Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 Commentary

For the most part Psalm 31 sounds just one primary note across its 24 verses.  So although the Lectionary has chopped it up to carve out the opening 5 verses and then 2 verses closer to the middle of the song, the main theme and imagery of the psalm are still visible.  In the verses not assigned for this Sunday in Eastertide, there is a bit more overt wishing of some measure of harm or at least justice to fall upon the psalmist’s enemies (and the RCL seems to shy away from having us engage that kind of rhetoric).  But that this is a prayer delivered in the context of the songwriter’s actually having enemies is still plain to see in the 7 verses designated by the Year A Lectionary.

As the psalm opens, we encounter an image for God that is pretty common in the Hebrew Psalter: God as our refuge or our rock or our fortress.  God is a place to hide out in.  God is like a walled fortress behind whose battlements a person can hide from enemies and be protected.   As such, most of us would tend to form an image in our minds of a castle or some such perhaps built high upon a rock.

(Image Source: Nenad Savic on Pexels)

If you did tumble to something like the image above, the one thing you would be the least likely to ponder is anything having to do with movement.  If anything, you would think about the immovability of such a fortress.  You might tumble to thinking about how unshakeable such a fortress would be.  If you wanted to visit the specific castle or fortress above, you have to travel to Serbia because that edifice is definitely not going to come to you.  Nor if you were to find yourself ensconced in such a building would you be going anywhere until or unless the time came for you to exit and go back out into the wider world.  But while you are inside the fortress, neither it nor you are going anywhere.

But that is why the opening 5 verses of Psalm 31 should strike us as a little odd, a little bit of a visual oxymoron.  Because the psalmist overtly talks about both taking refuge inside the strong fortress that just is God and about how the poet is asking this fortress-like God to guide them on all the paths they need to travel in life.  So now we have the image of a fortress on the move after all.  You can be inside the fortress and refuge of God and at the same time be traversing various roads and paths in this world.  A moving fortress.  A refuge you can take with you when you hit the road!

That alone is a bit of a poetic curiosity to ponder.  Among the things it implies is that we can encounter our enemies almost anywhere while simultaneously still being inside the refuge that just is our God (our God in Christ we would now say in a New Testament setting).  This is why the psalmist at least did not seem to see any discrepancy between the fortress/refuge image and the plea for God to guide our steps nor did it conflict with God as shining a light upon us or helping us to sidestep the traps that may have been laid for us by our foes.

Our God is a moveable fortress.

This may remind us of Jesus’s Great Commission promise “Surely I am with you, always, to the end of the age.”  It may remind us of Paul’s favorite prepositional phrase that we are now “in Christ” through our baptisms.  The theologian Lewis B. Smedes once described our union with Christ as a kind of spiritual change-of-address, that the union we gain in our baptisms places us inside the new cosmic situation brought about for us by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.  It is as though “In Christ” is now our spiritual zip code.  But here too we imagine this as both a new place in which to live (and take refuge) and as something that is not tied to a specific location such that no matter where we go in his world, we are inside of all that.

Of course, when preaching on this and if you take this angle, we have to admit the crosscurrents of life in a still-broken world.  We may be “in Christ” and so “in” Psalm 31’s divine fortress wherever we go and yet even the psalmist still had enemies to contend with and sometimes it feels like something happens in our lives that makes us feel—whatever the larger spiritual reality—that somehow we ended up outside the fortress’s walls and so a bad or tragic thing was not kept from us after all.  On the one hand, that could undercut the idea that there is such a thing as taking reliable refuge in God.  On the other hand, we could also perceive it to mean that for whatever reason enemies still have their kicks and bad things still get through to us, we cling all the more to the knowledge that whatever else such unhappy events indicate, it does not indicate our union with Christ has come to an end.  To hark back to the end of Romans 8, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  We cannot be relocated from the new situation in which we now dwell with Jesus and if that does not mitigate all our of pain or the tears we shed, it does give us hope

The Lectionary did not include Psalm 31:24, the final verse, but we lean into its truth: “Be strong and take heart, all who hope in the Lord.”

Illustration Idea

A famous person was once quoted as saying that he was perfectly willing to forgive his enemies but only after they had been well hanged.  C.S. Lewis once noted, writing not long after the conclusion of World War II, that everyone agrees in principle that forgiving our enemies is a lovely idea and that lovely idea hangs in there right up until the moment we are face to face with an actual enemy or someone who harmed us.  Lewis was referring to people like the Germans and the Italians who had been Britain’s foes in the war but most of us have some people who come to mind when we think of those in need of our forgiveness.

Jesus of course told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  Among the many things Jesus commended for us to do and for us to be, those words from early in the Sermon on the Mount constitute a definite heavy lift spiritually speaking.  But those words have to somehow temper how we receive and pray the Psalms too.  As is the case in Psalm 31, so a lot of psalms go on and on about enemies.  Indeed, the word “enemy” or “enemies” crops up in the Book of Psalms about 100 times.  No other biblical book comes close to that many occurrences (the next highest is Deuteronomy with all of about 25 occurrences—most biblical books are in the single digits).   What’s more, a lot of psalms ask God to quell, vanquish, or actually bring harm to such foes.

To put it mildly, how we understand this as we follow the Prince of Peace who told us to love and forgive our opponents is a daunting challenge.  But if we believe Jesus is the fulfillment of all Scripture and that he is therefore in the definitive position to interpret Scripture for us, then we cannot adopt without qualification at least some of the enemy talk in the Psalms.  For us preachers this is probably something we cannot point out often enough for our congregations prayerfully to consider, especially in a time when some leaders are marshalling God to lead the way and bless the execution of wars and conflicts and the punishing of enemies.