Psalm 146 Commentary

Psalm 146:9 directly names that famous triplet found throughout the Bible but most especially in the Old Testament: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.  If you read God’s Law and the various statutes God put into place for his people Israel (especially in Leviticus but elsewhere as well), you will see again and again God’s keen concern for this triplet of vulnerable people.  They are called the anawim, the people who too easily get shoved to the margins of society and who can also be too easily actively exploited or too easily passively ignored.

One of the few biblical characters who pretty much ticked all three anawim boxes was Ruth.  She becomes widowed, she is effectively an orphan, and once she moves to Israel with her mother-in-law Naomi, she is also the immigrant stranger.  To put it mildly, Ruth’s situation was precarious on most every level.  Thankfully Boaz upholds God’s Law, including the gleaner laws that required farmers to purposely leave some grain behind in the fields for the poor to come and collect.  Boaz upholds God’s Law by incarnating in his own being God’s ardent concern for widows, orphans, and strangers.  And it saves Ruth.  She even becomes a great-great- . . . . great-grandmother to no less than Jesus of Nazareth.  (Keeping God’s Law faithfully does not always lead to something quite that spectacular but it is always the right thing to do and good will come of it.)

But, of course, in Psalm 146 God’s being the champion for the downtrodden is held up as yet another among the many reasons this psalm details as to why God deserves ardent praises forever and ever.  Yes, God is majestic and faithful.  Yes, God is the Creator of the heavens and the earth and everything in between.  But praise redounds to God’s Name also because he is mindful to care for the anawim even as we know that very often God does that caregiving through people who respect God’s character and follow in God’s prescribed ways for his people to behave.  In fact, it could be contended that when we human beings made in the image of God care for the vulnerable, those acts are themselves acts of praise.  We can praise God with our mouths and through our songs.  But God is honored and praised through also the faithful work of God’s people.

As Christians who preach on this Jewish psalm, we cannot miss how closely verses 5-9 mirror a passage like we find in Isaiah 61, whose words were the ones read by Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4 and that Jesus then went on to claim as being fulfilled in him.  Psalm 146 is like a roadmap for the ministry of Jesus.  And when you connect what Jesus did in his ministry to what Jesus lauds in people in Matthew 25 through the imagery of the sheep and the goats, then we realize that Psalm 146 is our roadmap for discipleship as well.   Mostly we don’t think about that when we use Psalm 146 in worship or when we sing songs that have been based on the 146^th psalm.  Mostly we treat this poem as what it is: an act of praise and a call for ongoing praise.

Yet we cannot sing these words without also recognizing the need to live them out in our lives in imitation of the God who sees the oppressed and upholds their cause.  The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff once noted that worship in the absence of justice nauseates God.  He based that statement on the many images in the Old Testament prophets in which God is said to be sickened by sacrifices offered up at the Temple on the Sabbath by people who spend the rest of their weeks grinding the poor in their midst down to a fine powder.  So to pray or sing Psalm 146 without a commitment to justice and upholding the cause of the anawim would indeed be the kind of hollow worship God is said to detest.

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Old Testament and Psalms scholar John Goldingay.  In one of his books on the Psalms, Goldingay notes that although we may profitably use individual psalms for private devotions or as giving us the language we need for our private prayers to God, really the most robust use of the Psalms takes place in the context of the worshiping community.  The Psalms need to give voice to what the entire communion of the saints believes but at the same time what the Psalms tell us needs to be the posture of the wider community in ministry to the world.

In the case of Psalm 146, then, we collectively praise the Lord for all God is worth, for all God has done, and for all that God stands for.  In so doing, however, the community must also be shaped by these words and receive them as the posture they need to assume over against a needy and hurting world.  Worship that uses Psalm 146 further forms in us the heart of our God in Christ and in this case particularly that part of God’s heart that has a soft spot for the downtrodden, the exploited, the marginalized, and the overlooked.  Indeed, the New Testament gives us an advance on all this when, pace Matthew 25 as mentioned above, we discover that when we care for the needy, it is as though we are doing this to Jesus himself.

So yes, with Psalm 146 we do indeed cry out, “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!”  But once we leave the worshipping moment to return to the world, we also look for that Lord in each person we encounter, and never more so than when faced with the last, least, lost, and lonely of the earth.

Illustration Idea

The following is a quote from a Theology Today April 1991 article by Nicholas Wolterstorff:

“Liturgy in the absence of justice does not please God; it nauseates God.  Liturgy gives voice to life, to lives of faith.  In our lives we seek to obey God; in the liturgy we praise the one whom we seek to obey and we confess our failures.  It follows that if our lives are not committed to God, then going through the motions of liturgy constitutes a malformation so serious, it angers God.”