Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 Commentary

The Year C Lectionary—like all three Lectionary cycles—gives us two options for this final Sunday in Lent.  We can focus on the Liturgy of the Palms to celebrate Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem or we can make it Passion Sunday / Liturgy of the Passion and focus more on the upcoming crucifixion and death of Jesus at the conclusion of Holy Week.  For this year I am going to focus on Psalm 118 that is part of the Palm Sunday focus.  But if you are preaching on Psalm 31 and the Liturgy of the Passion, you can see the commentary I wrote in 2023 for this Sunday.

As I ponder Psalm 118—or the few snippets of it assigned by the RCL—I am reminded of one of the central dynamics that drove the plot of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.  In Tolkien’s imagined world of Middle Earth, the world is full of striking and very strong figures.  There is the kingdom of men with dashing heroes like Boromir of Gondor, Lord Aragorn, King Theoden of Rohan.  There is the realm of the Elves with powerful figures like Galadriel, Lord Elrond, and the dashing and brave Legolas who figures so prominently in the trilogy.  There are the stout and brave-hearted Dwarves that include the indefatigable Gimli.  There are the powerful wizards like Saruman and Gandalf.  And there are terrifying creatures of great power too like the Orcs or the Uruk Hai.

But in the end, the salvation of Middle Earth, the ones who would deliver Middle Earth from the evil of Lord Sauron and his fierce Ring of Power, were not to be found among any of those groups or the individuals who comprised those races.  The picture below is a classic one from the Peter Jackson films showing “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the nine companions assigned to bring the Ring of Power to the evil land of Mordor to destroy it once and for all because with the destruction of the Ring in the volcanic rivers of Mount Doom would come also the final end of Sauron and his threat to all that was good and right and lovely.

Above we see the future King of Gondor, Aragorn, the Gray Wizard Gandalf, the fleet-footed Elf Legolas, the strong and brave Boromir, the bold and brave Dwarf Gimli.  And then oh yes, four so-called Halflings of the Shire, Hobbits as they are better known.  They are less than half the size of most everyone else.  (At one point in the books and films a man refers to a Hobbit as “one that would appear to you to be only a child.”)   And on the picture above, the shortest of those four is the Hobbit known as Frodo Baggins.  And he, not his more strapping Fellowship companions, would be the one to save the world (with no small amount of help from his best friend Samwise Gamgee).

Our salvation in Christ is like that.  As we enter Holy Week on this final Sunday in Lent, we see an unlikely figure riding an unlikely steed into the Holy City of Jerusalem.  It is Jesus of Nazareth, reputed to have done many signs and wonders but in the end nothing really to look at..  Born in a barn in the backwaters of the powerful Roman Empire and coming from such a second-rate town that even a soon-to-be disciple once sneered “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  And now in what looks like a very poor imitation of the entrance of the Caesar (arriving on a white stallion, a war horse, and prancing along the rolled-out red carpet), this Jesus is sitting awkwardly on a donkey and its little one.  The beast is far too small for a grown man.  There is no red carpet to roll out so the beasts carrying Jesus plod on top of people jackets and coats.  No one is blowing any trumpets so the people cut down palm branches and start waving them in a desperate attempt to make this sad little spectacle look like something more.

Jesus was all along the very portrait of humility and service.  And though he preached intriguing (albeit via the parables at times downright confusing) things and was known to have done amazing things like turning water into wine, opening the eyes of the blind, curing leprosy, even raising those who most certainly were dead, even he was mostly hush-hush about it as time went on.  The last thing Jesus seemed to desire was calling attention to himself.  To the frustration of even his closest companions, instead of talking (as everyone wished he would) of marching to Rome to take on the Caesar, Jesus was known with increasing regularity as his ministry progressed to spouting off predictions of his upcoming suffering and even death.  On one such occasion the disciple Simon Peter pulled Jesus aside to rebuke him and to urge him for heaven’s sake to stop talking in such gloomy terms.

But it was that very quiet and unassuming nature of Jesus that caused the writers of the New Testament to glom on to Psalm 118 and most particularly verses 22-24.  The picture is of some kind of a building project in the ancient world.  At some point a quarryman looks over the stones available to him to build the edifice at hand.  He picks one such stone up, inspects it, and then pitches it off the worksite.  “This one’s no good” he says as the rejected stone thuds onto the ground some ways off.   I remember one time when I was a kid taking a walk along a beach with my Dad.   I found an interesting stone and asked my Dad what kind it was.  “A leaver-right” he replied.  “A leaver-right?” I asked.  “Yes,” Dad said, “as in ‘Leave ‘er right there!’”  So also the rejected stone referred to in Psalm 118:22.

Yet that particular Leaver-Right stone ends up becoming the cornerstone of the whole shebang.  And as has been noted often here in sermon commentaries on the CEP website, something about that verse so well encapsulated the understanding of the apostles as to the central dynamic of our salvation in Jesus of Nazareth that this verse—far and away over much better known and much more deeply loved lines from the Psalms if not from the entire Old Testament—became the single most-oft quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament.   Psalm 118:22 became like the little engine that could  This unlikely stray little verse, like the central image in the verse of the rejected stone, became the key, one of the most exegetically important verses out of all 39 Old Testament books.

In our celebrity age and in a time when the uber-wealthy are snapping up all the headlines and garnering every spotlight in the world—and in a time when too many church leaders seem to aspire to want that same kind of attention and power—we need Psalm 118:22-24.  We need to be reminded of how God got salvation accomplished.   And we need to remember the Jesus who in the Upper Room and after having done the lowliest service there was in washing dirty and smelly feet told us “I have given you an example.”  Now it is up to us as followers of that man on a donkey’s colt who would soon enough be impaled on a wooden cross to follow his example.

Because we cannot proclaim the Gospel of this Savior using the bullhorns or the power tactics society might urge upon us.

[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

Well since we have already visited the world of Middle Earth, we may as well go all in, as they say, and get to the conclusion of the story.  The Hobbit Frodo and his companion Sam do fulfill their mission, they do save the world (along with fellow Hobbits Merri and Pippin).  And near the end of the Peter Jackson films in The Return of the King, we see in the White City of Minis Tirith the grand coronation of Aragorn as King and the arrival of the Elf Arwen who would rule at this side as his wife.  But in a climactic and moving moment as the new King and Queen make the rounds of those who came out for the coronation, they come upon the four Hobbits of the Shire who—as everyone had done for the new King—bow before Gondor’s new Sovereign.  But Aragorn won’t have it, as you can see in the scene you can view here.