Psalm 23 Commentary

All things being equal, I suppose it would be OK if we preachers did not find anything overly new or original to say about what may be the most famous, best-loved psalm of them all.  In fact, sometimes our efforts at being innovative can lead us astray even as being overly zealous to share some novel insight can result in our being too clever by half sometimes and so we might even end up saying something that is foreign to something like Psalm 23.  

Were you to browse our Sermon Commentary Library here on the CEP website and search for Psalm 23, you would discover that there are twenty Psalm 23 commentaries in the Library and that fully fifteen of those were written by yours truly.  Psalm 23 and I: been there, done that!

Even so and having said all that, when I looked at Psalm 23 again in preparation for my 16th commentary on it, I was struck by a juxtaposition of sorts that I am not fully certain I had noticed before.  But it is right in the middle of the psalm.  First the psalmist (David maybe) slips in one of this short song’s many comforting references.  Verse 3 concludes that God always leads the psalmist in what he calls “right paths.”  But then we jump to verse 4 that talks about walking through the “darkest valley,” which has in the past been translated as “the valley of the shadow of death” and that might indeed get at what makes the valley in question so full of dark foreboding.  

But wait a moment: how do we go from being directed onto all the right paths in life to traversing a path in a decidedly not-so-right place?  What you might expect at this juncture in Psalm 23 would perhaps be something along the lines of “He guides me on right paths for his name’s sake and when we come upon a dark valley, he guides me around it on safe paths that detour us around bad places.”  But that is not what we get at the midpoint of this poem.  So what do we make of this?  Can the path that leads through the valley of the shadow of death be counted as one of life’s “right” paths a la verse 3?  It hardly seems like it.

So this probably counts as something I am sure I have noted at least once in all those other Psalm 23 commentaries I have written, and that is what I call the realism of this psalm.   It is in many ways an upbeat song.  Green pastures, quiet waters, a refreshed soul, a bountiful banquet with an overflowing cup of wine and enough goodness and mercy to go around.   This is all the stuff that beautiful stained-glass windows are made of.  Slip in Jesus as the Good Shepherd and you’ve got a nice capsule summary of the Gospel.  

And yet in this same psalm we also have a dark and perhaps deathly valley, we’ve got scary shadows, we’ve got “evil” of one kind or another referred to, and we’ve got an admission that whatever else may be going on in the psalmist’s life, there is also the reality that he has enemies of one kind or another.  

In short, Psalm 23 was not written in some tidy bubble.  This psalmist did not put a blinder on in order to compose a song of great comfort.  Here is a writer who writes great and comforting things but not on account of having neatly blocked from view some of life’s less pleasant realities like death and evil and enemies.  No, all these things are in plain sight in Psalm 23.  This person did not have to bury his head in the proverbial sand to pull off composing what has become a beloved psalm all around the world and across time and history.

Maybe this explains Psalm 23’s staying power from its original context in the Ancient Near East through the coming of the Messiah and now for 2,000 years through the era of the Christian Church.  Maybe that is why Catholics and Baptists, Pentecostals and Presbyterians, people in the Global South and people in the Western Hemisphere gravitate equally to the twenty-third psalm.  It looks and feels authentic.  It looks and feels like real life.  The comfort this psalm brings is spoken into our various contexts and seasons of life and that include seasons of lament and sorrow, times of terror and uncertainty, moments when we really do sense that in this world there are those who oppose us in various ways and who like to make life difficult for us if they are able.

So have I managed to say something new about Psalm 23?  Almost certainly not!  But maybe that’s just the point: what can be said of this song has been said many times over for maybe 3,000+ years.  Yet we never tire of hearing the things Psalm 23 conveys.  We never tire of hearing them because they speak into our situation no matter what that situation may be on any given day or week.  Just that, then, is the gift of this psalm.

Illustration Idea

Since I have noted how many times I have written Psalm 23 sermon commentaries here on the CEP website, it seems fitting to do a reprise of an Illustration Idea I first published 5 years ago.

Years ago my colleague Neal Plantinga and I heard Rev. John Claypool deliver a sermon at the installation service for Tom Long at Candler Divinity School when Long became the Bandy Professor of Preaching, succeeding Fred Craddock.  At the end of the service Claypool used a benediction we had never heard before (though we have since traced it back, in part, to the breastplate of St. Patrick).  Neal memorized it on the spot and wrote it down and we have both been using it for years since.  I can testify that I regularly have people comment on how rich this blessing is.  At my former church, people requested that this be the benediction I was to use at weddings and funerals.  And it very much speaks to the sentiments and emotions evoked by Psalm 23:

God go before you to guide you.
God go behind you to protect you.
God go beneath you to support you.
God go beside you to befriend you.
Be not afraid.
And let the blessing of Almighty God:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Descend on you, settle in around you
And make its home in you.
Be not afraid.
Go in peace.

Having heard us use this lyric blessing on several occasions, our colleague Roy Hopp set it into a choral musical piece that you can listen to here.