Psalm 23 Commentary

In an article he wrote some years ago, theologian Neal Plantinga told the story of a choir that was rehearsing for a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  But the choir was not giving the conductor what he was looking for.  As it turned out, the choir was almost too good, too professional.  So the conductor said that this piece sounds the most authentic when it is sung the way his boyhood congregation might have sung “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.”  “You’ve got to sing this chorale more simply and deeply” the conductor said.  To quote Plantinga more extensively:

So they sang again. They sang with simple depth, with deep simplicity. Of course they didn’t sound exactly like a congregation. They probably couldn’t have sounded like that if they had tried.  The reason, of course, is that they brought all their musical understanding to the singing of the chorale, and so sang it with an educated simplicity, with a second simplicity, with a simplicity that lay beyond complexity.

We all know this phenomenon. According to a famous story, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth was once asked to sum up the thousands of pages of his dense theology in one sentence. He paused.  Then he said, “Jesus loves me; this I know; for the Bible tells me so.”

Well, it’s one thing for a child to recite these words, and quite another for Barth to say them. It’s one thing to fool around at a piano by plunking out the notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” with your index finger. It’s another thing to hear that tune as a reprise, as a recap just after a fine pianist has played Mozart’s variations on it. As a reprise the tune seems loaded.

 Second simplicities lie beyond complexities and incorporate them. 

(Source: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2876&context=pro_rege )

All of that is sort of Psalm 23 in a nutshell.  When I pulled up this psalm on my computer to begin work on this sermon commentary, I took a step back and just took in the whole song in a glance.  Just six short verses.  Only about 109 English words in most translations.  A mere 53 words in the original Hebrew.  It is simple on many levels.  Children have memorized it for ages as I did in Kindergarten.  There are far longer psalms in the Hebrew Psalter.  There are louder psalms, more gut-wrenching psalms, psalms with a lot of historical content.

And yet Psalm 23 has emerged in Judeo-Christian history as perhaps the most famous of the 150 songs in the collection.  But as with the Bach music Plantinga mentioned, there is just beyond Psalm 23’s simplicity some complexity, some deeper levels of meaning that emerge beyond what you might expect from such a brief poem.  A child can recite it.  But a theologian can wrestle with it on various levels.  It stands on its own and yet has tendrils that extend out to all kinds of other passages in both the Old and the New Testaments.  This psalm’s “second simplicities” likewise lie just on the other side of some complexities and then incorporates them to make this simple song profound after all.

The psalm opens with the simple image of a shepherd caring for his sheep.  The sheep don’t have to worry about being in want—the shepherd will lead them to green pastures that are as perfect for eating as for bedding down upon overnight or for a midday repast in the warm sunshine.  The song also concludes with an image of abundance, this time of a lavish banquet.  And yet in between the pastoral opening and the celebrative conclusion is a dark valley, dark in ways that are exceedingly reminiscent of death.  But we’re not alone in that dim place.  There is that shepherd’s crook that gently prods us to keep us on the path without slipping left or right into some unseen ravine.

Even when a banquet is set before us in the end, it’s done in the presence of “enemies” because most if not all of us have such people in our lives, people who wish us ill, who talk us down behind our backs, who are only too glad to engage in a little (or a lot) of Schadenfreude when something unpleasant happens in our lives.  For all its lyric beauty and imagery, the author of Psalm 23 does not want us to deny these less-pleasant facts.

But what that points to is some of those complexities that lie just on the other side of the psalm’s simplicities.  The whole doctrine of providence gets raised by Psalm 23.  The whole question of evil and why bad things can happen to good people is broached by this psalm’s acknowledgement of dark valleys, of death, of enemies.  If my Good Shepherd is with me, why does darkness still come my way?  Why do enemies not just vanish from my life?  If God can protect me in the valley of the shadow, why not just light up the valley in the first place and be done with it?

Of course, some of these kinds of questions begin to be addressed when we take Psalm 23 and connect it to Christ Jesus the Lord, to the One who said he was the Good Shepherd.  The lavish banquet set before us is finally the Lord’s Supper where we remember what Jesus did to address the darkness of death and the presence of God’s and of our enemies.  Because Jesus is the Good Shepherd who is also a slain lamb.  Jesus is the One who stays with us in death’s chill shadows because he himself passed through death to emerge in the light of Easter on the other side.

What happened to Jesus the Good Shepherd and slain lamb is not simple.  How and why salvation could have been achieved through only sacrifice and death is not easy to understand.  And yet somehow by the alchemy of grace when we die and rise with Christ in our baptisms, we are able to say with the simple faith of a little child, “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.”  It’s that simple.  It’s that complex.

Illustration Idea

In the citation from the Neal Plantinga article above there is reference to the simple melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and how the utter simplicity of that reveals itself in complexities beyond the simple once Mozart had at it in his variations.   The video you can see here reveals this and all the more so since the pianist in this performance is Natalie Schwamova who, well, actually IS a little child playing at first what most any child could do after a few piano lessons to then performing something very few children could do!  Natalie’s facial expressions alone reveal the simple glee of a child and the complex seriousness of a gifted prodigy.