Psalm 126 Commentary

The first half of this short psalm does not seem to fit the Season of Lent very well.  This begins as a psalm of rejoicing and praise, remembering the time the exiles returned from Babylon.  Those verses paint an almost delirious picture of happiness, laughter, and people feeling as if their dreams had at long last come true.  Not a very Lenten set of emotions.

But then comes the second half and this part does seem to fit Lent.  The sentiments shift to reflect those who still need some key restoration.  People are pictured as going out and sowing seeds with tears, as going out weeping along the way.  There remains here the hope that they will return in joy one day, carrying the sheaves of a bountiful harvest with them.  But this latter half of Psalm 126 definitely feels more Lenten in tone.

So then the question becomes not which part of Psalm 126 seems to fit Lent better but rather how do these two quite different halves fit together in a single poem?  The delirium of verses 1-3 seems rather washed out by the somberness of verses 4-6.  How, then, can we meaningfully understand this psalm as some kind of a unified whole?

Perhaps we could make one attempt at such understanding if we saw this as a reflection of what in theology we often refer to as “the already and the not yet.”  Typically this is a phrase that someone invented to describe the time between Christ’s first advent and his second coming again in glory at the end of history.  The theologian Oscar Cullman famously made the analogy of D-Day in World War II.  Once the invasion of Normandy was successful and the Allied Forces began to take back Europe from the Nazis, the end of that terrible war was as good-as assured.  But the war would continue for over another year.  It would take 11 months after D-Day on June 6, 1944, for Germany to fall in May 1945 and another three months after that before Japan surrendered in the Pacific after the dropping of two atomic bombs.

D-Day meant the end was at hand, was certain.  But before the real end could come, the Battle of the Bulge would be horrible not to mention the suffering and death in Japan from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  So also, Cullman said, after Easter and Christ’s Ascension into heaven, the victory of the kingdom of God is assured.  It’s a done deal.  The kingdom of God really is, as John the Baptist said first followed by his cousin Jesus, “at hand.”  But it is not fully realized.  And in this long interregnum period, there remain many challenges, much suffering and even death.  The delirium of Easter is wonderful to celebrate each year but sometimes that celebration is followed by once more going out into this world in tears and weeping as we go along our way.

Maybe Psalm 126 reminds us of this with its portrait of on the one hand a restoration that brought giddy joy but on the other hand the acknowledgement that not everything had as yet come up roses for Israel.  The road ahead would be long at best and frequently difficult to the point of shedding lots of tears.  But if this psalm really can remind us of our current “already and not yet” situation as people who really do dwell “in Christ” but who are also still very much dwell in the world, then Psalm 126 can remind us of another important truth too.  And this is the truth that we see in verses 4-6: when the difficulty of our situation becomes plain and clear, the only place we can go with our prayers and our pleas is the same God who brought us as much hope and restoration as we have already experienced.

The faithful God who has brought us this far is the God who will one day bring us to the conclusion of it all as well.  But unlike the Israelites of old, when we look to God now we something more, something wonderous, something itself that is redolent of so much hope.  What we see can be summed up in these words from Hebrews 12, “And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”

In other words, when we turn to our Lord to plea for help, we see once again the crucified Savior.  The pioneer and perfecter of our faith bears on his very body the signs that he knows what we are going through intimately and from deep within himself.  There is more than a little comfort to be drawn from the fact of Jesus’s suffering and death.  Jesus is the very knowing Savior.  That as much as anything else about him is what looking to him during our own “already and not yet” challenges makes Jesus the perfect One to whom to direct our prayers and our cries and our laments.

And that, in turn, makes Psalm 126 a deeply Lenten psalm after all.

[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

Whatever the precise restoration that is being envisioned here in Psalm 126, it is clearly presented as a kind of dream come true.  How often haven’t we seen it in films or in novels and in our own lives that when something beautiful happens—especially if there had been prior circumstances that made this wonderful thing seem unlikely ever to happen—somebody grins from ear to ear even as he or she says, “Wait, am I dreaming?  Is this really happening?  Can this be true?”

It reminds me of an iconic photo many of us have seen before of a family welcoming home their husband/father after he had been a POW for a long time in Vietnam.  If you look closely at the picture below, you will notice that the elder daughter’s feet are quite literally not touching the ground as this picture was snapped.  They never thought this day would come.  And then it did.

“We were like people living in a dream” the psalmist writes.  “Our mouths were filled with laughter.”  Some things are so unexpected and yet so good they quite literally seem, as we say, “too good to be true.”