Shout for joy in the Lord, O
you righteous! Praise befits the upright.
Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre; make
melody to him with the harp of ten strings!
Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the
strings, with loud shouts.
For the word of the Lord is upright, and all
his work is done in faithfulness.
He loves righteousness and justice; the earth
is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his
mouth all their host.
He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap; he
puts the deeps in storehouses.
Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the
inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!
For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded,
and it stood firm.
The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to
nothing;
he frustrates the plans of
the peoples.
The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the
plans of his heart to all generations.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,
the people whom he has chosen
as his heritage!
The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all
the children of man;
from where he sits enthroned he looks out on
all the inhabitants of the earth,
he who fashions the hearts of them all and
observes all their deeds.
The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior
is not delivered by his great strength.
The war horse is a false hope for salvation,
and by its great might it cannot rescue.
Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who
fear him,
on those who hope in his steadfast love,
that he may deliver their soul from death and
keep them alive in famine.
Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help
and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him, because we trust
in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you.
Psalm 33
Reflection – Our Monday Psalter has
brought us to a happy place where the psalm we have reached is most suitable to
the liturgical season we are in. I would have hated to have to write about a
psalm of lamentation or great distress when the Church’s liturgy is calling us
to rejoice in the Lord’s victory.
Well, here
we are, and here is God’s victory. I haven’t written about Easter yet, except
for the news roundup of how we did it in MH this year. It is good to reflect on
it from this angle of Psalm 33. I especially like the part ‘he frustrates the
plans of the people. The counsel of the Lord stands forever.’
The human plan
for God was to kill Him and be done with Him forever—to be able to write our
own story, make our own way, be saved in the way we chose to be saved, decide
for ourselves what is what and what will be.
This is the
human plan, although we usually dress it up under a hundred fair-looking
costumes. Our plan is ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ God’s plan is a simple one:
‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling on death by death, and on those in
the tombs lavishing life.’
And this is
the victory of God over the world and over you and me—not a victory that
destroys us, but certainly a victory that destroys our rebellion against Him,
our self-willed autonomy and self-determination.
We are not
self-determined, which really means self-limited, self-defining, self-enclosed.
God bursts forth from the tomb, and God bursts forth from the tomb of our human
smallness, the ‘place of the skull’ which we all carry around just above our
silly necks. God was put to death in that place, but He rises and in rising
shatters the limitations of human ideas and plans and purposes.
And the
rapturous praise, the delight, the joy, the singing with ten-stringed harp—all of
that good stuff is the only thing we can do, the only fit response we can have
to this victory of God in the world. So—and I do realize this is a very simple
and obvious word for the Easter season—let us remember to praise God this day,
this week, these next weeks of the year until Pentecost wraps up the Paschal
time, and beyond that to eternity. Alleluia.
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