Psalm 23 Commentary

Not even an hour before I sat down to begin working on this sermon commentary on Psalm 23, one of my students preached an in-class sermon on Jesus’s Parable of the Lost Sheep from Luke 15.  She reminded us in the course of the sermon that there are connections between that parable and the I Am saying in John 10 where Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd.  And of course both of those passages and any number of other pastoral images in the New Testament all hark back to Psalm 23.

The Bible in both of its Testaments for some reason likes comparing people to lambs and to sheep.  No doubt it stems from the culture in the Old Testament in particular where sheepherding was common and, of course, Israel’s most famous king, David, had himself grown up tending to his father’s flocks.  Many of the prophets in the Old Testament compared the leaders of Israel to shepherds of God’s people Israel, most famously in Ezekiel 34 where the prophet indicts the leaders of Israel as downright lousy shepherds of God’s sheep and how God himself would ultimately step in to become the better Shepherd these other leaders proved incapable of being.  Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of that prophecy as he demonstrated in Luke 15 when he showed the joyless Pharisees the true joy of heaven when one single lost sheep gets found.

Psalm 23 is definitely a frequent flyer as texts go across the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary.  Combine that with its familiarity to many people and sooner or later preachers wonder if there is a fresh word from the Lord (or anyone else!) when it comes to tackling the 23^rd psalm.  But perhaps what is less needed is a fresh word and just fresh reminders of the lyric truths that undergird this song.

We can note first, however, something that has no doubt been observed before here on the CEP website on this particular poem: the utter realism of Psalm 23.  Yes, we begin with a no-holds-barred picture of protective bliss.  If the Lord God of Israel is your Shepherd, you won’t lack for a thing.  It’s all green pastures and quiet waters every day.

Except then there is even so an acknowledgment that sunny pastures and sparkling waters are not the whole story apparently.  Now and again one has to pass through dark valleys.  There are shadowy places.  There are places rife with the very chill of death itself.  Yes, this divine Shepherd sticks with us in those places too.  Whether his shepherd’s crook is always visible in the dim light, it’s there, you can feel it, it pokes at your side to keep you from falling off a cliff or something like a kind of holy guardrail.

That is good and comforting.  But then another shadow falls across the poem’s page when the reality of certain “enemies” is mentioned.  Yes, they function in Psalm 23 mainly as a foil for the rich banquet God prepares for his people in the presence of those foes but there is no getting around the fact that this is the psalm’s acknowledgment that such people do exist.  Redolent of hope and joy and comfort as Psalm 23 is, it is by no means in the business of hiding from our sight dark, shadowy places of death or the unhappy but undeniable fact that there are those in life who count as our opponents for whatever the reason.

As I noted in a sermon I wrote many years ago (some elements of which no doubt exist on this website now too), I first learned this psalm in Kindergarten back in 1969.  I can still see it written out on the wall above Mrs. Luyk’s chalkboards.  I am sure we all innocently recited this in our wee 5-year-old voices, though probably none of us had as yet actually ever walked through any dark valley full of death’s shadow nor did we as far as we knew have any identifiable enemies in our little worlds.  We mouthed the words and knew we were to take comfort in Jesus as a result of knowing Psalm 23 but its more robust nods to reality flew clean past us I am sure.

But it’s very different for most of the people to whom we preach week in and week out in today’s church.  We live in a frightening world.  We live in a dark world of war and carnage and death.  We live in a fractured and fractious world where political and theological disagreements split apart families, congregations, friendships.  If the COVID pandemic and its aftermath revealed nothing else, it was the fragility of some of the bonds we took for granted as the glue that held us together with fellow church members or family members or friends.  It did not take a lot for some of that glue to melt away and not a few of us walked away deeply disoriented and disillusioned.

We may not know a lot by way of firsthand experience about sheep or shepherds.  What we know keenly and acutely, however, is the need for Someone to guide us through this dark world and its many perils.  We need someone to guide us onto right paths indeed and to remind us of the love and the grace that holds us still even if we sense we are being watched with suspicion by our “enemies” around us.  Years ago I titled my Psalm 23 sermon “Everybody Needs a Shepherd.”  It feels more sure than ever that this is indeed so very true.

Illustration Idea

Though all of six verses in length, Psalm 23 covers some territory.  We begin in what feels like the wide open spaces of the natural world, of God’s Creation.  We are outdoors.  We are in green pastures near some pretty bodies of water.  Soon enough we shift to a darkened valley, however.  But once we get to the other side of that dim place, we arrive in some kind of banquet hall.  A feast is prepared, wine is served to overflowing.  And then we end the psalm in “the house of the Lord,” which may be a reference to the Temple.

Psalm 23 is sufficiently well known that we may march right on through these half-dozen stanzas and not bat an eye at how much the settings change.  But perhaps it is all not quite so radical a change in surroundings as we may think.  There is in the Old Testament a real unity to worshiping God in the Temple and being aware of the natural world as well as to see the Temple as a place pointing forward to the ultimate feasts with God promised by prophets like Isaiah.  The very architecture of the Temple was meant to be reminiscent of the Garden of Eden and the wider created world, replete with carvings of palm trees, depictions of fruit, a representation of the ocean and of seas.  What’s more, in the prophets in particular there is such a tight linkage between salvation and the restoration of the created order that Larry Rasmussen once observed you can scarcely tell redemption apart from good highlands agriculture.

It is all wrapped up together in Scripture.  This is why some people regret that some contemporary worship spaces are devoid of windows that allow in natural sunlight or that enable one to glimpse clouds and trees during worship.  Instead some such spaces center on artificial lighting, fog machines, and laser lights and if all of that lends an otherworldly sense to our faith and salvation, well, just that might be a problem worth pondering.