Psalm 103:1-8 2025 Commentary

As lyric psalms go, it is tough to beat Psalm 103.  The RCL is having us look at only the first eight of the psalm’s twenty-two verses but we know this poem stays on high notes of beauty and praise throughout.  In a couple of the congregations to which I have belonged the pastors used parts of Psalm 103 as a response of thanksgiving following the Lord’s Supper.  And if having taken the bread and the wine once more you want to thank God with everything you’ve got for the precious gift of Christ Jesus, well, you could not do much better than just to recite Psalm 103.

But, of course, it does not take long to notice that Psalm 103 also makes some firm declarations as to God’s activities that might be a little difficult to square with reality.  Yes, parts of this poem are unassailable.  God is said to forgive all our sins and we believe this has always been true but is now definitively true thanks to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  He is the Lamb of God who has taken away the sin of the world.  All of it.  And at the end of this lection God is described as being full of compassion, slow to anger and abounding in grace and love.

Yet in between the declaration of sins being forgiven and these statements about God’s loving compassion there is a litany of claims that may ultimately be true in the longest possible run and sometimes can be seen as true in the ordinary run of our lives on this broken planet.  But a number of these claims are very simply not always true.  Or they are true here and there, now and again but not universally so all the time for every single person we could think of.  God is said to heal all our diseases.  God is said to always get us out of any pit into which we have fallen (and one assumes these could be literal or metaphorical pits).  God always satisfies us with good things and renews our youth like the eagle’s.  And then God is said to work righteousness and justice for all oppressed people.  All of them.  All of them everywhere.

And just here we might find the words of this lyric poem sticking in our throats a little.  Because there are far too many diseases we see in our loved ones and among the members of any given congregation that do not in fact get healed.  People die of diseases every day.  And this includes people for whose healing we fervently prayed to God.  But it did not come.  Sometimes it does.  But by no means always.  Also, when we look around us in society—and it may not matter what society you are in anywhere in the world—we see that justice is by no means always delivered to victims of racism and oppression.  Worse, as often as not the perpetrators of some of this world’s worse injustices not only seem to get away with it, they flourish.

It takes nothing away from the beauty of Psalm 103 to admit this, to acknowledge this reality.  But then how are we to interpret these words?  How are we to preach on these words to congregations that are full of people who might themselves be suffering right now as victims of injustice and racial profiling and inequities of all kinds as well as people who are well aware of these dim truths about our society and who are heartsick about it all?  To state the merely obvious, we preachers cannot touch on this subject but then come across as turning a blind eye to what is going on.  Doing so might make preaching on parts of Psalm 103 easier—why raise the specter of questions the preacher cannot fully answer after all?  But that of course would be a profoundly dishonest way to preach.

Instead, we take two things head on simultaneously: the lyric beauty of the hope for healing/justice that Psalm 103 points to and the fact that God has most certainly not delivered on this in every instance we could name today.  If we can manage to do that, then perhaps the words that might stick in our throats a bit become a generator instead of hope.  Let’s take this psalm’s words about God’s healing of all diseases and bringing justice for all the oppressed as yet another biblical instance of having God’s very heart opened up before us.  If this is who God is, if Psalm 103 reveals to us yet again no less than the character of Almighty God, then we have the hope that in the longest possible run, this is what will happen.

What’s more, because this is who God is, we as the people of God are right to feel sickened by the rampant injustice we see almost every day.  We are right to recoil at racism, at past spectacles (and their present-day echoes) of something like Jim Crow.  We are right to react against laws and practices that are designed to make life more difficult for people with a certain color of skin.  We are right to feel saddened to see diseases of all kinds, to feel our hearts break when dementia ravages someone we love and leaves them but a shadow of their former selves.  If God recoils at all this because he is the God who wants to heal all diseases and fight all injustice, then we are right to feel this way too.  What’s more, we are right to do all we can to combat sicknesses of all kinds and to thwart the unjust practices of too many of our neighbors and leaders.

Like any number of what I sometimes call sunny-side-up psalms, so also Psalm 103 is more aspirational than an accurate description of how things go in this world where disease and injustice are concerned.  But because that aspiration also reveals to us the heart and the character of God, the disconnect between the broad statements of the psalm and our on-the-ground reality need not make those statements meaningless or so pollyannish as to be unhelpful.  Instead, it tells us both what God ultimately desires and what God will finally accomplish.  And meanwhile we also learn how we are to view this world and how we are to act in it as God’s agents of kingdom renewal already now.

Illustration Idea

In May 2024 I was part of a study tour group that traveled through the American South to ponder the legacy of American slave culture.  The travel course was run by the Telos Group out of Washington D.C. in conjunction with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.  On the final day of the eight-day course we were in Montgomery, Alabama, where Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative have helped to build now three significant memorials to the slave culture and its ongoing effects in the United States.  After a visit to the impressive but sobering Legacy Museum we visited an outdoor memorial to the victims of lynching.  This installation features rows upon rows of large rectangular slabs suspended from above on which are engraved the names of lynching victims by year.  You cannot see such a display without being fiercely saddened by how much injustice has been done to people in history.

Psalm 103 says God works justice for the oppressed.  And in the end we know he will.  In Dr. King’s well-known words, the arc of the universe is long—very long—but it bends toward justice.  We can but pray that the day when this article of our faith is made sight will come and that it will come soon.