Psalm 16 Commentary

What if we took the middle section of Psalm 16 and grafted it over the story of Jesus from the Gospels?  If we did that, what would we see and notice?  Consider the following:

⁵ Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.

Can we read these words and not recall a certain prayer Jesus uttered three times in soul-wrenching agony.  “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.  Father, if it is not possible for this cup to pass from me unless I drink it, your will be done.”  The Lord God may have been Jesus’s portion and cup but it was a bitter and horrible cup and for that time at least in that garden on that night, Jesus might have testified that his lot was anything but “secure.”

⁶ The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.

For Jesus, the boundary lines of his life were challenging almost from the get-go.  First there was the need to become incarnate as a frail human being.  Then even as an infant he had to be whisked to Egypt lest a bloodthirsty King Herod slaughter him.  And once he launched his public ministry, nobody understood him.  His own family came by to collect him one day, to whisk him home and sequester him because, as they themselves said, “He is out of his mind.”  Think of that: they found Jesus to be a public embarrassment.  That had to hurt him.  And when he was not being misunderstood, he was being rejected, called a blasphemer, a glutton and a wine-bibber, and just possibly in cahoots with no less than the devil Beelzebub.  All in all, these were not pleasant places.

⁷ I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;
even at night my heart instructs me.
⁸ I keep my eyes always on the Lord.
With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Surely in his life Jesus felt the presence of his Father in heaven.  He taught his disciples how to pray to this Father.  He constantly said that everything he did was because the Father told him to do so and everything he said was because the Father told him to say it.  Ultimately it was true that Jesus as the Son of the Father (who on more than one occasion declared his approbation of his beloved Son) he could not be shaken.  But there were moments when he was shaken, when he said his heart was in turmoil, was troubled even to the point of death.  When the death of a friend caused him to weep publicly.  He was a man of sorrows and very well acquainted with grief.

⁹ Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
¹⁰ because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithful one see decay.

Jesus did his fair share of rejoicing in his life but in the end, he more and more often lifted up laments.  Luke tells us that at the very moment when the disciples and the crowds around Jerusalem were cheering for him at an all time high as Jesus entered the city on a donkey’s colt, Jesus broke down and wept.  He lamented the fate of Jerusalem, even predicting little children would die in the calamity to come.  In what we call the Olivet Discourses Jesus pointed ahead to all manner of terrible happenings.  And at the very end, far from rejoicing, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And if in Psalm 16 the poet was calling on God to not let him go to the realm of the dead (at least not just yet), we know that for Jesus that is exactly where he had to go.  And we have to assume that for those days while Jesus’s corpse was in that tomb, the process of decay had really begun.  That this body would soon be raised takes nothing away from the fact that the incarnate flesh of the very Son of God was dead and doing what all dead flesh does: rot.

Obviously since we are looking at Psalm 16 for the Sunday after Easter in Year A and in the year 2026 it may seem strange that I am layering Jesus’s suffering onto Psalm 16 to show that in some ways what befell Jesus was the opposite of what the psalmist was reflecting on from his own life experience.  But I am suggesting we bring these darker things to mind to let the other parts of the psalm shine through all-the-more brightly.

The songwriter of Psalm 16 may have hoped not to be abandoned to death for now, for the foreseeable future.  But he knew his day would come.  But now we know that because of the things Jesus suffered as summarized above, we really will never be abandoned to death.  “I am the resurrection and the life.  The one who believes in me will live even if they die and if they live by believing in me, they will never die.”  And so if we want to think about having our bodies rest in peace, this promise is why.  This is why, even though we may be terribly sad at the moment, Christians have the pluck to stand next to an open grave, slit like a wound in the skin of the earth, and with a casket right in front of us we declare, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”

Our God in Christ really has opened the path to life for us.  We really are filled with joy in the presence of our great God.  Oh, and let’s recall the final line of Psalm 16: “You fill me with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”  What does that remind us of?  Something else we say all the time in our most ancient Creed: “The third day he rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.”  By faith we now know with a blessed certainty that at the right hand of God, there really are eternal pleasures and those pleasures have a name: Jesus.

Illustration Idea

The writer and undertaker Thomas Lynch has observed that in more recent times, fewer families opt to go to the place of either burial or the place of cremation.  More and more families opt to have “Celebrations of Life” with nary a casket in site rather than a more traditional funeral where the casket gets rolled to the front of the church for all to see.  People seem more intent, Lynch has written, to downsize the dead, disappear the bodies, avert our eyes from urns of ashes or the piles of dirt at an open hole.  Sometimes even if you do go to the graveside, you might notice that the cemetery folks try to hide the dug-up dirt piles under a draping of grass-colored fabric over the dirt.  Like we don’t know what’s under there and where it is going next!

But we can surely surmise why some skirt this part of the funeral process: being at an open grave is the hardest part.  I’ve seen this on the faces of family members at every funeral I have conducted that included a graveside committal.  I saw it on the face of my wife when she walked away from the caskets of her parents.  I am sure it was on my own face—and most certainly it was on my mother’s face—when we buried my Dad about a year-and-a-half ago.  It’s just so final.  But for that very reason it is the moment, as noted above, when we most need to cling to the Gospel promise that this body now being lowered into the cold earth will rise again.  That is not an easy thing to believe anytime or most anywhere.  But at that grave . . . it’s beyond tough.  And yet we believe.  We hope.  And we do so because of the words from the Book of Common Prayer we often hear intoned at the graveside: In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.