O Lord, our Sovereign, how
majestic is your name in all the earth!
I will give thanks to the Lord
with my whole heart; I will tell of your wonderful deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you; I
will sing praise to your name, O Most High.
When my enemies turned back, they
stumbled and perished before you.
For you have maintained my just
cause; you have sat on the throne giving righteous judgment.
You have rebuked the nations, you
have destroyed the wicked;
you have blotted out their name
forever and ever…
The Lord is a stronghold for the
oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.
And those who know your name put
their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.
Sing praises to the Lord, who
dwells in Zion. Declare his deeds among the peoples.
For he who avenges blood is
mindful of them; he does not forget the cry of the afflicted.
Be gracious to me, O Lord. See
what I suffer from those who hate me;
you are the one who lifts me up
from the gates of death, so that I may recount all your praises, and, in the
gates of daughter Zion, rejoice in your deliverance…
The wicked shall depart to Sheol, all
the nations that forget God.
For the needy shall not always be
forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever.
Rise up, O Lord! Do not let
mortals prevail; let the nations be judged before you.
Put them in fear, O Lord; let the
nations know that they are only human.
Psalm 9: 1-5, 7-14, 17-20
Reflection – This
is the first time in the Monday Psalter that I cannot print the entire psalm
text on the blog—Psalm 9 is just a little too long for that. This is a psalm
that probably does not rank among many people’s personal favorites. At first
glance it is simply a reiteration of a theme that at times gets a little
monotonous in the psalms: we have enemies; God, destroy our enemies; God did destroy our enemies. Hurray! Repeat
as needed.
When you pray the
entire psalter, as those of who pray the full office do over a four-week
period, the large number of psalms more or less taken up with these matters is
a bit disconcerting. The ancient world lived in a state of perpetual warfare
and constant threat of destruction. If it wasn’t the Assyrians, it was the
Babylonians, and then the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans. And before all that
time of imperial conquest and dominance, it was a whole era of smaller tribes
continually jostling for territory and slaying each other in the process.
And the people of
Israel were pretty small potatoes in all this, much more often the conquered
and the slain then the victorious conquerors. So it makes sense that in their
psalmody questions of the enemy and what to do with them, the crying out to God
for redress and the jubilant exultation when deliverance comes all are
prevalent themes.
For us, though? These
psalms push us somewhere that may seem a bit alien to us. I, personally, have
never had a gun pointed at me, let alone held to my head. I have never been
beaten up, never been faced with real hunger, never been in fear of my life. I
realize I am profoundly, deeply lucky in these matters, and that not everyone
in my North American social context, let alone elsewhere, can say those things.
But we are, as a
society, largely blessed with security and peace, at least compared to much of
the rest of the world, much of the rest of human history. But this psalm, and
such psalms, push us regardless of our own personal situation into a deep
solidarity with humanity and its suffering, the anguish of the poor, the terror
of the victimized and brutalized. We pray this psalm for and with the Yazidi
people, for and with the kidnapped children of Nigeria, for and with all the
terrorized and the refugees, the tortured and the slain.
And this particular
psalm is a cry to the just God who works justice, who is the savior of His
people. This too pushes us deep into the mystery of faith. God’s salvation and
God’s deliverance is a mighty mysterious thing at times. Without a faith in
heaven and eternal life, it is hard to see how we can pray this psalm at all—so
many live and die in this world without seeing any obvious deliverance of God.
So this psalm which may
not be our most beloved favorite takes us both deeply into the heart of suffering
humanity, and bears us into the heart of the mystery of faith. All flesh is
crying out to God for justice and salvation; all flesh yearns to see this
deliverance; all flesh cries for God to rise up and raise us up with Him in the
glorious victory of good over evil, love over hate, God over all. Amen.