O Lord, in your strength the king rejoices,
and in your salvation how greatly he exults!
You have given him his heart's desire
and have not withheld the request of his lips.
For you meet him with rich blessings;
you set a crown of fine gold upon his head.
He asked life of you; you gave it to him,
length of days forever and ever.
His glory is great through your salvation;
splendor and majesty you bestow on him.
For you make him most blessed forever;
you make him glad with the joy of your presence.
For the king trusts in the Lord,
and through the steadfast love of the Most High he shall not be moved.
Your hand will find out all your enemies;
your right hand will find out those who hate you…
Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength!
We will sing and praise your power.
Psalm 21: 1-7, 13
Reflection
– Today’s instalment in the Monday Psalter may leave us initially a bit
flat, a bit unsure what this has to do with us. Most of us are not kings. Most
of us are not in battles, at least not the literal kind. Most of us have at
best seen a crown of fine gold in a museum, and are not likely to have one set
on our heads any time soon.
All this does remind us that the psalms are prayers
from a very long time ago (this one undoubtedly dates back to David or
Solomon), products of a very different world that may not immediately apply to
us. How are we to pray this psalm and make it our own?
Of course our first connection is to go through David
and Solomon to Christ. Any ‘king’ reference in the Old Testament should recall
to us that we do have a king, that his kingdom is eternal, and that we are his
subjects. And this king, in this psalm, is utterly victorious—the verses I
omitted for space reasons are all about the total overthrow and humiliation of
his enemies, their complete confounding. This is for us supremely a psalm of
the resurrection, of the ascension, of the second coming.
But this leads us to a meditation on the nature of his
victory, and the nature of ‘victory’ in general. In the original reading of the
psalm, there is no question that it is an actual physical battle that is being
celebrated, with swords and arrows and shields and all the works of war. The
ancient world was a war-like place, violent and brutal—pacifism did not present
itself as an option.
Well, without belabouring a rather obvious point to
anyone not living under a rock this past week, we still live in a world of
violence, where at least some portion of humanity considers the only victory
possible to be the slaughtering of its enemies and the taking of vengeance
against those who offend it.
This psalm, because we as Christians can only pray it
as a meditation on Christ’s victory, invites us to contemplate the ‘battle
plan’ of our saviour, the way in which he won the victory which we do believe
has been won definitively. It is not by the sword, or the rocket launcher, or
the fighter plane, that victory is won in this world—the real victory, the
victory over sin and death and hatred and fear.
Christ won the victory by suffering love, by obedience
to his Father and by infinite compassion for all human beings, even and perhaps
especially those howling for his death.
‘Crucify Him! Crucify Him!.. Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do.’
As we pass through these difficult days—and I fear
there will be more violence, more terror before we are through them—we who are
Christians must hold fast to the victory of Christ and how it was won. Love is stronger than death; light is stronger than darkness; Christ is risen from the dead, and the path to
that resurrection and life is the path he laid down for us, of humble love and
service, of forgiveness and mercy.
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