Category Archives: Psalms

Psalmcast Episode 10 Transcription

Introduction

 

Hi, I’m Derek Olsen, creator of St. Bede Productions. I’m an Episcopal layman with a PhD in New Testament and a passion for the intersection of Liturgy and Scripture. Welcome to Episode 10 of the St. Bede Psalmcast, a podcast about the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary, reading them in the context of the Sunday service and alongside the Church Fathers. We had a bit of an unexpected hiatus from Holy Week through the Easter season. This was due to my wife taking a new position as rector of a congregation and all of the various shifts in our family routine that that caused, but also because several major projects I have been working on have reached some major milestones. The two big ones here are a new recode of the St. Bede’s Breviary which is up on my test site now, and also the finishing work on my next book on the spirituality of the Prayer book coming out from Forward Movement next month. So—check out the new release of the breviary if that interests you; I’ll put a link in the show notes—and keep an eye out for the book, and I’ll let you know when that shows up on Amazon and other places. Before that happens, though, we need to get on with this episode of the psalmcast!  Today we’ll be talking about Psalm 8, the psalm appointed for the Feast of the Holy Trinity which this year falls on May 22nd, 2016.

 

Lectionary Context

 

So, why is this psalm appointed here for this day?

Clearly, the Feast of the Holy Trinity is different from an ordinary Sunday. This is a feast that celebrates a doctrine, so all of the lectionary selections are referring in some way to the interrelations between the three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Now—here’s the thing… The doctrine of the Trinity is one that flowed fundamentally out of Christian experience. They had powerful spiritual experiences and through these gained the solid conviction that God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were all divine in the same way; but figuring out exactly what that meant and what that means for us was a pretty complicated task.

Some people criticize the doctrine of the Trinity and the Creeds which define this for us and point to it as a real departure from the simple faith of the Palestinian peasant Jesus. They’ll point to the creeds coming out of councils convened by the Emperor Constantine and the Greek philosophical terms that get all thrown around in those debates and say, “Ah! This is what happened, this is where it all got messed up! This whole notion of the Trinity is where the simple faith of Jesus got high jacked by Empire and philosophy and dogmatism and where everything went to pot.”

The best response to these sort of critiques—or even allegations—is to go back to the starting point. The truth of the Trinity flows out of Christian spiritual experience. So, all of the apostles, Mary, all the disciples as good Jewish believers would have regularly recited the Sh’ma: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” However, they soon began to feel the continuing resurrection power of Jesus in their lives and also the on-going presence of the Holy Spirit, guiding, directing, and purifying them. So, they were working with the data of their spiritual experience. God is one as the Scriptures and the Jewish confession insists. However, there were these three persons who impacted them in powerful and important ways.

So—now at this point—the early Christians then went back to the Scriptures to see if they could find clues hidden away in the Old Testament and in the New to help them make intellectual sense of their spiritual data. So, starting with a conviction about the Trinity, they dug back into the texts. Also—at the same time—the Church engaged all of tools that they had—including philosophy—as a means of wrapping language around this mystery that they were all experiencing together. And that’s where the Greek philosophy comes to all of this: it was the framework that they had in order to try and wrap language around this experience that they were having.

Don’t ever think that Constantine sat a bunch of bishops down and said, “Now—think up a new idea that we can use to destroy the simple faith of Jesus and do something else with instead.” No—it didn’t work like that. And this is pretty clear for several reasons: the first and most obvious is that if a bunch of guys had sat down and dreamed this up out of nothing—it would have made a hell of a lot more sense! It would have been easy and clear and straightforward—but it’s not… And that’s not because some guys made some stuff up; rather it was because they started not with thinking, but with the data of Christian spiritual experience.

Alright—why did I just go on that big tear; wasn’t I supposed to be talking about the other lectionary readings grouped around our psalm? Yes, yes, I was. But! We had to get that out of the way so that we would understand properly what it is that we are looking at in our lectionary readings.

The first reading comes from Proverbs 8. Which, looking at it historically, really doesn’t seem like the best choice at all. So. Proverbs 8 is one of several creation stories that are sprinkled throughout the Old Testament. Yes, we’re most familiar with the one at the start of the Bible, but actually we have two different ones slammed together there, on in Genesis 1 and then a different on in Genesis 2-3. This shouldn’t bother anybody—just like it didn’t bother our Hebrew and Jewish ancestors in the faith. None of these stories were intended to be scientific accounts; instead they are all spiritual metaphors that get across the main point—God made everything, God is in control of everything, and everything was made both well and good. That’s the key here.

Hence, our Old Testament reading is Proverbs 8. Basically, it tells the creation story from the perspective of Wisdom. Now—given the placement of the reading and what it says, the *assumption* is that Wisdom here must be a member of the Trinity, and many readings assume that. Wisdom is a major focus of and a recurring character within the Bible’s Wisdom literature and is personified as a woman. The key reasons for this are because in Hebrew (and also in Greek), the word wisdom (hochma or sophia) are grammatically feminine, but also because the literature sets up wisdom as an object of desire for the male scribe or sage who is seeking after it. Modern Feminist theology has made an identification between Wisdom or Sophia and the Holy Spirit and thus in parishes like the one I attend, you’ll often hear people refer to the Holy Spirit as “she” or “her” and that’s why.

However, in the early Church, wisdom was understood to be Jesus and so in direct reference to this passage and especially the image in verse 27 of “drawing a circle on the face of the deep” there’s a famous manuscript illustration of Christ the architect with a compass, drawing the circle on the face of the deep. The reason why this is such an odd reading for Trinity Sunday is because verse 22 was one of the chief prooftexts for the Arian heresy that argued that Jesus was a created being rather than being God. That Jesus was the very first and the very best of all creatures, but still a creature. Orthodoxy, said, no, Jesus is God and always was God, and therefore isn’t a creation of any kind.

Ok—so that’s Proverbs 8. We could say a lot more about this reading but this is a podcast about the Psalm and we haven’t gotten there yet. The reason why I went into such detail here is to give you a sense of this search for the Trinity that the early Church undertook that will be important in talking about our psalm, and to show you the mindset of the church as it read the psalter.

Real quick, the Romans 5 passage talks about the confluence of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as we experience justification and the growth of virtue into sanctification. The Gospel is John 16—again. And, yes, your preacher is probably running out of things to say about this passage too because we’ve been working in it for the last half of Easter it seems.

 

Interpretive Context

 

Now, is there other information we need to help us understand what’s going on? 

 

You’d think not after everything that I’ve already said, but no! There’s some other stuff that we’ve got to talk about now… The key thing we need to address at this point is inclusive language. I consider myself a feminist which I would define as the radical notion that women are people too and deserve to be treated as such. I have a wife who is a priest and I’ve seen people and institutions treat her in ways that they would never treat a man. I’ve seen her asked questions that would never be asked of a man. I have two daughters, and I firmly believe that their gender should never be an artificial barrier to what they want to accomplish, nor should they have to live, work, or play in an attitude of fear because of a society that hides or ignores violence against women which is a reality and that we need to address in some pretty major ways. So—let’s get that out of the way at the beginning.

 

You run into discussions about two particular topics around inclusive language in the church. The easiest way to say it is that there’s horizontal inclusive language and vertical inclusive language, there’s inclusive language about people and there’s inclusive language about God. I regard these two as separate. That is, we’re dealing with different sets of issues when we consider each. Today we need to look at the first, not the second. That is, we’re looking at inclusive language around people—the horizontal perspective—not inclusive or expansive language about God.

 

The Bible was produced in a patriarchal culture. Men were the ones who could read and write. They were the ones who could be priests and scribes. As a result, the basic, flat assumption was that literate culture was about men writing to men. So you see “he” and “the man” or “men” or “brothers” all over the place. Horizontal inclusive language recognizes that this isn’t our world or our experience anymore. Literacy is not restricted to men. And while some authors might intend the term “men” to be inclusive and to be synonymous with “humanity,” it’s not on a basic plain-sense reading of the text by a modern American used to modern texts. Thus, when the traditional-language version of the creed says that Jesus became incarnate “for us men and for our salvation”, it’s not intending to exclude women, it assumes women are in there, but you can see how a regular American reader off the street might read it that way.

 

There are two ways to address this. One is education. We teach people to realize that references to men are, for the most part and in most cases, simply generic references to human beings. That’s how I read our traditional language, Rite I service; that’s how my girls and my wife read it—and, yes, they like Rite I as well. The other way to address it is to edit the scandal out while retaining the intention. So, when Paul—who was actually quite progressive on women’s issues for his time—says “brothers” we know he is addressing the whole congregation so it’s still within the intention of the text to translate it “brothers and sisters.” This is the tack taken by the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (the NRSV) which is the most widely used Bible in the Episcopal Church and most mainline denominations. The prayer book usually uses this approach as well. “Brothers” becomes “brothers and sisters” and the generic use of “the man” in order to refer to an individual gets turned into a plural. So instead of “the man” and the subsequent use of “he,” you get “they”.

 

Hence, Psalm 1. The King James starts: “Blessed is the man”, the NRSV has: “Happy are those” while the prayer book has “Happy are they.”

 

Psalm 112. The King James has “Blessed is the man”, the NRSV has “Happy are those”, and the prayer book has “Happy are they.”

 

Alright—now we get to the point. Take a look at verse 5 of our psalm. The King James has “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” The NRSV has “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” The prayer book has: “What is man that you should be mindful of him? The son of man that you should seek him out?”

 

Where the prayer book usually utilizes inclusive language and typically makes a move to the plural, in this case it doesn’t. And this is really important. The translators of the prayer book psalter made an informed theological decision here. This has absolutely nothing to do with a wavering commitment to inclusive language, rather, it points to a broader awareness of Christian Scripture.

 

I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll say it again: It’s really hard to overstate how important the psalms are to early Christian thinking about Jesus. When we alter the words of the psalter we alter not only what is read but what can be read and how we understand what other people read. Most Christians aren’t terribly familiar with the Letter to the Hebrews. It’s a letter of the New Testament stashed at the end of Paul’s letters because while it has a vaguely Pauline vibe going on, it’s not from Paul, and does different things from what Paul typically does. The first few chapters of Hebrews in particular are a running discussion of the “elementary doctrine of Christ” (Heb 6:1) as read out of the psalter. Thus, chapter 2 of Hebrews opens with a discussion of Psalm 8 and in particular give us this passage; I’m quoting from the RSV here: “For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man that thou art mindful of him,

or the son of man, that thou carest for him?

Thou didst make him for a little while lower than the angels,

thou hast crowned him with glory and honor,

putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” (Heb 2:5-9)

 

So, Hebrews is making a connection between “Son of Man” drawing from the Book of Daniel and from the title used throughout the Gospels, with this psalm and Jesus. This works if the psalm is making reference to “a man” and leaves the phrase “son of man” intact. It works in the RSV. It fails miserably in the NRSV. The whole argument in Hebrews is fundamentally altered and misread in the NRSV because they retain the inclusive plural both in the psalm and then try to inject that into the argument in Hebrews. It simply doesn’t work right!

 

So, that’s a really long—and potentially contentious—way of saying that Psalm 8 has historically been read in the church not only as a statement on the dignity of humanity, but more particularly in relation to Christ and the status of Christ—which then (finally) is why we get this particular psalm appointed for us for the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

 

I realize that was rather long and tortured, but I hope you could follow it…

 

Incidentally. Psalm 1 which we hit up there was classical read about Jesus as well—when it says “blessed is the man” that was seen as the first psalm introducing the theme of Christ which would then run throughout. In a modern version when we read “Blessed are those” or “Blessed are they” that’s not even a potential reading and lops off centuries of Christian interpretation.

 

So to just wrap up the inclusive language tangent, I see nothing at all wrong with the use of the NRSV and other translations that use inclusive language in the public assembly and as a way to get people into Scripture without the burden of an apparently patriarchal perspective. However, my personal preference for private devotional use when I’m using English is the RSV because I understand that it’s referring to women as well as men and because that way I don’t have that filter between me and the language of the text.

 

Historical Readings

 

Since we’re not the first Christians to read the psalms, what insights have others found within this text before we came along?

 

This is typically the section where I’d start talking about Cassiodorus and Augustine, but—honestly—I’m going to skip them today. If you’ve spent any time with this podcast, you know where they’re going: this text is right in their wheelhouse. Obviously, the man, the Son of Man is Jesus so they follow the lead of Hebrews and see this as the voice of the Church praising Christ. Just a few quick notes, then—Cassiodorus sees this psalm as one of a group of 8 other psalms that specifically focus on the two natures of Christ and emphasize the humanity of Jesus alongside his divinity. Also, at the very end of his thoughts, Cassiodorus makes reference to and quotes from Ambrose’s Christmas hymn Intende qui regis Israel better known from its second verse, Veni redemptor gentium which we have as numbers 54 and 55 in our hymnal.

 

Thematic Reading

 

How do we read this psalm on this day?

 

The way I read this psalm is that we have a strong interpretive center of gravity around verses 4 to 7 which is then bookended by an internal antiphon that starts and ends the psalm. Thus, the theological center is these verses:

 

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, *

The moon and stars, you have set in their courses,

What is man that you should be mindful of him?

The son of man that you should seek him out?

You have made him but little lower than the angels;

You adorn him with glory and honor;

You give him mastery over the works of your hands;

You put all things under his feet.

 

Now, there are two major approaches to hearing and pondering these lines. The first is the classical approach, the approach Hebrews takes, the approach the fathers took and to see the references to “man” and “son of man” as being references to Christ. The second is to understand these as generic references to humanity. Now, I believe that there is a single correct answer here, and that answer is: both! We get the fullest sense of the text and the fullest revelation and insight into who God is and who God is for us, when we see that these two methods reinforce and strengthen one another. Thus, you get more meaning and better meaning when you read them together than if you try to go with either one or the other.

 

Let’s tease out the first option first, reading son of man as a Jesus reference and play with that for a little bit. I think our natural starting place is to see the speaker of the psalm addressing God the Father. In this sense, then, we move from creation to the notion of incarnation. We start with the heavens, then we move to Jesus. What is man, the son of man? Well—he is one who took on our flesh and is indeed a figure singled out from amongst all creation. In his self-emptying humility (be thinking Philippians 2 here) he has willingly taken upon himself the limitations of flesh and humanity for the purpose of transforming humanity and the human experience with exaltation as a result. And, as Episcopalians, we shouldn’t be able to hear verse 7 here without a line from Eucharistic prayer B rattling around in our heads: “In the fullness of time, put all things in subjection under your Christ…” That’s what we’re talking about here.

 

Now, let’s play with this angle a little bit. Cassiodorus puts this psalm in mouth of the Church. So this is us singing our praise to God. Great, that’s fine. But—as a thought experiment—how does it change what we hear, if we hear this psalm in the voice of Jesus rather than the church? What if we hear this as Christ’s own words and ponderings to the Godhead? Clearly as an observant Jew and as who prayed the psalms, this is one he must have prayed, particularly given his apparent fondness for night-time vigils. I’m not trying to make a point here—I’m just raising the question: how does it change the way we hear this if we hear him speaking it?

 

Now let’s do one more transformation on it… We’ll get into some potentially confusing territory here so let’s define some terms: the ontological Trinity is a statement of the persons of the Trinity be means of the dominant metaphors by which they are known to us in Scripture and in the Tradition and that’s the familiar : Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then there’s the economic Trinity. This has seen a lot of us in recent years, but much of that use has been imprecise or potentially misleading. The economic Trinity is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, but if we’re going to use it we need to get one thing straight up front. This is not the same as the other. Because this refers to core functions carried out by the whole, united, Godhead. Let me say this another way. These are the three core things that the Trinity does together, not three separate roles or modes or jobs done by the three separate persons. What does that mean? The easiest way to say it is like this: When we look at Scripture we see places where God the Father is creating. We get this in Genesis 2 and 3. We see Jesus the Son creating: We get this in John 1 with the notion of the Logos as the fundamental structuring device of all of Creation. We see the Holy Spirit creating in Genesis 1 as it moves across the waters of chaos. We see God the Father redeeming when the Israelites are led out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm. We See Jesus the Son redeeming in his work on the cross. We see the Holy Spirit redeeming In Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones… The point I’m making here is that while we might see one person doing one of these things, these are done by the whole Trinity and are not unique to one person and that’s the problem with the way that it so often gets used as a non-gendered replacement for the ontological Trinity. If we’re not taught correct we can fall into thinking that the Father is the Creator, the Son is the Redeemer and the Spirit is the Sustainer. But that’s not what the Church teaches and that matters because of the ways that we encounter, experience, and consider the Trinity working in our own lives. We can’t and shouldn’t compartmentalize.

 

The reason I even dared to enter these waters is just this: What if we see this psalm as the Church’s words addressed to Christ? The moon and stars are no less the works of his hands than God the Father’s. And what we get when we consider this angle is the kind of paradox that see in hymns like Quem terra pontus: “The Word whom earth and sea and sky adore and laud and magnify, whose might they show whose praise to tell, in Mary’s body deigned to dwell.” (That’s hymn 263 in the ‘82 Hymnal.) And then, this hits back to the Proverbs 8 reading a bit based on however you decide to read that.

 

Now—if we change up and read the psalm talking man and son of man as generic humanity, then we get another interesting set of things to ponder. The people of the Ancient Near East lived in a far smaller and much more compact universe than we do. That is, conceptually, their grasp of how the world was made and its boundaries were miniscule. The habitable portion of earth is this little bubble of air  suspended in the waters above the firmament and the waters below the firmament. That’s it. We know so much more. We know about solar systems and galaxies, and clusters and things that defy the imagination to try and wrap our understanding around the scope and distances involved. If they looked up and were amazed at the immensity of what they saw, how much more should we be amazed at what we see and can’t grasp? The night sky now, as then, gives a glimpse of our cosmic insignificance. The lifespan of our entire planet, billions of years old is literally a blip on the screen of cosmic time. We aren’t the center of the universe, in fact we’re nowhere near it, we’re in a minor arm of a minor galaxy.

 

Which just puts more punch behind verse 5: “What is a person that you should be mindful of me, of humanity that you should seek us out?” As someone who approaches thing from a very intellectual angle, verse 4 is easy for me. It’s easy to see and consider a transcendent God who sits in the center of these great cosmic mechanisms and keeps everything spinning. That makes sense to me. I don’t have to stretch to consider that. But that’s the rational, Deist, clockmaker God. Verse 5 cuts at what’s hard: the immanent God who loves, who knows who cares, who is present to and for a minor person of a minor species living in the minor arm of a minor galaxy. Opening ourselves, our minds and hearts to that truth, that’s mind-blowing. And, it’s precisely at that intersection that the line from the Creed is so important: who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven.” For you; for me. This is Christ for us.

 

And then in verse 6 we get a biblical humanism. We are not God. We are so far from God. And yet we are not without dignity. We possess a dignity from our creation in the image of God and in that Christ has taken on our form and our experience and that the Holy Spirit chooses to dwell within us and guide us. We can speak of a positive humanism that sees us and our efforts and useful and meaningful in light of God’s activity with us.

 

The last point we need to touch on—briefly—relates to then how we read verse 7 and the mastery over creation. Real quick, it’s pretty easy to get an ecological theology out of the psalms. The starting place is Psalm 89: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” The earth, the creation belongs to God and any mastery humanity has is a form of stewardship. Furthermore, the psalms hasten to remind us that the various elements of creation are all fellow witness with us of and to the glory of God. When we destroy or despoil the creation, we are silencing witnesses to God’s own grandeur and greatness—and that ought to make us all take pause. There’s a lot more we could say on that but we’re running a little long as it is…

 

So—to sum up: Psalm 8 gives us an interesting perspective on the Trinity. Reading it from one perspective gives us a meditation on a God who is simultaneously transcendent, the distant creator and maintainer of the great cycles of creation and the cosmos, yet who is also imminent and present with us in a variety of ways. From another perspective, we ponder Christ who honored human nature with his incarnation and who reveals to us a Trinity eager to know and be known. On this Feast of the Holy Trinity, this psalm reminds us that for us the Trinity is foremost and experience and then secondarily and based off of that a doctrine. We believe it because it helps us wrap our words and our minds around what we have first experienced to be true of God.

 

 

Conclusion

 

So—that’s what we have to say today about Psalm 8 as the psalm appointed for the Feast of the Holy Trinity in Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.  If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends about it and leave a review on iTunes. You can find more of my thoughts at www.StBedeproductions.com and follow me on Twitter (and there’s a link you can follow on my blog and in the show notes.) Until next time, I’m Derek Olsen for St. Bede Productions.

 

The path you must follow is in the Psalms—never leave it.

St. Bede Psalmcast: Episode 10

The 10th episode of the St. Bede Psalmcast is now up! It’s a wide-ranging discussion of Psalm 8, the Scripture appointed for the The Feast of the Holy Trinity, that gets into a number of hot-button topics and unexpected places. If nothing else, this episode gives credence to my dictum that the psalms provide the perfect starting place to get into almost any branch of Christian theology and practice!

 

The St. Bede Psalmcast: Episode 7

Here’s Episode 7 of the Psalmcast on Psalm 99, the psalm appointed for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C.

The guest appearance today is from my cat Tenebrae. Apparently he felt that he didn’t get quite enough exposure by being the one of the February models in Foward Movement’s Episcocat Calendar and graced us with his presence here. You’ll hear him purring starting around 17 minutes…

The book I referred to is Jon Levenson’s Sinai and Zion. Heartily recommended!

I’ve started experimenting with Pinterest as a way to collect research pieces for the show that are primarily visual; the Pinterest board for this show is here: Episode 7 Board.

My original intention when I started the Psalmcast was a 20-minute show. Recent episodes have been creeping much longer than that. This one is right about 20, but that’s largely because the Cassiodus/historical section got the shaft… In this case, I don’t feel too bad about it. He didn’t have anything too interesting to say, and the Ancient Near Eastern stuff plays a larger role in this one in my opinion.

 

https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep007-psalm-99-yrc-epiphany-last

 

The St. Bede Psalmcast: Episode 6

This episode of the psalmcast looks at Psalm 19, the psalm appointed for the Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, in the Revised Common Lectionary.

The image is Christ departing the tabernacle in the sun from f.10v of the Utrecht Psalter.

Too, the Psalmcast has its own Facebook page now! Go like it…

 

https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep006-psalm-19-yrc-epiphany-3

On Bede and the Psalms

I have taken St. Bede as my patron because he represents an ideal for me: a spiritually grounded interpreter who fundamentally exists within the cycle of the church’s prayer and who reads and interprets Scripture in conscious connection with the Fathers, with intellectual rigor, for the purpose of edifying souls. I’ve not written anything on why I’ve specifically adopted him as patron of the St Bede Psalmcast as well aside from a general sense of consistency, but I couldn’t resist sharing this quotation from M. J. Toswell’s The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (pricey, I know, but *awesome* nonetheless…) which can go a long way towards doing that job for me:

For Bede, then, the psalter was a kind of intellectual home base. It was a text he could call to mind at will, probably even without volition, and use as a bridge from the Old Testament to the New, from prophecy to fulfillment, from literal and historical analysis to allegory. Bede made mention of the psalms as part f the ordinary course of his writing, interleaving quotations from the psalter so deeply into his works that at times it becomes difficult to tease out the original text. The psalms were alive in Bede’s mind; because of his own deep spirituality, daily butressed by the singing and recitation of the Office, and because of his constant interweaving of them into his thinking about every other question of Christian doctrine or ecclesiastical history that he chose to explore. The psalms were Bede’s spiritual companions; like many others, he chanted them on his deathbed during every part of the day not already occupied with other matters. Psalm reference made understanding Christian doctrine easier for the laity, and Bede used the psalms to encourage devotion and deeper thought on these issues. His lifelong engagement with the psalms was a lifelong engagement with the challenge of understanding and explicating the fundamental text of Christian spirituality. At the same time, Bede is in no way unusual amongst the church fathers. His engagement with the psalms was the engagement of a committed Christian intellectual. It offered a model, and a challenge, for other Anglo-Saxon Christians. (Toswell, A-S Psalter, p. 63)

Emphasis is my own…

The St. Bede Psalmcast: Episode 5

Here is Episode 5 of the St. Bede Psalmcast. My reader this week is production assistant Greta, and the image comes from British Library, Harley 3244, f. 38r.

Included in the discussion is a reference to Rudolf Otto; I forgot to mention the book, but it’s this one: The Idea of the Holy

https://soundcloud.com/user-657912221/ep005-psalm-29-yrc-epiphany-1

Psalmcast Episode 4 Transcript

 

Introduction

Hi, I’m Derek Olsen, creator of St. Bede Productions. I’m an Episcopal layman with a PhD in New Testament and a passion for the intersection of Liturgy and Scripture. Welcome to Episode 4 of the St. Bede Psalmcast, a podcast about the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary, reading them in the context of the Sunday service and alongside the Church Fathers. Today we’ll be talking about Psalm 147:13-21, the psalm appointed for the First Sunday after Christmas which this year falls on December 27th, 2015.

Our reader today is Barbara who writes at chantblog and there’ll be a link there in the show notes.

13 Worship the LORD, O Jerusalem; *
praise your God, O Zion;
14 For he has strengthened the bars of your gates; *
he has blessed your children within you.
15 He has established peace on your borders; *
he satisfies you with the finest wheat.
16 He sends out his command to the earth, *
and his word runs very swiftly.
17 He gives snow like wool; *
he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.
18 He scatters his hail like bread crumbs; *
who can stand against his cold?
19 He sends forth his word and melts them; *
he blows with his wind, and the waters flow.
20 He declares his word to Jacob, *
his statutes and his judgments to Israel.
21 He has not done so to any other nation; *
to them he has not revealed his judgments.
Hallelujah!

 

The Lectionary Context

So, why is this psalm appointed here for this day? When I first looked at this psalm, I wasn’t entirely sure why it had been appointed for this day. I thought maybe we had some kind of a seasonal reference because of the cold weather imagery, but that only works for those of us in the northern part of the northern hemisphere. Looking at the other readings, though, quickly clarified what we have going on. Isaiah 61:1-62:3 is a hymn of rejoicing around the vindication of Jerusalem. Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7 talks about the coming of Christ to free us from the Law, and makes explicit reference to the birth of Christ. These are good fairly general Christmas texts, but what really clinches it is our Gospel. The Gospel appointed for this Sunday is John 1:1-18. This is John’s great prologue which I’m sure you know and which was read as the Last Gospel at the ends of masses in the Western Church for centuries: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being.” This reading gives us Jesus Christ, Son of God, as the Word of the Father, the Logos.

Suddenly, having that piece, the reason for having this psalm on this day makes a lot more sense. If you look at our psalm, you’ll see that the term “word” appears three times in this brief span of verses and that we have three other synonyms as well. Verse 16 in particular jumps out at us in this context: “He sends out his command to the earth, and his word runs very swiftly.” For an early Christian, in particular, reading this, it was an obvious no-brainer: In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was the Scriptures for the early church, the Greek word “logos” is repeated twice, and the word for “sent out” is apostoleí which is the same root from which we get the word “apostle” as one sent out by God. And, of course, in Gospels and Letters of John, this is the word used to describe how God sends out Jesus to humanity. So, an early Christian couldn’t read this psalm without seeing it use very heavily freighted language about God sending out his Word to the earth and the results of that Word. Not only that, verse 19 is almost unavoidably Trinitarian in the Greek: You have the Father who again, exact same words as verse 16, “aposteleī ton lógon aut­oū (he sends out his word)” but then also “pneúsei to pneūma autoū.” Do you hear the repetition there? The same root is being used as both the verb and the object, and the root is pneuma, which can mean wind, breath, or spirit but is the term used for the Holy Spirit in Greek when hagios is added to it. So, one way to render this as it would have been read is “He spirits his spirit.” Now “He breaths his breath” does the same thing with better English but loses the theological valence there.

So—there’s a very strong connection between the use of Word in the gospel and the reading and hearing of the term “word” in the psalm. It’s currently fashionable in some church circles to really emphasize the “lateness” of the Gospel of John and to suggest by means of this that the idea of Jesus as the Word is therefore a “late idea” and therefore one that we don’t have to put a lot of stock in and was a means by which the man Jesus was obscured by dogma and doctrine. I’d like to make a brief comment on that to give it some context. First, the idea of a “logos” as a philosophical thing, was already out there in Hellenistic thought in the first century, especially Stoic cosmology. So, Stoics used the word “Logos” to mean reason and spoke of it as a form or template or structure that underlaid all of Creation. Philo Judaeus, who was an important Jewish philosopher writing in Alexandria in the first century, born about 20 years before Jesus, in his vast commentaries on Scripture from a platonic philosophical perspective is all about the logos; he develops the notion of the logos being the image, the eikon, of God and an archetype of everything, and therefore as the instrument through which God creates all things. Third, this is exactly the same concept that Paul uses to talk about Christ in Colossians 1 when he says, “He is the image (eikon—same word Philo uses) of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” Doesn’t that sound like John’s Prologue? Yeah—not an accident… So—Paul, writing in the 60’s and giving us the first Christian writings that we have, is using the exact same concept that John will be using later. And, again, the payoff here is that Christians were saying Jesus wasn’t just a nice guy who taught good things but got himself killed by the state; instead, Paul and John are saying, look at this guy and how he acts—by giving himself up to death on the cross he wasn’t just showing us a bad way to die, but he was living out principles of justice, mercy, and love that are hardwired into the universe on a subatomic level. He wasn’t just a good guy who got killed, rather he was disrupting things, annoying powerful religious people, and pissing rulers off with his acts of love and mercy because he was demonstrating the very fabric of reality.

Now—to get back on track and to talk about the psalms again—which is what we’re actually doing here—one the reasons why the first Christians had this notion in mind is precisely because of psalms like this one that use “logos” in this way and connect that term deeply into both the creative action of God and the redemptive action of God.  You can’t forget how important the psalms were to the early Christian concept of Jesus and how much the Gospels and Epistles draw on and from the psalms in reflecting on the story and meaning of Jesus.

So, to sum up, we get this psalm on Christmas, because it taps into our theology of the Incarnation, the Word sent from the Father to earth.

The Interpretive Context

Now, is there other information we need to help us understand what’s going on?

Psalm 147 sits within a distinct block of hymns at the very end of the psalter; Psalms 146-150 are a unit with a lot of common characteristics. One of which is that they don’t have any superscriptions in our Hebrew text, meaning there aren’t any context notes. However, the Septuagint does supply one which is very interesting: all the psalms from its 145 to Psalm 148 receive as a title “Alleluia, of Haggai and Zechariah.” Thus, it’s attributing this block to the prophets Haggai and Zechariah who were writing in the sixth century just after the Exile and in the time that the Temple was being rebuilt. And that makes a lot of sense. There is generally a post-exilic tone to these and there are a number of common themes between these psalms and what you find in the sections at the end of Isaiah that were also written at this time.

It’s worth noting too that the verses that we have for today, verses 13 through 21 in the numbering of the prayer book, were the full text of Psalm 147 in the Septuagint and then later in the Latin Vulgate as well. The first part was their psalm 146, this is how and why the numbering systems come back together at this point. So, they would have read this as the whole thing rather than being part of a whole.

Let’s talk for a moment about what I mean when I say that this psalm is a hymn and that it stands within a block with other hymns.

Remember, we have several different classifications that we use to categorize the psalms based usually on their content. So, we have laments, we have histories, we have a bunch of other types, and we have hymns.

Hymns are more common in the second half of the psalter and virtually all of the hymns in the last third of the psalter appear to be post-exilic in nature. So—that certainly fits for this one.   These psalms tend to have a common three-part structure. The psalm opens with a call to praise, then the main part describes the motivation for the praise (often starting with the Hebrew word ki (because) or, in the Septuagint, hoti, then the final part end with a repetition of the call to praise which can be very brief. Thus, looking at our psalm, Verse 13 is our initial call to praise—“Worship the Lord O Jerusalem; * praise your God, O Zion;” Then verse 14 introduces the main part, the motivation for the praise, with the word “For…” (And, sure enough in the Hebrew that’s a ki). And then we get that final repetition of the call to praise with the “Hallelujah” at the end of 21 remembering that the English loan-word “Hallelujah” can also be translated as a phrase “Let us praise the Lord”; the root halal meaning “to praise” and “Jah” being a commonly found short form of the personal name of God.

If this whole discussion of the parts of a hymn reminds you at all of the structure of a collect, that’s not really an accident, there’s some definite overlap there. In a collect we address God, we use a describing clause where we name God and the aspects of God that connect to our petition—and that section there is kind of what the psalms are doing with hymns. We’ll touch on this thought a little more later…

In content, hymns tend to focus on either on God as creator of the world, God as redeemer of Israel, or both. And again, the fusion of these, the Creator of the universe as the One who cares for and redeems Israel from captivity and the One who watches over the rebuilding of Jerusalem, is a major theme in post-exilic prophetic thought—notably in the later sections of Isaiah.

To recap, this is a hymn, likely from somewhere around the year 500 when the Exiles had come back and were rebuilding Jerusalem, and—like a lot of hymns, it combines images of God as the one in control of creation with God as the one who cares for Israel.

 

Historical Readings

Since we’re not the first Christians to read the Psalms, what insights have others found within this text before us? Cassiodorus breaks this psalm into two basic sections, the first one dealing with Jerusalem in 13-15, the second dealing with God’s gifts of grace in verses 16 to the end.

Jerusalem here is identified as the New Jerusalem, this is the end state, the consummation of the Christian hope. The best way to think of this is that Cassiodorus is reading this portion of the psalm through the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, when the Bridegroom comes, the bridesmaids enter, and the gates are shut and bolted. So the references to the bolts of the gates means that everyone is shut inside the city of God and that they have all they need in the vision of God and don’t need to go outside the city for anything. Then the reference to being satisfied with the finest wheat is a Eucharistic image. Just as the Eucharist feeds the Church now, the direct presence of God then will feed believers that much more. That’s the first section of the psalm.

The second section begins with the infamous verse 16 that we were talking about before; Clearly Cassiodorus sees this as a reference to the Incarnation. However, he also doesn’t stop there—he’s not satisfied with that being the end of the sending. The other verses that follow are also part of it. And now we’ve got a block of the cold weather imagery. Now—we have four lines that refer to snow, hoarfrost, and hailstones, then a general reference to coldness. He doesn’t have that. The Septuagint and the Romanum following that refers to snow, mist, and crystal. Jerome actually complains about this; he knows those are bad translations and so he clarifies what the Hebrew is referring to here but these word choices are also mitigated by the oddities of antique science—most interpreters mention that crystal is formed from ice that has hardened so hard over the course of many winters that it becomes permanently hard. Which—no, it doesn’t—but that’s ok, it means they’re reading the text with coldness in mind.

So, most of the Church Fathers go into spiritual interpretation mode here. In their view, since the word coming to earth is Jesus, then we can’t actually be talking about weather, we’ve gt to be referring to something else and how they decide to work this depends on how they deploy their readings. Throughout this psalm Cassiodorus tends to be working pretty closely off Augustine but, he doesn’t connect all of the dots that Augustine does. Because of that, I’m going to follow Augustine in particular because he makes a very interesting move.

The first thing I want to say is that Augustine and Cassiodorus are using a particular strategy of over-reading here. What do I mean by over-reading? Well, the three cold-weather images that we have here are straightforward similes, where you compare one thing with another thing by using the words “like” or “as”. Or the Latin word “sicut” which is equivalent. Here the similes all correspond to basic visual texture. Thus, the snow looks like how wool looks. Hoarfrost covers things like grey, burned out ashes. Hailstones drop down in little pieces the same size as little morsels of bread. So—these similes look to be based on simple visual comparisons. But that’s not how the fathers treat them! Instead, they bypass what you and I would see as the obvious interpretation. Why do they do this? First, they’ve already established in their own minds that the text has already pointed beyond itself to a different referent. Because Jesus is in the picture, the literal meaning of the rhetorical devices can’t be all there is here. But second, this is a form of intellectual play. And that’s a really important point that I don’t think modern readers and theologians appreciate sufficiently when we read the Church Fathers. This is a complex intellectual game. You don’t win by providing an easy answer, you win by constructing an elaborate rhetorical edifice that actually works. Augustine actually talks about this in his book On Christian Teaching. In Book 2, section 6, he says:

it is more pleasant in some cases to have knowledge communicated through figures, and that what is attended with difficulty in the seeking gives greater pleasure in the finding. . . . Accordingly the Holy Spirit has, with admirable wisdom and care for our welfare, so arranged the Holy Scriptures as by the plainer passages to satisfy our hunger, and by the more obscure to stimulate our appetite.

So, if some of these readings and techniques seem far-fetched, you have to understand why: they are using them as a means for restating things found elsewhere in Scripture that provides a logical coherence to how they’re reading the rest of the passage.

That’s not to say that patristic and medieval readers couldn’t read the text literally: After all, that’s what the Utrecht Psalter’s image gives us. Christ is standing quite firmly in the heavens giving a blessing to Jerusalem while angels fly about scattering baskets of snow and hail about. (I think he had Psalm 104 in mind while he was sketching)

But, instead of reading these as a simple simile, in this case the Church Fathers are over-reading in a particular kind of way. There may be a technical term for the strategy they’re using but if there is, I haven’t found it mentioned by the main classical authorities yet. Essentially, they’re using the cold weather image as the starting point, then the thing it’s being compared too as the transformation caused by Christ and the Holy Spirit.  At the root of this, I think the interpretive key they’re working through is Ezekiel 36:26-27. That text is talking about God making a new covenant with Israel and part of that is this promise: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.” So, the key image here is that the hard thing, the heart of stone, is being replaced by a soft thing, a heart of flesh, and with the removal of that hardness, the people—or person—will begin to pay heed to what the Lord says and wills. And this is where the Fathers go with it.

Snow refers to the hard and cold people who refuse to heed God’s ways. But transformation is coming. Wool is the material used to make garments, and this is the Church, Christ will clothe himself with the church and thus the hard, cold hearts will be transformed into the garment of Christ himself. In the same way the coldness represented by mist will turn to ashes which are a sign of penitence. So, by repenting God’s people will be transformed. Then, since crystal is this super-frozen hard substance, the love of Christ will not only melt and transform them, they will come to distribute morsels of bread and even the hardest of hearts can be transformed into those who spread the Gospel and, picking up that these are bread-crumbs, make another Eucharistic turn and suggest that not only can hard-hearted sinners be transformed into those who spread the message, but into priests and bishops as well. And Augustine connects these dots to make this into an image describing the Apostle Paul. He was the hardest-hearted of all. And (playing on that hardness language) was even there for the stoning of Stephen. But, through God’s transforming grace, even this hardest of hearts was melted by the blowing of the Spirit and became great among the apostles. Then Augustine runs with that to the final verse as well: truly God’s statues were given to Israel, and not the other nations, thus the Gentiles needed someone from Israel to take it to them and hence Paul, once the hard-hearted but now transformed becomes the apostle to the nations and takes the promises given to Israel and communicates them throughout the whole world, that all may learn of God’s favor and be saved.

So, moving from an image of the New Jerusalem to the moral transformation wrought by Christ, Cassiodorus and Augustine see this as a thoroughly Christocentric psalm.

Thematic Reading

In light of all of this, how do we read this psalm on this day?

Again, I prefer to read in accordance with a sensus plenior, meaning that we don’t have to pick one right reading. We can hold multiple meanings in our heads at the same time and be enriched by all of them. What I’m hearing right now out of these multiplicity of voices, is the fact that this is a hymn. It starts off with a classic example of that static synonymous parallelism—two lines that say the same thing in different ways: “Worship the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise your God, O Zion.” This is the call unto us just as much as it was to its original audience twenty-five hundred years ago and through all the successive generations from then down to now.

The basis for the praise is who God is—the identity of God. I didn’t see this in English, but when I looked at this text in the Greek and in the Latin, I noticed that there was a particular figure at work. As you look down the left side in the prayer book you’ll see a row of “He”s, so many of the lines start with “he.” But that’s not what you find when you look down the left side of the Latin text: it’s not “he” but “qui”—“qui” in Latin is a relative pronoun which means you’d translate it as “the one who” whatever… For me, this gives the psalm a different spin. We’re saying “praise God” ok—well, who is this God? And the psalm answers, the one has strengthened, the one who has blessed, the one who satisfies (notice that the first few are past tense, things that God has done, while that one is continuous? The one who continues to satisfy with the finest wheat?) The one who sends his word, and so forth. Because we have this repetitive string (we’d call this figure of speech an anaphora, a repetition of lines all begin with the same word or set of words) these are all identifiers, these are all telling us who this God is whom we praise, and, reading alongside and through the Fathers, we see this God as not only the one who created, not only the one who acted decisively in history to rescue Israel, to restore fallen Jerusalem within history, but also as the one who sends forth the Son and the Spirit, who gathers the church out of all nations, and who feeds us with Eucharistic bread now and the promise of an even more direct experience of his presence once we reach that final consummation and stand rejoicing with the Bridegroom.

So, we are called to praise, but also to wonder at the vast scope of God. Especially in this day and at this season, we wrestle with the great paradox of Christmas: that the one who created the vast expanse of interstellar space, who controls the universe and its elements, would take on our flesh and our nature and know what it feels like to be human—from the inside. And thus, with the psalmist, we lift our voices to praise God; we rejoice in what he has done, we look forward to what he will do, we marvel at the elements, at the wonders of creation and—with the Fathers—we look for his transforming grace to turn our coldness and hardened resistance into obedience and sharing the Good News and good gifts that we have been given.

Conclusion

Well, that’s all for today. I’ll take the next week off as I celebrate Christmas with friends and family. I’ll be back in the New Year with Psalm 29 for the First Sunday after Epiphany.

If you enjoyed today’s show, please tell your friends about it and leave a review on iTunes to help more people find it. You can find more of my thoughts at www.stbedeproductions.com and follow me on Twitter. Until next time, I’m Derek Olsen for St. Bede Productions. The path you must follow is in the Psalms—never leave it.