O Lord, who may abide in your tent?
Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
and speak the truth from their heart;
who do not slander with their tongue,
and do no evil to their friends,
nor take up a reproach against their neighbors;
in whose eyes the wicked are despised,
but who honor those who fear the Lord;
who stand by their oath even to their hurt;
who do not lend money at interest,
and do not take a bribe against the innocent.
Those who do these things shall never be moved.
Psalm 15
Reflection
– This psalm is one of a several that are likely to
make us modern prayers of them just a bit uncomfortable. Namely, the psalms
where the psalmist speaks of the need—need—for
moral purity to enter the presence of God, to be in communion with Him.
In the original context, the reference to
tents and hills would have been to the temple in Jerusalem, and the state of
life necessary to enter into that temple and offer sacrifices to God.
Meanwhile, the ‘blamelessness’ referred to wholly exterior matters of ethical
conduct and ritual purity.
When we who are Christians pray this
psalm, we run into a problem, in that we understand blamelessness in a much
broader, deeper, and more interior context. We just heard yesterday Jesus identifying
love of God and love of neighbor as the heart of the Law, and both the Sermon
on the Mount and the new commandment in John 15 to ‘love as I have loved you’
bring out for us just how total this demand of love is, and just how little any
of us can claim to be truly blameless, how little any of us can seriously say
we always ‘do what is right.’
The temptation for us faced with a psalm
that contains at least implied claims of moral perfection (although this
particular psalmist at least does not say, ‘And that’s me, Lord, yep!’) is to
simply not pray it. Wrong answer! This is Scripture; this is part of the prayer
patrimony of the Church. It is for us to see what this psalm really means for
us, and to go deep in our meditation for that purpose.
Well, Jesus is the blameless one, of
course. So first, this psalm has to be prayed Christologically if it is to be
prayed at all. Only the man Jesus can truly merit to dwell in the courts of
God, and our ability to enter those courts and dwell in them is only possible
through, with, and in Him. When this psalm makes us feel a little
uncomfortable, that discomfort is meant not to drive us away from the psalm,
but towards Jesus who is the Just One who makes possible what is impossible for
us by our own power.
But in our Catholic understanding, Jesus
does not simply cover over our blame with his blamelessness. Yes, He does this,
but in doing this He communicates His moral righteousness to us. Grace does not
simply make up for what is lacking in us; grace transforms us into what we are
not. In other words, it is the very nature of the grace of communion with
Christ that it both calls us into a process of conversion and effects that
conversion.
In the painful discussions going on right
now around the Eucharist and who may or may not receive it, this fundamental
dynamic, the intrinsic connection between communion and conversion, has to be
kept in view. No, the Eucharist is not only for the perfect (I would be the
first one to excuse myself from the table if that were so). But the Eucharist
is for those who desire to be perfected,
and who have made the first graced movements towards that perfection by
repenting of grave sin and receiving the forgiveness of God lavished freely in
the sacrament of reconciliation.
Jesus, and His Church, do indeed welcome
all to the banquet table of the Lord. But it is the Lord’s banquet table, not
ours, and God calls us all to examine ourselves thoroughly, with great humility
of heart and contrition, for we all have sinned, and to not approach that
banquet with hands and hearts unwashed by the fountains of mercy made so easily
available to us in the sacrament of mercy.
To deny one is a sinner, to insist that
one has a ‘right’ to enter the banquet, to stand on one’s own blamelessness, or
to define all these terms in one’s own way and not God’s way—these are terrible,
spiritually dangerous stances to adopt. And the Church, in my view, is being
profoundly merciful in instructing people who will not humbly accept God’s laws
as they are and so amend their lives in accordance with those laws to refrain
from approaching the table. Not because ‘they are not worthy’ – none of us are
worthy. But because they are not in their current state allowing Christ to
communicate his blamelessness to them, and hence are not able to truly receive
the gift of communion.
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