Psalm 121 Commentary

The reassurances of Psalm 121 notwithstanding, even most pious Christian parents have a common byword or saying for their children: “Nothing good happens after midnight.”  This is the stuff that curfews are made of.  Behind it is the belief that when the world grows dark, it grows dangerous.  Under the cover of dark, certain things might be tried that would be very unlikely to happen in broad daylight.  So younger children are usually told they absolutely need to be home before dark.  Older teenagers may be allowed to stay out after sunset but not too long after sunset even so.  Best to be back behind the locked door of home at a time when things go bump in the night.

The ancients had many reasons to fear darkness and the overnight hours.  The world back then could be pitch black indeed with no street lights or the glow of distant city lights to brighten things up even a bit.  Torches threw light only just so far ahead of you.  And if it rained, even that source of illumination was finished usually.  Of course, there is the moon most (but not all) nights to light things up.  Ah, but the ancients feared what the moon might do to a person, too.  “Lunacy” is derived from exactly what you think it is: our lunar satellite.  (And if you think that was just so much superstition, talk to an ER doctor or nurse sometime to hear the odd and sometimes bizarre cases that show up at the hospital on nights when the moon is full.)

But whether in the light of the noontime sun or the dark of a moonless night, we all of us have a sense that we need safety, protecting.  For a lot of us “Keep me and our children safe today, Lord” may be as common a prayer as we utter.  Some families have in the past called Psalm 121 a traveler’s psalm and so took care to read it on the eve of a long road trip for a family vacation.  And this is a Song of Ascents and so doubtless was originally associated with pilgrimages, most particularly holy treks to Jerusalem and to the Temple.  But roads could be dangerous places.  When Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the tale of a man being robbed and beaten while on the road would have been plenty familiar to Jesus’s listeners.  Happened all the time.

Thus Psalm 121 asks where we should look for the protection we crave.  As we have noted before in past CEP sermon commentaries, not all translators and interpreters of this fairly familiar psalm agree on how we are to take just the opening verse.  Older translations did not have verse 1 in the form of a question but rather a statement.  “I lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.”  On this reading the help in question is somewhere up there in the hills and it will come from there to you.

But most modern translations pose it has a question.  “I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?”  You could almost read that as “but where does my help come from?”  And here some interpreters claim that the answer for the psalmist is that his hope is not up in the hills.  Because what might people see with their eyes once they get lifted to the high places?  Baal altars.  Asherah poles.  The pagan leavings of Canaanite idolatry.  No, no, there is no help to be found up there.  Instead look higher still to the Lord God of Israel who is not up in the hills but he is the one who created those hills and everything else.

Once we locate the correct and true source for help, then the assurances pile up thick and deep.  This God is forever watching and is on guard.  He doesn’t get sleepy, takes no lunch breaks, is not easily distracted by his Facebook feed.  This God is present.  Close.  Close enough to provide shade when the sun beats down on you.  Close enough to provide . . . well, whatever it is that needs providing to protect you from whatever lunacy could come your way from the full moon.  The Lord God of Israel will protect your comings and goings forever.

This is beautiful poetry.  This is lyric theology.  Pastorally, however, this can be rugged.  Not, obviously, in all those situations (and there are more such good situations than we know of most of the time) when we could allege this happened.  The family road trip vacation we prayed over Psalm 121-style went off without a hitch.  No car problems, everyone was safe on the hikes the family took, no one got sick.  (I remember my Mom used to sum up safe family vacations by saying “As we drove, we didn’t even see any accidents the whole trip!”)  Or there are other journeys: journeys with sickness, with depression, with unemployment.  But sometimes these journeys turn out well too and we see the leading of God’s providential hand protecting us along the way and helping us to arrive at a new and better destination.

And then there are all those other journeys.  The ones that don’t end well.  The ones where someone’s foot did slip, metaphorically if not literally.  I think of my colleague whose daughter’s foot slipped on a mountain somewhere in Europe and fell to her death as a young teenager.  That was not a Psalm 121 vacation.  And all of us who preach and who pastor can pile up such stories like cord wood.  So what then of Psalm 121?

Obviously we avoid the too-easy, almost glib, answers of “God must have had his reasons” and its ilk.  We similarly avoid any thought that the accident happened, the illness took her life because it turns out Psalm 121 lied to us: God does slumber or take breaks or has sabbatical seasons in the providence department.  No, that won’t do either.  Psalm 121 is all true and most of us live off the benefits of those truths all the time.  But when it feels like it’s not true, we can but turn even this back over to God in lament and protest.  This should not have happened and we have to believe God knows that even better than we do.  Why did it happen?  We may never know or we may only know when we arrive in the Father’s kingdom equipped with more abilities to know the deep mysteries of the universe than we can have at present.

One way or another, we lift up our eyes to our God in Christ.  We lift up our eyes to reject false sources of protection.  We lift up our eyes to the truest Source of all good things.  We lift up our eyes in thanksgiving when all that Psalm 121 promises seems to have come true.  We lift up our eyes in protest and sorrow when so little of the psalm seems to have panned out for us.  But this we believe: every time we lift up our eyes, our God in Christ is there.  Always.  Even to the end of the age.

Illustration Idea

Note: A little over eight years ago here at CEP, my former CEP writing colleague Stan Mast had a beautiful sermon illustration idea for Psalm 121.  It’s too good not to use again (and anyway, I couldn’t come up with anything this week and certainly nothing better than this!).  Thanks, Stan.

Here’s another way to think about the Lord’s “watching over.”  In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar Schell is a nine-year-old boy whose father has been killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack in the Twin Towers.  Understandably, Oskar is deeply disturbed by that terrible loss.  So when he finds a key in his father’s closet, hidden in an envelope marked “Black,” he is more than interested.  He sets out to find the lock that the key will open, convinced that it will tell him something important about his dead father.

So, all by himself, at nine years of age, he sets out to visit every “Black” in New York City.  Consulting his telephone book and a map of the city, he goes out to meet total strangers in search of that lock.  As we read the book, we are worried for him, wondering how he can do such a thing all alone.  And we wonder with more than a little disgust where on earth his mother is in the whole thing.

Finally, by a convoluted set of circumstances Oskar learns that it wasn’t his father’s key after all.  It was simply a key hidden in a vase that Oskar’s father had bought at a rummage sale.  Angry that his search was in vain, Oskar destroys everything associated with his search.  But that’s when he discovered that his mother knew about his activities all the time.  In fact, she had contacted everyone in New York with the name Black, telling them what Oskar was doing.  All of them knew ahead of time that he was coming and, thus, gave him generally friendly receptions.

She gave him the freedom to conduct his search alone, but she was watching over him all along by going ahead of him and setting up his appointments.  Oskar had to go alone to accomplish his mission, but she prepared the way so he was safe.