Proper 15 Year B 2024: Psalm 34

When I was a senior in high school, for my English class we each had to write a paper analyzing a poem. We were given a packet of choices full of enough options that our teacher wasn’t going to have to read 10 papers on the same poem. I made my choice in the quintessential high school senior way: which one I thought would mean I had to do the least amount of work; which poem seemed the most straightforward. The fact that I was choosing from a collection provided by the teacher was totally lost in my quest for a black and white, say what you mean text. Even though I thought I found one, writing that assignment taught me something important about language and about how we express ourselves. How even when we do say what we mean, there are implications in the choices of how we phrase anything. And how I learned at 17 that digging deep into something like poetry can reveal the true depths of our feelings and expose truths in a way prose is not equipped to do.

When we think of poetry and scripture, we oftentimes go directly to the Psalms. Not a bad place to start. But when you think of Biblical poetry, take the 150 psalms and keep adding until you reach ONE THIRD of the Bible, because that is how much of scripture is poetry. More often than not, when Biblical authors communicate words attributed directly to God, it’s poetry, not prose. And throughout our sacred texts, there are countless poetic expressions. Sometimes they are poems of jubilation like the Songs of Miriam and Moses in Exodus, the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel, which is echoed in Mary’s Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke, or the Song to the Lamb in Revelation. Sometimes they are poems of mourning, like David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel or his lament over Absalom, Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and of course, the entire book of Lamentations.

Biblical poetry is different in several notable ways when compared to what we think of as “modern” poetry. Biblical poetry is more freeform, with the patterns often in phrases, rather than in rhyme. And then there is the issue of translating between languages. If you have sung Bach in English you might have noticed the dissonances falling on weird words because of different word order rules in English compared to German. Some early Beatles songs were translated into German for their gigs in German venues, which really demonstrates how poetry translates…odd. For example, “I want to hold your hand” when sung in the German version “Komm gib’ mir deine hand” translates as “Come give me your hand”. That certainly carries different implications in English! “I want to” vs “Come give me”. Word choice is so important. It took Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy years to translate Rilke’s poems. They painstakingly deliberated words, nuance, and cultural implications, finding the best choice possible in going from German to English. Many of the features of biblical poetry are lost when translated between languages. We don’t have that luxury between ancient Hebrew and modern English of having the same word for “hand” as the Beatles’ translators did. That’s why we have to be so careful when digging into translated poetry - some of which we are guaranteed to read every week in our psalm.

We read the first third of Psalm 34, which is a psalm of thanksgiving, last Sunday. Today we have the middle section, and next week we’ll read the final third. Last week, we heard the regular features of a psalm of thanksgiving in verses 1-7: sweeping praise and reference to the specific acts of liberation by the Lord. The verbs applied to the Lord are “answer”, “deliver”, “hear”, and “save”. The superscription at the beginning of the psalm links it to David’s rescue from Abimelech in 1 Samuel. The link to a specific event warns the reader against over-spiritualizing the psalmist’s real experience of deliverance. In the words of Walter Brueggemann, “This prayer is for those who find themselves resourceless against the powers of this age, and then are remarkably released for new life.”

Today’s text from the middle section is a set of wisdom instructions about how to live in the new world for which God has released the psalmist. The instructions are remarkably unambiguous in verses 11-14 with the summons of the teacher in verse 11, reflecting on how to have and enjoy life, a warning about false speech in verse 13, and an imperative in verse 14: turn from evil and do good; desire peace and pursue it. Israel, in following the commands of the Lord, must engage in society building, to develop forms of behavior which sustain the gift of new social possibility. Perhaps the psalmist knows that if those things are not done intentionally, if we don’t purposefully follow the commands of the Lord, very soon the recently poor and afflicted, who have been delivered in the first third of the psalm, will be back in the old context of hopelessness.

The final portion of the psalm, beginning at verse 15, is a reflection on righteousness. The translation, “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous”, requires further exploration. It is not a warning, like Santa watching whether you’ve been bad or good. Rather, in this context, the eyes of the Lord being on you mean the Lord is watching out for you. In last week’s portion, the righteous are given well-being by God. The righteous are objects of God’s intervention and know themselves to be recipients. That is why they are thankful. In today’s text, the righteous are responsible for reshaping life. They know themselves to be summoned to take initiative in reordering society.

These kinds of texts, when interpreted as being about us, run the risk of being a kind of prosperity gospel. That is, a sign that the righteous are favored by God and that’s why they prosper. But these texts are not about us, they are about God and about where God’s heart is. God’s heart is with the righteous, which are not defined by their success on the Earth, but because they are “of God”;  righteousness can also be translated as “of God”. Righteousness is not based on anything the people do other than that they look to God as their source of help. That is what makes them “righteous”.

What does it look like, then, to be “the righteous”? Oftentimes, “the righteous” are not who we’d want to be - the lowly, the hungry, the poor. And I wouldn’t argue that the psalmist is saying we ought to become lowly, hungry, and poor. But the psalmist does say what God will do for them. As does Mary in her song to the Lord - “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” So if God will do those things, and we proclaim to follow God’s lead, then we should be working towards those ends. In Hannah’s words, “The Lord raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.” (1 Samuel 2:8) As people who pray every week that the will of the Lord be done on Earth as it is in Heaven, then we are to follow the lead of these prophets and poets to act like our Lord in the last third of this psalm: “The face of the Lord is against those who do evil…The righteous cry, and the Lord hears them…The Lord is near to the brokenhearted…The Lord redeems the life of his servants, and none will be condemned who trust in him.” Amen.