Psalm 80:7-15 Commentary

This week the Lectionary is carving out the middle section of Psalm 80 beginning at verse 7 and its call for God to make his face to shine on his people so as to restore them.  If we zoom out and look at the entire psalm, then we see that verse 7 is a refrain in the song that is repeated word-for-word in verses 3 and 19.  Three times the Aaronic Benediction from Numbers 6 is evoked in the call for the divine face to shine on people so as to bless them and to save them.

Soon enough in this middle section we find out why this plea was so urgent.  In the span of only a few verses from verse 8 to verse 13 we get a capsule summary of both the exodus from Egypt and the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians.  Of course, a whole lot of history took place between those events.  First there were the forty years of wilderness wandering after the exodus generation despaired at their ability to be able to conquer the Promised Land of Canaan.  Then there was the conquest of Canaan, the establishment of the monarchy that reached its zenith in Kings David and Solomon.  And then came the divided kingdom and strings of kings in both the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah, most of whom were the nadir points that provide sickening contrasts to the zenith points of David and Solomon.

Yet the psalmist asks why God let Israel and Jerusalem be defeated.  But we know the answer, even if this psalm does not exactly come clean on the misdeeds of injustice that characterized Israel for far too long until God had finally had enough.  Because among the historical facts that come between the exodus and the exile are the work of the Minor Prophets.  People like Amos and Micah assailed Israel’s political and religious leaders for trampling on the poor, for treating the Temple like some safe house on the Sabbath for criminal thugs who spent the rest of their weeks plundering and cheating and stealing.  They not only failed to help the plight of the anawim God had commanded extra protection for but they actually made the plight of widows, orphans, and immigrants worse.  

This particular psalmist is not going anywhere near that but does recognize that the only hope Israel has is for God to forgive all that and turn his face toward them once more so as to shine on them and save them.  There is some hint in verse 4—not included in this lection—that there may be a reason for God’s anger to smolder against the prayers of God’s people.  Still, that’s not exactly a full-throated confession of sin.  But it at least hints at the idea there is a reason why God may have had for a time a reason to find the prayers of the people to be hollow and hypocritical.

So it is a little difficult to know just how to preach on this psalm since it does feel necessary to do what I have already done in this sermon commentary; viz., fill in some of the background details that explain Israel’s having received a dreadful judgment from God.  

But even if we do that and even with admitting the somewhat odd lack of penitential candor in Psalm 80, we can still appreciate the cries for salvation, for the shining grace of the divine face.  Because God alone is our hope in this difficult world.  God alone is our hope in the midst of our own lives where at any given moment we know we have not fully succeeded in leaning into our baptismal identity in Christ.  God alone can forgive us in Christ.  And God has done so.  The face of Jesus Christ shining on us, aglow with resurrection power, assures us of what Paul wrote in Romans 8: nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

When we too cry out for restoration and forgiveness, we do so to the God who is so very eager to do those very things.  That divine desire to shine his face upon us is the heart of the Gospel.  It was while we were yet sinners that God loved us enough to send his Son to die for us.  Not after we had mostly managed to clean up our acts on our own.  Not even only after we had come fully clean on all our sins.  Nope.  It was while we were still in the midst of all that sin and evil and iniquity that God sent Jesus.  It was while it was still abundantly clear that we could never save ourselves—just as Ancient Israel had never been able to live up to their end of the covenant bargain—that God sent God’s own Son.

And now that this divine Son has cried out on the cross, “It is accomplished!” we loop back to Paul’s soaring declaration near the end of Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.  Everything the writer of Psalm 80 could have wished for and pleaded for has been done for us by grace alone.  Indeed, this salvation in Christ is everything the psalmist could have wished for and far, far more than that.  As Paul puts it in Ephesians 3, God is now able to do far more than we could ever ask God to do and in fact God has done and will continue to do far more than we can even imagine.  

And that is very Good News indeed.

Illustration Idea

Years ago Rob Bell produced a series of videos in a series titled Nooma.  In the video titled “Lump,” he tells a story about his young son who got caught doing something wrong and was overcome with shame.   You can watch the video here.   If you watch the video, then you will see that at the end Bell repeats that Romans 8 line of how nothing can separate us from God’s love.  He repeats the word “nothing” so many times you’re tempted to conclude he’s overdoing it a little.

Until you realize that when it comes to conveying what Bell is conveying at the end, you actually could never repeat that often enough.