Psalm 65:(1-8), 9-13 Commentary

Even after a couple decades writing sermon commentaries on Revised Common Lectionary texts, it remains a mystery to me just what it means when they place some verses inside parentheses.  And in the case of Psalm 65 that means just over half of the psalm is so designated.  In any event there is very little reason why you would not preach on the entire song here as it is only 13 verses long (do some churches worry that 13 verses would make for too long of a reading and so the parentheses bless you should you skip over reading them??).  So yes, here we consider the entirety of Psalm 65.

It is perhaps no surprise that in the end Psalm 65 is about the fertility of the earth and the bringing forth of crops and herds of animals.  A lot of religions in the Ancient Near East were fertility cults and in a lot of them—including the worship of Baal and Asherah—the idea was that you offered sacrifices to appease the god who in turn would make things grow so people could eat.  Or you yourself engaged in fertility rites of ritual sex acts and maybe if a god or a goddess like Asherah saw such actions, it would put them in mind to make the earth fertile too.  Like leads to like.

It is also no surprise that this would be a religious focus in the Ancient Near East given that a lot of the real estate in that part of the world is on the arid side.  In the Old Testament we frequently read of famines that resulted from years without sufficient rainfall.  It did not take much for those arid deserts that consisted of more sand than clay or black soil to dry up.  Whether or not people could grow enough crops to be able to eat and survive was frequently top of mind for a lot of people back at that time and in that place. And so that it became also a primary religious focus makes sense on multiple levels.

Israel was never a fertility cult or religion.  God’s Law forbade things like ritual prostitution and child sacrifices or other actions aimed at currying favor with a capricious god or goddess who needed to be bribed into making things grow.  The focus for Israel was always more that sins needed to be atoned for, that sacrifices needed to be made not to make crops grow but to display true sorrow over having lived in ways that offended a holy God.  What’s more, this was a holy God who was thought to dwell in the Temple in the Holy of Holies atop the Ark of the Covenant.  Every sinful act done by Israel polluted the land and threatened God’s desire to dwell amongst his people.  The people needed to aim for holiness so their Holy God would not depart (though eventually in Israel’s history that did happen as we see in Ezekiel 10 and 11).

We see this reflected in the opening of Psalm 65.  God is praised in verses 1-4 for having forgiven the sins of his people, for hearing their cries for mercy and forgiveness, for moving past their transgressions.  God is awesome for having created this amazing creation and we see that celebrated in verses 5-8 but just as often in the psalms—if not more often—God is praised for his lovingkindness that inclines God in the direction of putting sins away if only the people will ask for his mercy to do so.

Then we get to verses 9-13, which use lyric poetic imagery and language to show God tenderly watering the furrows of people’s fields.  God drenches furrows and levels ridges, God softens the fields with showers of rain.  You can almost see in your mind’s eye the hands of Yahweh reaching down to the earth and patting the soil down ever-so-gently.  As a result, the fields overflow with crops, the hills are said to be “mantled” with grain even as the hills are dotted everywhere with flocks of sheep and goats.  The language here is quite stunning.  Lilting.

Again, however, Israel’s views on fertility and fecundity do not spring from the same notions that fueled fertility rights in other religions or in other places like Egypt where a god needed to be appeased to make the rains fall or to cause the Nile River to overflow and leaves its rich silt behind on the otherwise dry desert sands.  Yes, Israel’s God is to be praised for all God’s acts of providence, including fruitful fields and wonderful flocks of animals.  And yes, God is faithful to his people in these providential ways when those same people genuinely repent of their transgressions against God’s ways and try to live in the just and generous ways described in the Law of God.

In other words, there is a connection between the faithfulness of God’s people and God’s blessing them in multiple ways, including being successful in agricultural and pastoral pursuits.  But that is not because God is first of all a fertility god nor can one coax this God into helping the wheat to grow by offering sacrifices that go against God’s ways and certainly not by engaging in ritualized sex acts that also are clearly outside the bounds of God’s Law.

God is the Giver of all good things.  The God who created the majestic wonders described in verses 5-8 is also the faithful God of providence who sees us in our needs and provides for us by his lovingkindness and grace.  And for this reason something like Psalm 65 praises this God to the heavens and back again.

As preachers, to get the full point of Psalm 65 across to people today, we need to revive people’s sense of the connectedness of all things and especially of God’s provisions for our flourishing.  We think about crops and farmers only fleetingly most of the time.  We don’t wonder if enough rain will fall in breadbasket areas of the world and we seldom pray about it.  Bread comes from the supermarket.  Breakfast cereal comes from Kellogg’s while fruits and vegetables are found in the produce section without our ever giving a thought to the human beings (whose faces we’ll never see) who labored hard to give you that zucchini or that Honeycrisp apple.  And we certainly seldom find ourselves confronted with an array of bell peppers in ways that cause us to lapse into a song of praise for all God’s wonderful goodness and providence toward us.

All of that is to the impoverishment of our own spirituality and of our connection to God of course.  Perhaps preaching on something like Psalm 65 becomes an occasion then to revive an active sense of God’s role in the food we eat in ways that should lead us to pause to give God thanks before we bite into that pear or dive into that Caesar salad in front of us.  “The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.”  Indeed.

Illustration Idea

Over the years in my pastoral prayers in public worship services, I have tried to give thanks for very specific things.  Not long ago in a prayer I gave God thanks for spicy tacos and crunchy eggrolls.  I have given thanks for pears that are so juicy it’s like biting into a water balloon.  Somewhere John Calvin once observed that in worship it is perfectly apt to give thanks for well-functioning gall bladders and spleens and kidneys.

Not surprisingly, when pastors pray in such vivid ways, people take note.  And probably the reason for their pricking up their ears at such specificity is precisely because they have mostly only ever heard very generic prayers that use blanket statements about food and health but don’t drill into the nitty gritty.  They say the devil is in the details but in positive ways God is very much in the details too.  Psalm 65 points to furrows and ridges, grasslands and meadows, carts heaped high with the fruit of the land.  Psalm 65 evokes very specific imagery to pop up into our imaginations.  Our own prayers can and should do likewise.