Psalm 84:1-7 Commentary

Psalm 84 is a lovely poem and song and at just a dozen verses, it’s a fairly short song at that.  So why the RCL would have us take up only the first seven verses is a mystery to me.  Aside from a passing reference to “the wicked,” verses 8-12 simply continue the radiant imagery of the first seven verses.  So it’s up to you as a preacher but I would take up this entire psalm and I will comment on it as such here.

This is clearly a pilgrimage song, a Song of Ascent for those journeying to Jerusalem and to the Temple for some religious feast or another.  As a way to perhaps encourage the pilgrims and to goad them on to complete the journey, the psalmist rejoices in the loveliness of God’s divine Temple, and for a people taking a long trip on foot, that might be another way of as good as saying, “And that is what we’re going to get to see at the end of our pilgrimage!  So let’s keep it going, people!  This is going to be great!”

The psalmist talks about how they are yearning and fainting to see that loveliness, and that was surely a feeling the pilgrims were all feeling.  Yearning for sure but literal fainting might not have been too distant of a possibility either!  These pilgrimages in the Ancient Near East were surely a bit on the arduous side.  And that may be why a bit later in verses 5-7 God is invoked literally to give his traveling people strength.  Even when they pass through the toughest of stretches, God will be with them, God will strengthen them, God will help them to see the journey through to the end.

But then there is also that curious excursus about the sparrows and other birds who made their nests in the eaves of the Temple.  And it is almost as though the psalmist is saying, “You lucky birds, you!  Day and night you get to be that close to the altar, to the place where no less than Yahweh, the One true God of Israel, dwells, seated on the Mercy Seat on the Ark of the Covenant!”  Later in a burst of further enthusiasm the psalmist will say that even a single day in God’s courts would be better than one thousand days anywhere else that you could name (and most assuredly is far superior to dwelling among wicked people who have no regard for God).  Even being a mere doorkeeper or custodian in the Temple is much to be preferred to any other job in the world.

To state the merely obvious, this psalmist is one adoring fan of God’s Temple!  If some of the language of Psalm 84 seems to press into the territory of hyperbole, you rather suspect that just this is the point.  You cannot, in fact, overstate how important and beautiful and lyric and moving this all is for this psalmist and for the psalmist’s fellow pilgrims.

Of course, another aspect of this psalm is that, like many others in the Hebrew Psalter, this song makes some pretty grand and sweeping promises.  At the very end of the psalm is the claim that some people have a way of life—a walk—that is “blameless.”  And we read that with a bit of skepticism since other psalms and most all other parts of the Bible assert the more common sense claim that no one is truly blameless.   All have sinned, other Scripture passages declare, and there is no exception (until you get to Jesus anyway).  What’s more, a whole panoply of blessings is promised to all those who seek God.  “They will go from strength to strength.”  All in all, a very sunny portrait of how life goes.

Or at least perhaps how life should go.  For surely not every pilgrim’s journey was that trouble free.  Not every person who needs strength gets it, even when God is directly petitioned for it.  As always, we need to remind ourselves that nearly a third of the psalms lament and protest the fact that this does not always happen, even for those whose walk is, if not blameless exactly, pretty righteous and sincere.  So in this sense we take Psalm 84 as aspirational and something that will be true in the longest possible run even if for seasons of life for now it is not so evidently the case.

Perhaps for Christians today reading this psalm—and some really good hymns and songs have been based on Psalm 84 and so we also enjoy singing this psalm—we might wonder just what to do with such rhapsodic sentiments about a building that ceased to exist a long time ago.  And probably few of us feel quite this rapturous when we enter our church buildings on the average Sunday morning.  Given that Israel believed that the Temple in Jerusalem was the only place on earth where God had a unique dwelling, we also know we don’t claim that about any given church location today.  The ubiquity of God by God’s Holy Spirit means we cannot quite summon up in ourselves the singular enthusiasm that psalmist had for the Temple.  Certainly we cannot summon it up for our own physical church buildings, no matter how much we might like our own church facility.

But perhaps we can get closer to this level of joy when we remember that the New Testament revealed—in especially John’s Gospel but really everywhere—that Jesus is the one true and final Temple.  Even after Herod’s Temple got destroyed around 70 A.D., John was able to compose a Gospel to tell people, “Don’t worry about the absence of that physical edifice.  The true Temple is Jesus.”

So what if we read Psalm 84 through this Gospel lens.  Can we conceive of having the kind of joy in approaching our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus as the psalmist had for Solomon’s Temple?  Could we in that case be able to say that one day spent with Jesus is better than a thousand days anywhere else?  Can the prospect of in any sense seeing Jesus—much less that day when we are promised we will see Jesus face to face—generate the kind of joyful super wattage we see in this poem?  To all of those questions we can hopefully say a vigorous and joyful “Yes!”

Illustration Idea

This sermon commentary just suggested that if we can see Jesus as the truest fulfillment of everything the Temple of old stood for and meant, then perhaps we will find it easier as Christians to see ourselves in the exuberant picture painted by Psalm 84 as Israelite pilgrims approached the Temple.  This in turn reminds me of a song I can remember singing as far back as I have memories of being in church.  It captures in the Christian frame what Psalm 84 wants to say too.

My Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine;
for thee all the follies of sin I resign;
my gracious Redeemer, my Savior art thou;
if ever I loved thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

In mansions of glory and endless delight,
I’ll ever adore thee in heaven so bright;
I’ll sing with the glittering crown on my brow:
If ever I loved thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.