Psalm 17:1-9 Commentary

If you bring last week’s psalm lection of Psalm 32 and place it next to Psalm 17, you find a curious contrast.  In Psalm 32 the psalmist wrestles with unconfessed sin and how his not confessing it led to no small measure of torment for his spirit but even for his body.  Finally he does confess it and God overwhelms him with a tidal wave of cleansing and forgiving grace.  God then speaks in Psalm 32 to warn people to heed his instructions and not be like a horse or donkey that cannot stay on a level path without a bridle in its mouth.  God is then praised as the One to whom we can always go for forgiveness because, goodness knows, we all need that on a regular basis.

But now we get to Psalm 17 and the picture is quite different.  This poet claims to be almost sinless.  He is not deceitful.  He has not imitated the ways of wicked people.  God can probe his heart all God wants and he won’t find evil, he won’t find the ways of the violent in this world.  Whereas Psalm 32 warns us to stay on God’s righteous pathways, Psalm 17 claims that the poet here has never so much as strayed from those paths.  He’s dead center walking down Righteousness Lane.  And so for all these reasons when the psalmist cries out to God for deliverance from some unspecified enemies, God is all-but obligated to come through because, well, just look at this psalmist’s spiritual ledger: everything is in order.

The RCL once again has us stop short of the final section of Psalm 17 where the wicked are described in poignant terms as being callous and arrogant.  God is then summoned to thrash that wicked lot of folks and to let their own wickedness become like a poisonous food filling their bellies and the bellies of their children and maybe even their grandchildren.  You can see why perhaps the Lectionary folks would just as soon not have us reading such sentiments.  Even if we do wish to see some people getting their due comeuppance, we ought not be smacking our lips over the prospect of that.  It’s tragic.  But perhaps we can read the final verses of Psalm 17 without taking delight in it but noting that at some point the cosmic books need to balance out with justice coming for all.

Psalm 17 is one of multiple examples in the Hebrew Psalter where it’s a little hard to know how to take the psalmist’s claims of innocence.  Psalm 32 last week sounded more notes of realism.  We all sin.  We all need forgiveness.  We all need God alone to instructs us and by God’s Spirit keep us on the paths God would have us walk upon.  We sinful humans cannot do any of that all by ourselves or on our own strength and initiative.

Are we to read such claims to moral goodness as a kind of “all things being equal” set of claims?  That is, seeing as some wicked and rotten folks are threatening the psalmist on some levels, is the psalmist saying, “Look at them, O God!  Compared to all of that evil, I look pretty good, don’t I, O Lord?”  If we read it this way, it’s sort of like saying “I know I’m not perfect but I am a whole lot closer to your heart than those folks could ever be!”

But Psalm 17 doesn’t quite read like that.  At best such a contrast is in the background.  Taken head on, the psalmist’s claims to having no deceit anywhere within him looks like something he is claiming to be true whether or not you compare him with his nasty enemies.  Ironically, in our New Testament setting all of us who have been baptized into Christ and who have thereby gained union with Christ can rightly claim that now Jesus’s righteousness is our own.  God has taken the unending wealth of Christ’s goodness and righteousness and transferred the lot of it into our spiritual bank accounts.

Even so, however, few of us have ever gone to God to say that God simply must answer our prayers because we are as righteous now as Jesus and so God just has to come through for us whatever our request might be.  Doing that feels, to many of us at least, presumptuous.  And anyway, queue Psalm 32 again and we know that despite our having the righteousness of Jesus credited to us, we still mess up as we live in the already and the not yet of God’s kingdom and so we could even feel a bit deceptive if we hide behind Jesus’s righteousness so as to hide that rotten thing we did yesterday.

In the end it is a bit of a mystery to know what to make of the kinds of claims we find in Psalm 17 and elsewhere in Scripture.  But perhaps what we can agree on is that if we ask God to be on our side particularly in the face of unscrupulous and nasty people who oppress us and vex us in multiple ways, God does hear us.  God is on the side of justice.  God is on our side because in Christ Jesus he promised to be so.  If we are uncomfortable or would feel dishonest to ask God to act on our behalf based on how good we are—even if we did make it a “compared to them I’m good” sort of claim—we do know that in the end God is on the side of the just.  In that there is hope.

Yes, sometimes God seems slow to act, and this is sometimes reflected in Scripture too.  “How long, O Lord?” is a fairly common sentiment.  Prayers such as we find in Psalm 17 are not always answered swiftly and sometimes when we look around us in this world one could wonder whether God is listening at all in that the wicked keep getting away with it.  Near the end of Psalm 17 the psalmist characterizes evil people as those “whose reward is in this life.”  Alas, sometimes those rewards stack up nicely for such people.  They’re doing just fine and even if we remind ourselves “They can’t take it with them,” it can still be properly galling to observe.

So perhaps we can let Psalm 17 remind us that when we cry for mercy, deliverance, and ultimately for justice, God hears.  God will act.  Knowing this may not always smooth back our feathers when they get ruffled by seeing the unjust prosper but it does give us hope.  And hope is never a bad thing.

Note: There is a collection of Advent & Christmas resources including sample sermons,  songs, prayers and other worship resources on the CEP Year A Advent  page.

Illustration Idea

Enemies.  Foes.  Oppressors.  Talk of such people are all over the place in the Psalms.  It even occurs smack dab in the middle of the most famous poem of them all, Psalm 23.  “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”  Mostly when such groups of people are mentioned, the prayer is for them to be crushed, destroyed, slain.  Psalm 17 near the end even asks God to brandish his divine sword to take care of these people.

Talk of having enemies seems less common today.  Or sometimes if we do hear such talk, we find it offensive as it sometimes means that some aspect or another of the wider culture wars has found its way into various pulpits and the enemies in question all turn out to be members of the opposing political party.  And that feels out of place in preaching to many of us (hopefully to most of us).  Then there is that other serious wrinkle: Jesus overtly called on us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  One wonders what the various psalmists who penned sentiments such as we find in Psalm 17 would have made of Jesus’s commandment.

But because of that, Christians today should be at best hesitant to adopt wholesale the language of wishing to see our enemies dead and buried.  That too clearly cuts against the grain of who Jesus was, what he said, what he did (and did not do).  Still, is it possible to love and forgive enemies and pray for the coming of justice?  Although a tricky combination to get right, it does seem possible.

Sometimes we witness moving scenes in courtrooms where the family of a murder victim forgives the newly convicted murderer.  Recently in the U.S. the wife of Charlie Kirk publicly forgave his killer.  That is the kind of moment that transcends partisanship.  It is stunning when you see it.  It is the way of Christ.  However, when that happens in a courtroom, the judge does not then say to the convicted person, “Well then, in the light of this new development, you are free to go.”  No, it does not quite work that way.  Forgiveness and the doling out of justice can co-exist.

Again, spiritually this is a difficult balance to strike.  But Christ Jesus calls us to do our best to strike it and far better to do this than merely adopt sentiments such as we find in Psalm 17 as being “biblical” when we know that in the context of all of the Bible now, the words of Jesus are deeply biblical and redolent of the Gospel too.