I have been meaning to preach on the psalms for the longest time but I never knew where to start with. So when I realized that this Sunday we would read Psalm 1, I thought this was maybe the perfect opportunity!Let’s just start with the beginning….And indeed psalm 1 is the beginning, psalms aren’t randomly arranged like a shopping list.Psalm 1 (along with Psalm 2) are meant to be an introduction, they tell us what the Psalter (the book of Psalms) is about.
– Now we already know that psalms are songs and poetry, a certain kind of poetry. It may not be obvious to our ears because this poetry isn’t about rhyme, but as I have already mentioned a few times, it’s about parallelism: One idea is expressed in a first line and then it’s reinforced by a second line. The second line echoes and expands the first idea. We can find parallelisms from line to line (that’s why we read psalms responsively.), sometimes also we find parallelisms from verse to verse like today (about the wicked v4 & v5)
So there’s a lot of repetitions, and we can be annoyed with repetition (We’re in a culture of fast paced entertainment, I don’t know if you have tried to watch a cartoon recently…) yet we have to realize that it is meant to be repetitive because it’s meant to be a meditation, a prayer. The Psalter is a book of songs that are meditation and prayers, and all those repetitions are like a spiral that is taking us always deeper to the core of its message about God and about human life (and the two are always connected: it’s about the Covenant)
– So that’s for the form. Now about the contents of the psalms, well Psalm 1 tells us right away: It’s about delighting in the Law of the Lord, meditating on God’sLaw day and night. That’s what the psalms are about.
We can be surprised about this possibility of finding “delight in the Law”, Law is just something we have to obey right? We have to understand that Law is a not so good translation of “Torah”, which is the name of the first five books of the Bible, the story of God and the people. So actually what the psalmist does is to invite us to delight in the Scriptures, in the knowledge of God.
The Psalter itself is a meditation on the Torah, on the Scriptures. You know, sometimes we struggle to understand the Bible as “God’s word”….we think: Did God really say all of that? It’s more effective to think of the Bible as a dialogue between God and God’s people. Clearly, the psalms are a dialogue – they respond to the Torah. In fact, at church, the psalms are read in the middle of the lessons, so the congregation has a chance to “respond” (responsively!).
1. How are the psalms a meditation of the Torah (Scriptures)?
– When I hear Psalm 1, what comes to mind immediately is this passage of Deuteronomy that you may know as well: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deut 30:19) and indeed our psalm makes it clear that there are two ways: the way of the wicked and the way of the righteous. One leads to destruction, the other leads to life.
Now we may understand it like that: The sinners will go to to hell when all sorts of good things happen for those who obey God’s law. But see how the psalm develops this idea and introduce some imagery (what poetry always does = it creates images)
The psalm actually does not say that the wicked, the sinners and the scornful are going to hell or even that they are being rejected by God, it says that they are like “chaff which the wind blows away, they cannot stand upright on the day of judgment“. Which introduces the idea that their actions are vain. They may look prosperous but if they don’t have God’s word in their hearts, nothing they bring into the world will endure. It’s in this way that they are doomed. What we try to do on our own, ignoring, resisting or disobeying God cannot stand and will be destroyed because there is no foundation to those actions.
In the same way, when the psalmist introduces the idea that “the righteous will prosper“, he does not say that the righteous will have a palace or servants or a private jet. He says that they will be like a tree planted by the water bearing fruit: They will bring nourishment to others and will have what they need for themselves, they won’t thirst.
So we see how the imagery of the psalm here brings a lot of nuance and a lot of gentleness to a difficult teaching of the Torah: indeed our life is about making a choice, it’s about choosing God. But it’s not because we have an angry God, it’s all for our own benefit, so we can have fullness of life, not a self centered life but a life that bears fruit. A righteous person is someone who let the word of God “waters” their life.
Ok so the psalms they look back at the Torah and they comment the Torah – that’s a first thing that’s important to understand.
2. Now a second thing that is important for us to know, it’s that as Christians we also make a connection between the psalms and Jesus’s life and teaching. (That’s why we add the “doxology” at the end of the psalm: Glory to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit). The psalms they look forward, they talk about what’s to come: Jesus and his kingdom.
Connecting Jesus and the psalms, it’s not something we have decided to do later on, it’s in the New Testament. We have a reading today in Acts 1 where Peter says how “(…) the scriptures had to be fulfilled / which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas“. So Prophecies aren’t just in the books of prophets, Peter find that actually in a psalm (Many psalms have been written by David, so that’s the reference). Peter refers to psalm 55, about the treason of a friend.
– The psalms are about the Torah and they are also about the Messiah (we see that in Psalm 2 that is alos an introduction to all the other psalms). Christians find a lot about Jesus life and death in the psalms (Psalm 22 about the crucifixion for example)
So concretely, when we pray the psalms, we are drawn closer to the spirit and the love of Christ and also it helps understand his inner life, his sufferings (the betrayal, the cross), and we look forward to his kingdom. This is very explicit in John’s Gospel. At some point Jesus tells the Pharisees:” You search the Scriptures (…not seeing that) they bear witness about me“(John 5:39).
As for us, we can just have a look at the lesson from John’s Gospel to understand how the psalms are connected to Jesus and how Jesus also comments on the psalm:
– First example: Jesus reminds his disciples that they don’t belong to the world (they belong to God), yet they are not out of the world and are called on a mission. It’s easy to think that to be holy we need to retreat from the world, but it’s not the way Christ lived, he was always with people. In Psalm 1 we read that the righteous “have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor lingered in the way of sinners, not sat in the seats of the scornful” but “sitting with sinners” that’s exactly what Jesus did!
In Mark 2:16, we read that ” When the (…) Pharisees saw [Jesus] eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” It never occurred to me before that the Pharisee may have been referring to the psalm, that they were shocked that Jesus would do exactly the opposite of what the first line of the first psalm tells us not to do: Do not sit in the seat of the scornful.Yet if we look at Jesus’s life, it helps us to understand the deeper meaning of the psalm: It isn’t about avoiding at all cost the company of sinners, it’s an image to say that we shouldn’t imitate their ways. We can claim our identity as God’s children while still being in the world, with everybody else.
– 2nd example Psalm 1 tells us to “Mediate the Law day and night“. Yet Jesus blamed the Pharisees for scrutinizing the Law! (Matthew 23). The idea though is not that it is wrong to study, what is wrong is sitting around all day thinking about God’s will, instead of doing it! Jesus says that the Pharisees have payed all their taxes (as is commanded by the Law) and yet they “have neglected (…) justice and mercy and faith” which are much more important. Again, in our Gospel today we see that Jesus sends the disciples to do this work of justice, mercy and faith. Not just talk about the Scriptures!
– 3rd and last example. The psalm tells us that the righteous will have God’s protection. They will become like trees it says, very sturdy, but in Jesus’s story we know that the tree is the cross. So we have to understand that God’s protection isn’t about bringing us self preservation. When Jesus asks the Father to protect the disciples he does not ask that nothing bad happen to them, rather, he asks protection from evil / that they will be able to be faithful to the end.
Conclusion: Why preaching on the psalms?
We need to be aware that reading only partsof the Bible always create the risk to read it literally, without nuances, as a black and white kind of thing: like here for example, we could use Psalm 1 to create divisions between the righteous and the sinners. And the problem is that if when we think like that we live like that as well, seeing the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other (see how we use the Bible today to justify the war in Israel). If we take time with the Scriptures though, if we mediate, we will start to see how they comment and nuance and even sometimes rectify themselves and it will help us live with more gentleness and more humility, especially if we manage to see in Christ the embodiment of Scriptures.