Year C. Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. July 8th, 2001
Title: “Exodus or Resurrection.”
Psalm 66
As the structure of this psalm shows, it is a juxtaposition of praise and thanksgiving, of communal and individual prayer and of past and present experience. Verses one to four, give thankful praise for past deliverance, verses five to seven. Verse eight, gives thankful praise for recent national deliverance verses nine to twelve. Verses thirteen to fifteen, give thankful praise for recent personal deliverance verses sixteen to nineteen, with verse twenty concluding in blessing God for his kindness. Given the overtones of a theological perspective akin to Deutero-Isaiah, this psalm is probably postexilic.
The psalmist has personally experienced what God did at the Exodus in his own personal life. Despite the difference in scale he praises and thanks God for both his communal and personal graciousness.
In verses one to four, Thankful Praise, Verse one, shout joyfully, this expression occurs in Psalms 47:2; 98:4; and 100:1. There are many other equivalent expressions in psalms of praise and hymns that indicate that Jewish liturgies were not staid, solemn or restrained affairs.
All you on earth, praise and thanks may begin in an individual’s heart but of their nature they keep expanding until they include the universe or at least invite the creatures of the universe, as here, to join in recognition of God. God’s universal way and sway and say should and shall be acknowledged.
In verse three, how awesome your deeds, “Awesome” translates the Hebrew nora’, a niphil participle of yare’, “to fear.” Nora’ is often used to denote that quality of God which inspires fear and terror in his enemies and, at the same time, awe and a spirit of praise and joy in his righteous ones. Same quality, different reactions.
Your enemies cringe: The Hebrew verb kihes is often used of “to deceive” or “to act deceptively.” Here it denotes an unwilling homage because it is feigned, not sincere. The “enemies of God” would, of course, here be the Egyptians who worshipped other gods. In begrudgingly recognizing Yahweh’s power, they were de-legitimizing their own gods, if only unconsciously.
In verse four, while the tenses allow a present tense, the future is permissible and to be preferred. The future does more justice to the facts, for this is more a promise, yet to materialize.
In verses five to seven, For Past Deliverance. In verse five, come and see, this language reflects the pilgrimage of worshipers at festival time, moving toward the Jerusalem Temple.
In verse six, he changed the sea into dry land, This refers to the Exodus event.
Through the river they passed on foot, this could refer to the Jordan River and the passage into the promised land, at the end of the Exodus or it could just be another poetic way of referring to the Reed Sea crossing. If it refers to the Jordan we have here an instance of merism. Merism means “the part for the whole.” In this case the whole of salvation history is included by mentioning the first event, the crossing of the Reed Sea, and the last event, the crossing of the Jordan River. More importantly, the worshiping community saw these, past, events not as, past history, but as possessing a present reality. The Exodus is a past event only in the barest factual sense. Its repercussions are forever, a pattern reproduced in God’s saving acts, seeing the hand of God in all events large and small.
In verse eight,-Thankful Praise. In verse eight, bless our God, “Bless,” is used here as a synonym for thankful praise.
In verses nine to twelve, For Recent National Deliverance.
In verse nine, who has kept us alive, because God lives so does the Exodus event. The present Israelites are kept alive by the same action of God that kept their ancestors alive through the trials of the sea of chaos.
In verse ten, tested us, God’s objective in testing is to reveal and develop the character God wants. The parallel line refers to silver being tested by fire. As fire separates the metal from the dross, purifying it, so does God’s testing in regard to his people, removing the baser elements through the heat of fire, enhancing their value. The test or trial is not specified. It can stand for any testing experience, but here refers to a contemporaneous one.
In verse twelve, we went through fire and water, “We” includes God along with his people. God goes through fire, testing- Daniel 3 and water, chaos- Isaiah 43:2, with his people. From one extreme case to another, like going through an ordeal to prove innocence, to refine, God uses suffering as a salutary discipline.
You led us out to freedom, “Freedom” is a rather abstract, but accurate translation of Hebrew rewahah “saturation” or “abundance” or “a spacious place.” The notion suggests one of moving out of prison, bondage, cramped quarters into an open land where one can breathe and move about freely.
In verses thirteen to fifteen, Thankful Praise. In verse thirteen, holocausts, “Holocaust” is a transliteration of the Greek, “a whole burning.” The animal, except for the skin, was completely burnt with nothing left for the worshipers to consume, as is the case with thank offerings or peace offerings. Likely, given the abundance of offerings, some were burnt and some were shared and eaten with fellow worshipers.
In verse fourteen, my mouth spoke in distress, this section concentrates on the individual‘s thanks. The reason for it is no more specified than the reason for the contemporaneous national deliverance. Perhaps they were the same, perhaps not. In the state of distress he promises such and such to God if and when God delivered him. Vows are frequently made to God in time of trouble and less frequently fulfilled after the trouble has passed.
In verse fifteen, fatlings…rams…oxen and goats. The number of offerings may indicate the man was wealthy. It may also be a poetic exaggeration, making a point frequently made in psalms of thanks; no amount of sacrifices will do justice to the occasion. God’s generosity cannot be matched or repaid.
In verses sixteen to nineteen, For Recent Personal Deliverance In verse sixteen, come and hear. The grateful individual stands in the midst of the worshiping community and gives witness to the wonders of God’s generosity in his behalf. God has repeated the Exodus event in his personal life, smaller in size, but no different in kind.
In verse eighteen, had I cherished evil in my heart, whatever his affliction, he was an innocent sufferer. If his misfortune involved a criminal accusation, he claims innocence, a requirement to be heard by God.
In verse twenty, but God did hear his prayer and so he is here to thank him for his kindness.
This psalm is a good example of “liturgical consciousness.” Liturgy is not merely the recall of past great events. Nor is it exactly the reliving of those events. It is the awareness that those events, the truths they reveal, are present in our events, the events of our lives. Liturgical consciousness is the realization that scale does not matter. Be they large or small, historically significant or not, every event contains and reveals God’s loving presence. The big events, the ones we celebrate again and again are paradigms, models, patterns. In reflecting on them, peering into them, studying them closely, we see God at work and how he works. Then we turn our attention to our own events and lo and behold we see him there too! That is what the psalmist is doing in this psalm. The tense or historical timeframe of the Exodus and the tenses of the verbs used are insignificant compared to the intent and content. Liturgical consciousness blends time and space, time and eternity.
It also blends or blurs the distinction between the person and the community, and eventually the world community. Whether he was thanking and praising God for the Exodus, the Jordan crossing, the national disaster they were just delivered from or his own personal deliverance, it was all of the same cloth, all the same subject matter, all the same God acting on his and his community’s behalf. Be they the great moments of public religion or the everyday crises of an individual’s life, the individual develops and grows into a healthy spiritual life in communion with his fellows.
Liturgical consciousness also blends and blurs the distinction between praise and thanks. We see the psalmist easily moving between the “rooms” of praise and thanks and the door separating them is wide and open. Even thanks to God can become self-centered. It must be set in the larger context, a context larger than purely personal concerns. Praise prevents such self-centered prayer. Praise requires concentration of the “community of God’s greatness” rather than merely what God has done for one as an individual. Praise requires concentration on God. On the other hand, praise alone can be sterile. It can keep God at a distance and be impersonal. We can praise God for all of his greatness, grandeur and power, even love, but fail to connect it all to ourselves. Thanks for specifically how God has intervened personally keeps that from happening.
This psalm, and many others, may begin to give thanks to God but then quite unconsciously lapses into pure praise and vice versa. In the midst of the assembly the singer reveals himself as thoroughly steeped in the presence of God and capable of seeing the Exodus event repeated, if only in miniature, in the ordinary and extraordinary, another blending and blurring of lines, events of his life. “His” life and “our” life are one and the same, much as Deuteronomy speaks of “today” when referring to past events. The Lord did not make a covenant with them, their forefathers, but with us. See Deuteronomy 6: 20-22; 26: 5-9. Like praising and thanking, the past deeds of God are not different from his present ones, not separate entities but different expressions or revelations of the same God.
This psalm was linked very early to the resurrection of Jesus. The Exodus is repeated in a new and higher key in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus was brought into a “spacious place,” out of the confines and constrictions of the tomb. For Christians every other experience is “rooted” in this “root” experience and grows out of it. Mystics like Paul of the Cross love this psalm because of its movement from overwhelming sorrow and intense interior testing to profound union with God and a new peace. God delivers and a look into former acts of deliverance will reveal how he does so and that he continuously does so.
Compared the gods of the surrounding nation, Israel’s God delivers on his promises and is more powerful than all of them put together.
The Exodus event is the central paradigm for recognizing how God works in behalf of Israel.
The prayer of thanksgiving arises from both the remembrance of God’s great works in the past and from seeing that same power at work in the present.
Whether large or small, communal or individual, every event in the life of a believer can and should be seen as a replication of the fidelity of God to his word of promise.
God delivers on his word every day and in every way both in the individual life of the believer and in the shared history of the community.
Corporate Personality: The Jew and the Christian both experience no substantial difference between their personal experiences of God and the great events that God performed to bring their respective communities into being. For the Jew the entire history of relationships between God and Israel can be summed up in the Exodus event. For the Christian it is the Resurrection of Jesus. The Exodus was a communal event, while the Resurrection an individual one. However, that is only a surface difference. Each Jew would see more correctly, should see the Exodus repeated in virtually every event of his or her individual life. The common experience of liberation is played out throughout each person’s life and played out all day every day. The Christian, on the other hand, would see, should see, the individual resurrection of Jesus repeated in virtually every event of his or her life and repeated in the communal life of the church. It is really only a matter of scale. Some events are of epic proportions, like the Exodus or Resurrection, and other are miniature replicas of those epic ones. It is hard to miss the epics, but easy to miss the miniatures. Praying this psalm helps us to see the connection between the two and, especially, to recognize that the same God, the same grace, that frees us from the clutches of sin and evil is at work in our “smaller” lives, the lives we live out every day in ordinary ways. It is just a matter of scale.
Scale: Scale is a good place to stop and reflect. When we get on the bathroom scale, for instance, we may be forced to face the fact that we are not free in our eating habits, that we are in the clutches of, perhaps, obsession and or compulsion, that we are not taking care of our health. We might decide to do something about it and quickly find we are powerless to do so. We may consult the pagan gods, that is, the diet pills, the diet plans, the empty promises of quick and easy weight loss. When we find they do not deliver of their promises and that it is up to our own free will to determine what and how much and when we will eat, we become desperate. We know our will is not strong enough to do the job. After all, how did we become overweight in the first place? If we recognize that there is only one power who can get us back to a healthy relationship with food and call upon him and turn our will over to his will to manage our eating habits, we will find what the psalmist found: “Blessed be God who did not refuse me the kindness I sought in prayer (v. 20).” On a scale of one to ten in importance our weight problem may not even register. However, the same kindness that delivered the Hebrews from slavery and Jesus from the dead can and will deliver us from obsession -compulsion, be it food, drugs, alcohol, sex, religion, relationships, work or money. The scale and scope of the problem might be comparatively small but the fundamental act of loving-kindness Hebrew hesed; Greek agape is the same, from the same God. When we recognize his love repeated throughout the events of a single ordinary day we find ourselves in continual thanksgiving. Indeed, the smaller events of grace, as they build up over the course of each day, expand our mindset and we do connect them with the great events and mysteries of our faith. We find ourselves in conscious union with “all on earth” and start thinking how God is doing the same thing for everyone else on the planet. And the thanksgiving and the awe keep expanding into praise. And it can all start by stepping on the bathroom scale. Amen.
