which it had been originally forged.  The Ring came to Frodo via his Uncle Bilbo who had managed to take the Ring from the creature Gollum years earlier.  But consumed by the Ring’s evil as Gollum was, he secretly pursued the Fellowship of the Ring, the group led by the wizard Gandalf who were helping Frodo in his quest.  As the Fellowship goes through a series of underground caves as part of the journey, at one point Frodo spies some creature who appeared to be following them.  Frodo reports this to Gandalf who confirms he knows that it’s Gollum.

This lead Frodo to say “It’s a pity Bilbo did not kill Gollum when he had the chance.”  “Pity?” Gandalf replies.  “It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand.”  He then goes on to reveal that in his heart he believes Gollum may have a key role to play.  “The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many” Gandalf finally says.  (And spoiler alert: Gandalf is proven right.  When at the end of it all the evil of the Ring so infects Frodo that he cannot bring himself to cast the Ring into the fire to destroy it, Gollum gets the Ring by biting off Frodo’s ring finger.  But having finally gotten the Ring back, Gollum then loses his balance and falls, Ring and all, into the fires that destroyed them both.)

It is not easy to feel pity for sinful or rotten people.  It is not easy to forgive those who persecute us as Jesus says we must.  But somehow—perhaps not usually in ways as easy to see as in the example above—feeling the pity that can lead to forgiveness may at the end of the cosmic day help us to arrive at the Shalom for which God created us.