Psalm 112 2025 Commentary

Depending on where you are “at” these days, it could well be the case that reading Psalm 112 is a little difficult.  Sunny promises tumble over top of one another in these ten short verses.  Lyric descriptions of all the good things that come to righteous and good people stack up like cord wood.  There is not a single cloud in Psalm 112’s sky.  And so it might not be too surprising if after reading each verse in this upbeat psalm a person might be tempted to say under their breath—if not simply out loud—“Yeah, I wish.”

The psalm concludes by claiming that when all the amazing good things described here come to righteous and good people, evil folks will look on the spectacle and find it merely vexing.  They will grit their teeth in frustration over how well off the blessed righteous of the earth are.  Lately, though, it seems that the news of what all is going on in the world results in a mirror opposite scenario: it is the righteous who look on how some really rotten people are thriving and are vexed and frustrated by the spectacle of it all.  It is the righteous who want to adopt for themselves not the uber-hopeful promises of Psalm 112 but more the language of lament from any number of other psalms: “Where are you, O God?!  How long must I look on corruption, O God?”

Maybe there are bad people somewhere who are ticked off at how well good folks in this world are doing but if so, I have not seen any of them lately.  Their frustrations surely are not making the news.  What is making the news?  Cries from starving people in Gaza.  Pleas for peace from those suffering war in Ukraine.  Calls for a justice that never seems to come for oppressed people everywhere.   And so these days not a few Christians really are in what feels like a sustained season of lament.

So what do we do with a psalm that tells such a different story and that paints such an opposite picture of what we all too often can see with our own eyes?  Well, let’s go for the low hanging fruit first of what not to do if preaching on Psalm 112: let’s not pretend that this is just generally how life in this world goes a good deal of the time.  No one would believe us preachers if we did preach it that way.  Or if people did try to embrace such a sunny vision of a world awash in blessing and riches and good things for only the good people of the earth, then that could only be the result of repression of the truth.  For most folks the preacher who claimed Psalm 112 is like a mirror held up to reality would be dismissed as engaging in magical thinking and fantasy.  And the pulpit is not a place for either one of those things.

Earlier this summer the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann passed away at the age of 92.  Recently a former colleague, Amanda Benckhuysen, published a blog on Brueggemann and in particular on one of the signature parts of his theology: Lament.  Benckhuysen points out a key insight that Brueggemann had; viz., that those who refuse to engage in lament often do so at the expense of losing their ability to know how things really should be.  A refusal to lament can end up meaning there is nothing to lament in the first place.  Whatever happens is perhaps somehow what is supposed to happen.

“The importance of lamenting suffering and injustice cannot be overstated for Brueggemann. When lament is stifled or abandoned, questions about injustice are also stifled and deemed inappropriate or disrespectful. In such a situation, it is assumed that whatever injustice or suffering exists is either God’s will or beyond God’s control and so we simply accept the world as it is. We make peace with the presence of evil, adjusting to the injustice and evil in our midst as an acceptable, even normal aspect of our lived reality. For this reason, lament is not optional but imperative for Brueggemann. Naming and calling out injustice and evil is one of the ways we as Christians participate in God’s redemptive work.”

But now perhaps you are wondering what this all has to do with Psalm 112 in that it is decidedly not one of the Psalms of Lament.  Well, let’s take Psalm 112 as a portrait of how things should work in God’s world.  There should be justice.  There should be blessings that accrue to good people.  There should be a celebration of noble acts like taking care of the poor and giving generously to help them.  A la Brueggemann in the quoted material above, let’s not for a moment give up on the vision of Psalm 112.  Let’s not dismiss this as magical thinking or wishful thinking or something too good to ever be true.  If for now Psalm 112 becomes a source of lament at how little this world resembles what is described here, that is OK.  Better to say “Yes, but this is what we are aiming for and we won’t stop until we get there” than to say, “This is so unrealistic we need to chuck and dismiss the whole poem.”

Earlier I wrote that after reading each verse of Psalm 112, we may be tempted cynically to respond, “Yeah, I wish.”  But let us indeed wish for the coming of what is described here.  Let’s keep wishing, not cynically but in hope.

Illustration Idea

In his lyric eulogy to his slain brother Bobby, Ted Kennedy pointed out that his brother Bobby had always been clear-eyed when it came to the harsh truths of a world shot through with injustice.  But his seeing that reality never dislodged for Bobby his vision for a better world.  This was reflected in Ted Kennedy’s extended quotation from a speech Bobby once made in South Africa in the face of that nation’s apartheid discrimination.  But it was the eulogy’s closing words that captured the world’s attention.  “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.  To be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.  Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.  As he said many times in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’  I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’”