Psalm 103: (1-7), 8-13 Commentary

The first half dozen verses of Psalm 103 are familiar to some of us because a lot of churches use those words as the words of Thanksgiving following a celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  At our church, the pastor reads the words and the congregation then echoes them.   They are such fitting words following the sacrament of grace because what else can one do after remembering again Jesus’s sacrifice than say “Thank you” in praise to God?   Of course, I am probably not alone in, at times, thinking in the back of my head that while we thank God for “healing all our diseases,” we cannot but recall the members of our congregation who had not gathered at the Lord’s table that day because as a matter of fact one of their diseases did not get healed.   And while it is true in the long run that God has redeemed our life from the pit—that is what we celebrate in the sacrament—some of us on any given Sunday are still in one kind of pit or another and even as we praise God for satisfying all our desires, a few unsatisfied ones nag us at the back of our mind too.

So those opening verses of the 103rd psalm may be one of many occasions in the Hebrew Psalter where you quietly attach the caveat that the full truth of these sentiments is “in the long run”, even if in the near term for now some sicknesses end in death and some desires are not met.   But it is still only fitting that we praise God for the blessings as detailed in Psalm 103:1-7.

The Lectionary focuses on verses 8-13, though breaking off this lection in verse 13 may feel a little strange.  At least in some translations the end of verse 13 is a semicolon, as the thought about God’s having compassion on us is then continued in verses 14 and following, pointing us to the frail and finite nature of life on earth.  So when you preach on this, you may want to extend the reading beyond the bounds of the assigned Year A lection.

The focus of these middle verses is on forgiveness.  And the language used is very lyric.  Two extremes are mentioned: how high the heavens are above the earth and how far it is from east to west.  But of course we have to take these in the metaphorical sense in which they are written.  I mean, how high are the heavens above the earth?  Well, you could put in most any number.  How many feet above us are the clouds on the average day?  Or maybe the boundary of the earth’s atmosphere is meant.  Or are we to think of the vastness of outer space which, while finite, is so huge as to be without any practical limit?  We measure distances in light years once you get out into space.  And something of that is the idea in Psalm 103: you just cannot overstate how vast God’s love for us is.  How much does God love us?   Well, you have to measure it in light years to even come close to scratching the surface of divine love.  Sometimes if a parent asks a child how much he loves his Mom, the child will stretch out his arms as far apart as possible and say, “I love you this much!”   God does this too, except that the reach of his outstretched arms spans the galaxies!   

And how far is it from east to west?   Well, again, you could make that a relatively small thing.  I live near Lake Michigan and it’s about 60 miles from the western shore in Wisconsin to the eastern shore in Michigan.  Or there’s the West Coast of the U.S. and the East Coast and they are about 3,000 or so miles apart.   Or you could look at the eastern goal post and the western goal post on a football field and say east and west are 100 yards apart.  But again and of course the idea in Psalm 103 is that there is kind of no end to what counts as either east or west and so the idea is that it’s an almost infinite distance.  And that is how far God removes our transgressions from us in his compassionate and endlessly gracious act of forgiveness.  Our past sins are taken so far away from us that they’ll never come remotely close to us ever again.  They are not going to come back to haunt us, taint us, or render us guilty before God all over again.  They have been taken away.  Infinitely far away.

Basically, then, Psalm 103 reminds us is that at the end of the cosmic day, you really cannot exaggerate the glory and the power of the Gospel!   If anything, we probably think in far too narrow of terms on the Good News.   Preachers think they can sum up the Gospel pretty succinctly and neatly.  We can sum up the whole shebang in a single pamphlet or in Four Spiritual Laws or in an elevator speech we can use for evangelism.  And while it’s true we can summarize the core goodness of the Gospel fairly quickly—“Jesus Christ died for your sins”—the larger reality is that we’ll never fully wrap our minds around the Gospel.  It will always prove to be bigger than our abilities to conceptualize it.  

But as the writer of Psalm 103 knew, that’s actually a profoundly good thing!

Illustration Idea

In past sermon commentaries here on the CEP website I have occasionally mentioned a sermon that Fred Craddock delivered at the Festival of Homiletics now nearly 20 years ago.  The theme of the sermon was hyperbole as Craddock launched off from that verse near the end of John’s Gospel when John writes that if everything Jesus had ever said and done were written down, “the world could not contain the books that would be written.”  Well, as Craddock said, you just know that if everything Jesus said and did could be written down, the world would have plenty of room for the resulting Gospel volumes.  The Library of Congress has 5,000 miles of running shelf space so it seems really likely we could cram all those Jesus books in there.

But Craddock’s main point was that actually hyperbole of this sort is a good thing but far too few sermons engage in it.  Instead too many sermons leave the impression that everything can be explained in 20 minutes with all the corners neatly tucked in and thus leaving the impression that “the preacher had walked all the way around God and taken pictures.”   There is in too many sermons too little mystery, too little awe, too little gob-smacked wonder.   Instead Craddock pushed for sermons that point to a faith with some real size to it.  

We do better at this in songs and hymns, Craddock noted.  

“Oh for a THOUSAND tongues to sing!”  

Or:

“Could we with ink the ocean fill,
  And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
  And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
  Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
  Though stretched from sky to sky.”

Wow!  Let’s preach like this.  Let’s resist reducing the love of God and the love of Christ Jesus to slogans and sound bites and easily digestible smaller chunks.

And that is essentially what the middle part of Psalm 103 is urging, too.