Praying the Psalms in Christ

READING THE SCRIPTURES

Gary A. Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Robert Louis Wilken

series editors

PRAYING

the PSALMS

in CHRIST

LAURENCE KRIEGSHAUSER, O.S.B.

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-268-08452-3

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

To my mother and to Abbot Luke

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Psalms 1–150

Glossary of Terms

English Renderings of Selected Hebrew Words

Bibliography

Index of Biblical Books Other Than the Psalms

Index of Selected Topics

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the following who in various ways made this work possible: Abbot Thomas Frerking, O.S.B., Ralph Wright, O.S.B., Ambrose Bennett, O.S.B., the Passionist Nuns of Ellisville, Missouri, the Saint Anselm Parish prayer group, Dom Bernard McElligott of Ampleforth Abbey, Professor Frank O’Malley of the University of Notre Dame, Dominique Barthélemy, O.P., of the University of Fribourg, Katie Lehman and Barbara Hanrahan of the University of Notre Dame Press, Dr. Thomas Moran, Jordan Cherrick, Reverend Mr. Gerry Quinn, Nick White, and Joseph Marrs.

Psallite sapienter. Ps 47:8

INTRODUCTION

The excellence of Christian prayer lies in this, that it shares in the very love of the only-begotten Son for the Father and in that prayer which the Son put into words in his earthly life and which still continues unceasingly in the name of the whole human race and for its salvation, throughout the universal Church and in all its members. (GILH 7)

With these words from the General Instruction for the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church proclaims the dignity of Christian prayer: it is a share in the prayer of the Incarnate Son of God himself. The Gospels show Christ frequently in prayer. He needed to commune with his heavenly Father to find wisdom and strength for his saving ministry and to entrust himself and his mission to the Father’s guidance. It was his prayer that animated his sacrificial offering of himself to the Father (Heb 5:7). But at an even deeper level, as the eternal Son of God he was always in intimate communion with the Father from whom he proceeded and whom he loved with an infinite love. The love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father is a third and distinct person, the Holy Spirit, who is the bond between the Father and the Son. The prayer of the Son on earth was a human participation in this trinitarian love, and the Church teaches that Christians who are baptized in Christ are drawn into this ineffable prayer of the Son to the Father: they are privileged to participate in it. Even when we cannot put this prayer into words or concepts, the Spirit of Christ is praying in us the prayer of the Son with unutterable groanings (Rom 8:26). It is the Christian’s task to allow the Spirit to produce this prayer in us, so that we say with Christ, Abba, Father (Rom 8:15–17).

EUCHARIST AND LITURGY OF THE HOURS

The principal Christian prayer is the Eucharist, in which we are invited to offer to the Father the very sacrifice of the Son on Calvary. As Christ offers himself to the Father in our midst, we let ourselves be taken up into his offering, giving to the Father both the Sacred Body and Blood of his Son and our own selves incorporated into him. The single, once-for-all sacrifice of the Son on behalf of the whole human race is not repeated but is realized again, made present in our time and place. The offering of the Son to the Father did not cease at his death but endures forever: the Son continually offers to the Father the Body that was slain and is now risen. In the measure in which we can join in this truly cosmic sacrifice we are purified of sin and made holy. The Eucharist perfects our transformation in Christ.

From apostolic times Christians gathered for prayers outside the Eucharist as well. They practiced with new meaning the prayers offered in Judaism at certain times of the day. They prayed in the morning, seeing in the rising sun a symbol of the Lord who rose on Easter morning. They prayed in the evening, recalling the Lord’s Supper and his Crucifixion both of which occurred toward the end of the day. Prayers celebrated at regular hours became a kind of sacramental fulfilment of the Lord’s injunction to Pray always (Luke 18:1; cf. 1 Thess 5:17), and the common vocal prayer was meant to sustain an interior prayer that would continue through the whole of the day.

LITURGY OF THE HOURS AND PSALMS

Where were the first disciples to find words to formulate the ineffable prayer of the Son to the Father? Christ himself gave the example in praying the psalms of Israel. On the cross he uttered both the psalmist’s cry, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Matt 27:46 = Ps 22:2) and the prayer of trust, Into your hands I commend my spirit (Luke 23:46 = Ps 31:6). He applied passages from the psalms to himself: The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone (Matt 21:42 = Ps 118:22); The Lord’s revelation to my master: ‘Sit on my right. I will put your foes beneath your feet’ (Matt 22:43–45, 26:64 = Ps 110:1); My friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has raised his heel against me (John 13:18 = Ps 41:10); Now my soul is troubled (John 12:27 = Ps 42:7); They hated me without cause (John 15:25 = Ps 35:19, 69:5). After his resurrection he showed the apostles how the psalms were fulfilled in him, particularly in his suffering, death, and rising (cf. Luke 24:44–47).

The apostles and evangelists followed suit in finding Christ in the psalms. Particularly in the events of his Passion they found the psalms fulfilled: They divide my clothing among them; they cast lots for my robe (John 19:24 = Ps 22:19); For food they gave me poison; in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink (Matt 27:34, 48 = Ps 69:22), and so forth. Saint Peter found a prophecy of his resurrection from the dead in Psalm 15: Even my body will rest in safety, for you will not leave my soul among the dead nor let your beloved know decay. You will show me the path of life, the fullness of joy in your presence, at your right hand happiness forever (Acts 2:26–28, 31 = Ps 16:9–11). For Saint Paul Psalm 8:7, You put all things under his feet, was to be applied to Christ (1 Cor 15:26–28, Eph 1:22–23). Three times the author of Revelation applies to the risen Christ Psalm 2:9: With a rod of iron you will break them (Rev 2:27, 12:5, 19:15). Not only did Christians see Christ in the psalms; in praying the psalms they explicitly related certain verses to the events of his death and resurrection (see Acts 4:24–30 with respect to Ps 2:1–2). The psalms were as much part of early Christian prayer as they were part of the prayer of Jesus (cf. Mark 14:26, 1 Cor 14:26, Eph 5:19, Col 3:16, Jas 5:13).

By the beginning of the third century psalmody was a regular part of the daily hours of prayer. Psalms were commented on by bishops and catechists. Already Tertullian had heard in the psalms the voice of Christ: Nearly all the psalms bear the person of Christ, that is, they represent Christ uttering words to the Father. Notice also the Spirit speaking as a third person about the Father and the Son.¹ It was Saint Augustine who most consistently propounded the Christian application of the psalms. For him the psalm was the voice of the whole Christ, head and members, that is, the prayer of Christ in his Body the Church. His vision is magisterially expressed in the great beginning of the exposition on Psalm 85:

God could have granted no greater gift to human beings than to cause his Word, through whom he created all things, to be their head, and to fit them to him as his members. He was thus to be both Son of God and Son of Man, one God with the Father, one human being with us. The consequence is that when we speak to God in prayer we do not separate the Son from God and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself. The one sole savior of his body is our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us, prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, and he is prayed to by us as our God. Accordingly we must recognize our voices in him, and his accents in ourselves. . . .

He further counsels his listeners, Say nothing apart from [Christ], as he says nothing apart from you.² And so if the psalm prays, Out of the depths I call to you, O Lord, it is Christ in his Passion praying along with Christ in his suffering members throughout the world right now. If it prays, I will praise you among the nations, it is the risen Christ praising the Father in the Church spread throughout the world. In the words of Jean Corbon:

[T]he prayer of the Hours consists chiefly of the prayer which Jesus himself used in his mortal condition: the psalms. In this single book of the Old Testament the entire economy of salvation became prayer, and now this love-inspired plan has been fulfilled in Jesus. When the church prays, the liturgy that fulfills this love-inspired plan is expressed through these same psalms. In them the Spirit repeats with the Bride the wonderful deeds of her Lord. (Wellspring of Worship, 127)

The present commentary will offer suggestions about how the psalms can become the vehicles of Christ’s prayer in his Body the Church.

ASPECTS OF THE PSALMS

In making the psalms his own Christ gave them their definitive meaning. They are the prayers of the man-God who is also the Son of God. He became incarnate, so to speak, in them. For this reason a Christian understanding of the psalms cannot neglect any dimension of these prayers that contributed to their original meaning, since that is the meaning taken up into the prayer of Christ. In any study of the Scriptures it is necessary to begin with the literal meaning of the passage in its historical context. For the Book of Psalms this includes an understanding of the genre or category of each psalm, its internal structure and emotional tensions, imagery, rhythm, and poetic devices such as parallelism and chiasmus, and asyndeton and consonance, by which meaning is enhanced or reinforced. The commentary will occasionally note how these various literary devices enrich the experience of the poetry; clearly only selected examples can be noted.

In the last quarter century research has centered on a previously unrecognized dimension of the Book of Psalms, its interconnectedness. Psalms are seen to have been deliberately placed so as to reflect and complement each other. In particular, greater attention is being paid to the division of the psalms into five books, each ending with a doxology. These are Book One, Psalms 3–41; Book Two, Psalms 42–72; Book Three, Psalms 73–89; Book Four, Psalms 90–106; Book Five, Psalms 107–150. Within these units are found smaller collections such as the Songs of Ascents (Pss 120–134), collections of psalms attributed to David (first collection, Pss 3–41; second collection Pss 51–65; third collection Pss 138–145), psalms attributed to the sons of Korah (Pss 42–49; 84–85; 87–88), or to Asaph (Pss 50; 73–83), etc. Word links between adjacent or nearby psalms in the various groups encourage the reader to see these psalms in relation to each other. In this way the psalms comment on each other. No one psalm stands in isolation, but each is to be seen as a partial aspect of a larger whole. That is to say that the complexity of the relations between God and man can be suggested only by a reading of the whole psalter, just as all the parts of a novel are necessary for the whole. This commentary draws particularly on the work of Erich Zenger and Frank-Lothar Hossfeld³ to highlight the significance of the positioning of each psalm in relation to the smaller collections of psalms and to the Book of Psalms as a whole. These interconnections will be part of the meaning that is taken up into the Christian praying of the psalm.

Often a verse of the Psalms is illuminated by a passage from another part of the Old Testament. Such parallels are indicated in the commentary, and the reader is encouraged to look up the parallel passages and reflect on the light they throw on the psalm. It may be necessary to read a few verses before the cited passage in order to understand the context, possibly with the help of explanatory footnotes, as in the Jerusalem Bible. Such a leisurely and meditative reflection on the links within the word of God can gradually point us toward the profound mystery beyond all words.

But it is the New Testament parallel passages that give the Christian dimension to the psalms. These passages point to the Christian relevance of the Old Testament prayers, bringing them to a new fullness of meaning. Throughout the Old Testament and in the Psalms in particular, God is portrayed as in love with his people. He created them, made them his own, rescued them from bondage, bound himself to them with a covenant, worked wonders for them; gave them a land, victory over enemies, kings and prophets, a temple in which he would dwell; and continually appealed to them to accept his lordship. Just as continually, his people refused his love, preventing him from being able to give them the fullness of peace he intended for them. The two sides of this God-man relationship are the warp and woof of the psalms. God longs for man; man longs for God but feels held back by sin or hostile forces. The impasse was only resolved when God sent his Son: the Incarnate Son of God would be the first human being to respond with wholehearted obedience to the loving will of the Father. Jesus’s vocation was to show God’s love for man in human flesh and to persevere in showing that love even when it was rejected and crucified. Because Jesus clung to the Father’s will even to death, he successfully fulfilled the task of man, and there was no reason that death should keep him in its power (cf. Acts 2:23–24). In raising him from the dead the Father reconciled all humankind to himself, taking away their sin (2 Cor 5:18–19). The risen Christ is our way to the Father (John 14:6, Heb 10:20), the mediator between God and man (1 Tim 2:5–6). When Christians accept Jesus as their Lord they receive the forgiveness of their sins and stand in the Father’s presence in the risen Son, calling God Father. And when they pray the psalms together on earth it is the saving love of Christ for the Father that they put into words: such is the import of the passage cited at the beginning of this introduction. They offer to the Father the one prayer by which the world was saved, participating in the remaking of the world. At the same time they are introduced into the heart of the dialogue between the Father and the Son in the bosom of the Trinity: they are drawn into the inner life of God.

Thus when a psalm speaks of God’s love (ḥesed) for his people, the Christian means the love shown in his sending of his Son to die for us. When it speaks of God’s dwelling among his people in the temple, the Christian means the Body of Christ, his Church. When it speaks of liberation from Egypt or defeat of enemies, the Christian means the liberation from sin won by Christ. When the psalm cries out in anguish, the Christian hears the voice of Christ offering his pain to the Father as propitiation for our sins, and he prays in the name of the suffering body of Christ on earth still bearing the cross on its pilgrim journey. In making suggestions about how to pray the psalms from within the Christian mystery, it is hoped that this commentary may stimulate Christians to find their own correspondences between the psalms and the mystery of Christ as presented in the New Testament.

As we continue to pray the psalms in Christ, allowing more and more his Spirit to possess us, we find that the psalms are expressing our own emotions. They channel our longing, our sorrow, our joy, our gratitude, our love into the full expression of the humanity of Christ. Even our anger becomes transmuted into zeal for the coming of the kingdom. In this way the psalms have an educatory function as was noted by the early monastic writers. For Saint Athanasius the psalms were a mirror in which the one praying finds his own self and emotions:

And the one who hears is deeply moved, as though he himself were speaking, and is affected by the words of the songs, as if they were his own songs. . . . Each sings them as if they were written about himself. . . . Then the things spoken are such that he lifts them up to God as if he were acting and speaking them from himself. . . . Each psalm is both spoken and composed by the Spirit so that in these same words . . . the stirrings of our souls might be grasped, and all of them be said as concerning us, and they issue from us as our own words, as a reminder of the emotions in us, and a chastening of our life. (Letter to Marcellinus 11–12)

In the next century John Cassian wrote in a similar vein:

Nourished by continual feeding on the psalms and appropriating all their emotions as his own, he will begin to sing them in such a way that in profound compunction of heart he will produce them not as composed by a prophet but as if uttered by himself as his own prayer, or at least he will consider them to have been directed to his own person and will recognize that their sentiments were not only realized formerly through or in the prophet but are carried out and fulfilled today in himself. (Conference X, 11; my translation)⁴

Athanasius went even further in attributing a kind of Christ therapy to the psalms. God composed these prayers as a pattern of the humanity of Christ before his sojourn in our midst, so that just as he provided the model of the earthly and heavenly man in his own person, so also from the Psalms he who wants to do so can learn the emotions and dispositions of the souls, finding in them also the therapy and correction suited for each emotion (Letter to Marcellinus 13). Through the psalms we can experience our own feelings as the feelings of Christ and vice versa. Our feelings become purified, liberated of anything selfish. So the psalms have been formed like a sculptor’s tools for the true overseer who, like a craftsman, is carving our souls to the divine likeness (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Inscriptions II, 137).

FEATURES OF THE COMMENTARY

The reader will notice at the head of each commentary a single word. These words are meant not as titles or summaries of the psalms, but as indications of something distinct about them. Sometimes the word is an image more developed in one psalm than in any other (e.g., tree in Ps 1); other times the word is used in a striking way in the psalm (e.g., apple for Ps 17) or as a motif (e.g., poor in Ps 9-10); still other times the word alludes to an item found in the psalm (e.g., sickbed in Ps 6, theophany in Ps 18). These choices are personal and may stimulate the reader to find his or her own key word that will designate the uniqueness of a psalm.

The commentary is based on the Hebrew text of the psalms as found in the Biblia Hebraica and follows the current trend in scholarship to respect this Masoretic text without alteration or emendation. The attempt to render the literal sense of the Hebrew may yield awkward English, but it has the advantage of giving the reader the force, and often roughness, of the original poem, even at the cost of elegance. Stylistic variations in word order, as in chiastic expressions, are difficult to reproduce in English, but as they are features of Hebrew poetry the reader has a right to know where they occur. It is hoped that some awareness of these features may deepen a reader’s praying of a psalm even if the official translation of these prayers does not reproduce them. The Grail translation, which is the most widely used version in the Liturgy of the Hours in the English-speaking world, has the merit of general accuracy, singability, and rhythm; it can easily be prayed even when one is aware that it cannot reproduce all the subtleties of the original Hebrew. The reader might find it helpful to have at hand a copy of the Grail translation as he or she peruses the commentaries on individual psalms.

The Greek translation, the Septuagint (LXX), is occasionally consulted to throw light on a psalm. Most often, however, the commentary takes the form of a literal translation of the Hebrew text, generally in the third person so that the author’s comments can blend with the text. When it was felt necessary to give a literal rendering of passages in the second or first person, the translation is provided within quotation marks. Quotation marks are also used around individual words that have a theological significance or that have important parallels in other verses of the Psalms or other biblical books, these parallels being indicated in parentheses.⁵

A particular feature of the commentary is the effort to translate a Hebrew word with the same English word each time it appears in a psalm. In this way words having a certain theological weight, such as ḥesed (covenant love), yšʿ (save), bāṭaḥ (trust), are preserved as are distinctions between synonyms that may have slightly different nuances, as in the rich vocabulary for verbs of rejoicing or nouns for anger or sin. Again the price for literal accuracy will be a loss of elegance, but the reader will have the advantage of knowing which Hebrew concept or poetic device is present in a given verse. At the end of the book is a table of English renderings of selected Hebrew words as translated in this commentary. Certain other translation choices require special comment. The divine name, YHWH, which appears over 680 times in the Book of Psalms, is sometimes rendered Yahweh, but generally The Lord. The title ʾādôn is regularly rendered Master. The word nefeš is translated by the traditional soul, although it originally meant throat, the channel of breath, and is sometimes likely to have this meaning.⁶ The important word ḥesed is rendered covenant love or simply love.

An attempt is made in the commentary to read the psalms as a book, in which each psalm makes a new contribution to the work as a whole. This means that themes are slowly developed, later psalms adding nuances to themes introduced in earlier ones. For this reason references to other psalms tend to look backward not forward, that is, to psalms already discussed rather than to psalms appearing later in the book. Like the reading of a novel, the continuous reading of the psalms is a cumulative experience. The first appearance of a theme will be discussed in its place, and later appearances will refer back to the earlier ones for clarification and enrichment. Only upon completing a reading of the Book of Psalms does one gain a grasp of the whole.

CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH READING OF THE PSALMS

The psalms are given to us by Judaism. They are the voice of a humanity befriended by God. If Christians see this humanity as taken up into Jesus, they are paying the utmost tribute to these Jewish prayers. The Church inherits the Hebrew Scriptures as a treasure of divine revelation; it does not reject them but venerates every last iota of them. Christians cannot afford to bypass the Hebrew Scriptures in trying to understand the One who is their fulfilment. While our Jewish brothers and sisters cannot be expected to read the psalms through the lens of Christ, we Christians will not read the psalms divorced from their Jewish roots. It is to be hoped that the Church’s growing awareness of the interlocking of the two Testaments will lead to a greater mutual appreciation between our two faiths. Christians see a potentiality of meaning in the Jewish Scriptures that does not abolish the original meaning of those texts for the Jews themselves (Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures, 64).

The Psalms are a vast temple in which God is worshipped. Each individual psalm is like a room in the temple, full of God’s presence but not exhausting it. Praising God in one psalm we hear echoes of songs from other rooms. The psalms in their totality are the script for the people of God, themselves a temple wherein God is worshipped, so that in the singing of the psalms the two temples come together. Our task is to open ourselves to the risen Christ who prays within us, whose Spirit guides our prayer. Because the ongoing psalmody of the Church on earth is a participation in the action by which all men and women are reconciled to God, no other action of the Church, apart from the Eucharist from which it flows, surpasses it in efficacy (Sacrosanctum Concilium 7).

Let us conclude with the great passage on the Liturgy of the Hours from Pius XII’s encyclical Mediator Dei, the document that renewed the Church’s understanding of the liturgy as the prayer of Christ (1947). The present book is simply an attempt to draw out the implications of this paragraph for each of the 150 prayers in the Book of Psalms.

The Word of God, when He assumed a human nature, introduced into this land of exile the hymn that in heaven is sung throughout all ages. He unites the whole community of mankind with Himself and associates it with Him in singing this divine canticle of praise. We have to confess humbly that ‘we do not know what prayer to offer, to pray as we ought’; but ‘the Spirit himself intercedes for us, with groans beyond all utterance,’ and Christ Himself beseeches the Father through His Spirit in us. (144)

Let us then study the psalms as the language spoken to the Father by the humanity redeemed in Christ.

1. [O]mnes paene psalmi Christi personam sustinent: Filium ad Patrem, id est Christum ad Deum verba facientem repraesentant. Animadverte etiam Spiritum loquentem ex tertia persona de Patre et Filio (Adversus Praxean XI, 5–7 in Salmon, Les Tituli Psalmorum, 53 n. 23; all translations mine).

2. Enarrationes in Psalmos 85.1. A recent study summarizes Augustine’s approach as follows:

Neither the narrow life span of the individual prayer nor the limited history of Israel, but only the time-transcending subject of the whole Christ could entirely embrace and perfectly assimilate the individual and collective experiences condensed in the psalms, from lamenting de profundis to jubilant Alleluia, and so unite pilgrimage and war, exile and temple, cult-criticism and priestly sacrifice, royal dignity and levitical ministry, sickness and ecstasy, betrayal and brotherly concord that their spiritually-interpreted reality became the expression of a single life that endures from the morning of creation to the last day to reach fulfilment in eternity. (Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi, 425–26; my translation)

3. Hossfeld and Zenger, Die Psalmen, vol. 1, Psalm 1–50; vol. 2, Psalm 51–100 (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1993, 2002).

4. Quorum iugi pascuo vegetatus omnes quoque psalmorum adfectus in se recipiens ita incipiet decantare, ut eos non tamquam a propheta conpositos, sed velut a se editos quasi orationem propriam profunda cordis conpuncitione depromat vel certe ad suam personam aestimet eos fuisse directos, eorumque sententias non tunc tantummodo per prophetam aut in propheta fuisse conpletas, sed in se cotidie geri inplerique cognoscat.

5. For quotations from Scripture other than the Psalms, I rely on the Jerusalem Bible, the RSV, or my own translation.

6. See the helpful discussion by Robert Alter in the introduction to his translation of the Psalms, The Book of Psalms (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 32–33.

Psalms 1-150

PSALM 1    tree

The first psalm establishes an important principle: success in life comes from an absorption in the revealed will of God. The psalm is less a prayer than a statement of a spiritual truth, or rather the uttering of it becomes a praise of the truth it expresses. The psalm begins with a beatitude, a statement of who is happy, of which there are twenty-six in the psalter. The first requirement for happiness is a refusal to walk according to the plans of the wicked who have no interest in God’s will (v. 1), a refusal to stand on the way of sinners who act against God, a refusal to sit in the abode of scoffers. Amid the bewildering array of lifestyles a man must be careful where he derives his principles of behavior. He must reject attractive but deadly formulas for happiness and instead delight in the revelation of Israel’s God committed to writing in the Torah. In that book he finds that he is a member of a people specially chosen and loved by the Creator, a God who has given his people a land and a promise of life, and who has invited them freely to affirm his rights over all life. The Law includes all the great deeds the Lord has done for Israel and also the commands that delineate how men may please him to receive the fullness of his gifts. His will is a gracious will: he loves all that he has made and invites the men and women made in his image (Gen 1:26–27) to share in that love. The man who will be happy is the one who delights in the word that reveals the loving plan of God and murmurs it to himself day and night (v. 2). Men are invited to delight in the Lord’s revealed plan and keep it constantly present to mind and lips.

What is the result of this ongoing converse with the word of God? One becomes firmly rooted in existence like a tree by water channels that bears its fruit in its time and whose leaves never fade; all that such a man does prospers (v. 3). The man firmly rooted in God is Jesus, whose food was to do his Father’s will (John 4:34) and who did always what pleased the Father (John 8:29). He continually sought time with the Father in prayer (Luke 5:16, 6:12, 9:18, 28, 11:1, 22:41) and thought of his mission as the fulfilling of the Father’s plan expressed in the Old Testament (Luke 24:44–47). His love for the Father was shown in perfect obedience to the Father’s command (John 14:31), as a result of which he was raised to an everlasting life (Phil 2:9, Rom 6:9, 1 Pet 3:18). In his manhood he is eternally rooted in the Father and bears the fruit of everlasting life for all who accept him.

But this man is himself the incarnate Word of the Father (John 1:1, 14), and as such, a source of living water springing up to eternal life for those who are thirsty (John 4:14). This water is identified by Saint John with the Holy Spirit poured out from Christ’s body (John 7:37–39), like the spirit poured out on the thirsty soil to give life to abundant plants (Isa 44:3–4). The word Christ spoke and the Word he was¹ are spirit and life (John 6:63). The Christian who drinks in this water bears much fruit in Christ (John 15:5, 8, 16), bears the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22–23). By accepting the Spirit of the risen Jesus, the believer is incorporated into him, lives with his life. He cannot help but prosper because he lives with a divine life.

The wicked have no roots because their wickedness consists precisely in cutting themselves off from the giver of life; they are ephemeral, lacking substance, blown away like chaff in the wind (v. 4; cf. Luke 3:17). When men are judged on their basic choices, the wicked will not be left standing, nor sinners in the gathering of the just (v. 5), the counterpart of the group of scoffers (v. 1). For the Lord knows the way of the just (as he does not know those who sin, Matt 7:23, 25:12): their lives of conformity to his will are totally transparent, while the way of the wicked vanishes (v. 6). The Church is the assembly of all those who, delighting in the revealed will of God, bear the fruit of eternal life in Christ.

The psalmist has borrowed from two books of Scripture outside the Psalms, Joshua and Jeremiah. On the threshold of the land of Canaan, the Lord instructs Joshua to murmur the book of the Law day and night that he might prosper in all [his] ways (Jos 1:8). Thus both the second and third sections of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Prophets (Greater and Lesser) and the Writings (beginning with the Book of Psalms), begin by hearkening back to the first section, the Law or Torah. The image of the fruitful tree by running waters is taken from the prophet Jeremiah (Jer 17:7–8) where it is applied to the man who puts his trust in the Lord, a theme that undergirds the entire psalter. Continual converse with the law of the Lord and trust in him are but two aspects of a single willingness to draw life from him.

PSALM 2    son

If in Psalm 1 man is rooted in God, in Psalm 2 he is a son of God. If nations and peoples, kings and princes rebel against God and his representative on earth, it is because they do not understand the unbreakable bond between Israel’s God and his anointed king. God is the one who sits in the heavens (v. 4) and who has begotten the king as his son on the day of the king’s coronation (v. 7). Speaking through the prophet Nathan, God had said of David’s son, I will be a father to him and he a son to me (2 Sam 7:14). No other Israelite could boast of having God as his father like the reigning son of David. The king’s vocation was to administer on earth the justice of Yahweh himself (see esp. Ps 72). He would make the law of Yahweh obeyed on earth, with Yahweh there to support him in this task. The king had the right of asking for a worldwide rule and his father would grant what he asked, smashing all opposition (vv. 8–9). For a short time David and his son Solomon did enjoy a rule over Israel’s neighboring kingdoms (cf. 2 Sam 8:1–14).

Such a son of David was Jesus Christ (cf. Matt 20:30, 21:9, Rom 1:3, Acts 13:23). As son of David he was son of God like each one of the kings of Judah. But divinity radiated from his person as it had from no other king. He performed actions that only God could perform (Mark 1:27, 4:39–41), his words carried a divine authority (John 8:26–28, 18:6). He spoke what he had seen with his Father before he came into the world (John 8:38). His being reflected that of his Father (Heb 1:3). He was Son of God for all eternity before becoming incarnate as a son of David. He knew the innermost secrets of the Father: there was nothing the Father did not show him (John 5:20). In short, he was the equal of his Father, distinct from his Father but the same God. While the son of David had become an adopted son of God on the day of his coronation, Jesus has been Son of God by nature from all eternity. He is the reflection of the Father’s essence who appeared in human form. Jesus thus adds a totally unexpected meaning to the term son of God in our psalm: this descendant of David has shared God’s nature for all eternity.

The son enjoys an unparalleled intimacy with the Father. Whatever he asks is granted, in particular the spread of salvation to the ends of the earth. Through Christ God establishes his kingship over the world (1 Cor 15:28). But Christ wishes to share his divine sonship with men. Through baptism those who accept him become sons of God (Gal 3:26–27), brothers of Christ (Rom 8:29, John 20:17), members of his Body (1 Cor 12:27). Christ has become the firstborn of many brethren. Insofar as we are in him we are sons in the Son (Gaudium et spes 22). We have the right to say with the psalmist-king: The Lord said to me, ‘You are my son; it is I who have begotten you this day’ (v. 7). We share in the very relationship the divine Son of God has with his Father (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2780). We have all the privileges of the son in the house (cf. Heb 3:6): absolute assurance of our Father’s love and protection, intimate fellowship and communion, mutual knowledge, resemblance, sharing of concerns, cooperation in a single mission in the world. All these aspects of the father-son relationship will be developed in the psalms.

The son of God in our psalm is associated with a place: God’s holy mountain, Zion, the mountain on which Jerusalem and the temple were built. God’s rule radiates from this place. His king reigns from the very place where God dwells among men. For Christians this place is the Body of Christ, the earthly members of which form his Church. Christ’s reign extends from this body to incorporate all nations and peoples. Beginning with the very next psalm, the psalms will often localize God’s presence on Mount Zion, which for Christians designates the temple that is the Body of Christ, the Church, with its divinely ordained ministries. As the baptismal ritual puts it, we call God Father in the midst of the Church. God establishes his rule on earth through the people who believe in him and form a temple of living stones.

The revelation of the king as son of God emerges in Psalm 2 in an atmosphere of contention. The psalmist is amazed that the nations rage and the races murmur empty things against God’s rule through his king. The opening verse illustrates synonymous parallelism in a chiastic (reverse) order: the initial Why matches the final empty things, the verbs come second and second from the end, and the noun subjects meet in the middle. The verb murmur found in Psalm 1:2 is now used in a pejorative sense. From the outset the psalms display dynamic tensions among themselves, patterns of unity in contrast. Verse 2 introduces kings of the earth and rulers taking their stand and conspiring against the Lord and his messiah. The activity of the rebels culminates in the cry, Let us sunder their fetters; let us throw from us their bonds (v. 3).

But the speaker sees beyond the present crisis to abiding realities. The earthly drama is watched from above by the creator of the world, who laughs at the folly of man’s rebellion (cf. Pss 59:9, 37:13); the Master derides them (v. 4). The laughter quickly becomes anger, which is how man experiences the holiness of God when it is rejected. God does not wish to terrify (v. 5) man but to save him (1 Tim 2:4, John 3:17) by giving him life (John 10:10, Isa 55:3). Rejection of the gift deprives one of that life and so is experienced as a thwarting of one’s deepest longing. God’s anger is simply man’s experience of the consequences of his own rejection of divine goodness. ‘Wrath’ does not refer precisely to an emotion in God, but denotes the situation created by human defiance of the divine will (Byrne, Romans, 302). The anger of God against sin is good news (Rom 1:18) because it destroys man’s refusal to receive the divine love. Jesus manifested anger at the hardness of heart of the Pharisees (cf. Mark 3:5–6) because it prevented him from being able to save them and others. As the revolt scene in the opening of the psalm culminated in a speech, so God’s anger finds expression in words: It is I who have set my king on Zion my holy mountain (v. 6). The verse breaks the psalm’s pattern of synonymous parallelism: the second half of the line adds new information to the first rather than echo it.

At the heart of the psalm is the citation by the king of the Lord’s oracle, beginning with verse 7: My son are you, I today have begotten you. There follow the Lord’s promises to grant him the nations (cf. v. 1) as an inheritance and as his property the ends of the earth (v. 8), and to eliminate all resistance (v. 9). The six words of verse 9 are artfully arranged: verbs at beginning (you will shatter them) and end (you will dash in pieces) surround adverbial phrases, one expressing the victor’s instrument (with a rod of iron), the other a comparison for the vanquished (like a potter’s vessel). The Book of Revelation applies the verse to the victorious Christ (Rev 12:5, 19:15, reading with the LXX rule for shatter), who shares his rule with his loyal disciples (Rev 2:26–28).

In the light of this revelation of the king’s divine sonship, the speaker advises the rebel kings and rulers (lit. judges) to recognize the sovereignty of Israel’s God and his messiah (v. 10, chiasmus). They are to serve the Lord with fear, fear not that God will punish them but that they might reject his love. Such a fear of the Lord is entirely compatible with rejoic[ing] with trembling (v. 11). After a disputed two-word phrase (Kiss the son) the final verse (12) alludes both to the opening of the psalm (cf. anger, v. 5) and to the end of Psalm 1 (vanish on the way). The concluding beatitude, which makes an inclusion with Psalm 1:1, introduces the theme of taking refuge in God, a major theme in Book One (Pss 3–41).

The first two psalms lay the foundation for the intimacy between man and God developed in the rest of the psalms. Neither psalm is addressed directly to God, and neither is really a prayer. The first emphasizes man’s willingness to receive life from God, the second the divine initiative in the establishment of his kingdom.

PSALM 3    thousands

The first psalm to address God directly introduces the theme of trust, though the word itself is not used. Innumerable are the psalmist’s oppressors, innumerable those who rise against him and claim that there is no salvation for him in God (vv. 2–3). The psalmist has recourse to the divine name (vv. 2, 4), confessing the Lord as both a shield (cf. Gen 15:1) around him and one who lifts up [his] head in victory (v. 4). As in Psalm 2 the speaker sees an invisible savior behind an overwhelming present crisis.

The psalmist develops his confession of trust in three additional verses, speaking of God now in the third person. The first act of trust is to call aloud to the Lord; instantaneously the