The Lord Is My Shepherd (Psalm 23)

Psalm 23

The Lord is my Shepherd

The Lord is my trainer

I shall not fear the fight.

He is constantly with me, working my corner

He refreshes me between rounds with cool water

And with even cooler advice

Yeah, though I walk to centre-ring

To stare out an opponent twice my size

Even then He will be with me

His hands on my shoulders

And his words to guide

With His towel and His sponge He will care for me

All the long rounds of my life

And when the final bell rings

I shall retire from the ring

Knowing that I fought the good fight.

This is my translation of the 23rd Psalm. It’s a rather loose translation, in terms of its relationship to the original Hebrew, but it captures (for me at least) what I understand to be the central theme of the 23rd Psalm - namely, God’s guidance and protection of us throughout our lives.

Yes, it’s Good Shepherd Sunday again, where we are encouraged to make our annual ecclesiastical visit to the 23rd Psalm, in case we haven’t been by that way lately. It’s a psalm we all know. Indeed, I do not remember a time when I did not know this psalm. We know the words and no doubt we know at least one tune to it! Psalm 23 is a passage that tends to stay with us for the whole of life. We learn it as children in Sunday School, and, at the other end of life, it is by far the most popular piece of Scripture that people ask for on their death beds.

I do not remember ever taking a funeral where I did not use the 23rd Psalm. I’ve taken lost of funerals - hundreds- but never without this trusted old friend - the 23rd Psalm.Mind you, it’s not only at funerals where the Psalm is read. I was told of one couple who asked for the 23rd Psalm to be the key reading at their wedding.

It’s a true story. The priest on that occasion was initially a little resistant to having the 23rd Psalm as the text for his wedding eulogy (preferring to work with 1 Corinthians 13 as usual) but apparently the couple insisted, saying "look, we’re quite fearful about the whole reality of marriage. Both our parental families are divorced. Many of our friends who only recently got married are already divorced. We look at the statistics for the rest of society and it doesn’t fill us with confidence. We need some reassurance!" So, sure enough, at the centre of their wedding, instead of having "love is faithful, love is kind, etc." they had "yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …"

The 23rd Psalm is certainly the most popular of the psalms. It is indeed one of the most popular and best-known parts of the whole Bible, which is why I assume we revisit it every year.

As far as I can work out, this is one of only two passages that come up every year. If you know the ’lectionary’ system upon which we work here, you’ll know that we basically work our way through the different passages in the Bible in a three-year cycle. This means that every three years we read our way through the whole Bible. It also means that the passages we read one week aren’t then read again for another three years. There are only two exceptions to this pattern that I’ve picked up. One is the Gospel reading we had a couple of weeks ago about doubting Thomas. We seem to have that every year after Easter. The other one is the 23rd Psalm. It too is rostered in every year, on the fourth Sunday after Easter, along with passages about Jesus the good shepherd. I assume, in each case, that the reason they are rostered in every year is because each passage is so staggeringly popular.

This is particularly remarkable - the popularity of Psalm 23 - when we consider that the Ancient Near Eastern shepherd is so remote to us as 21st century urban Australians. I don’t know a lot about shepherds, or about sheep for that matter. We don’t have sheep down at Binacrombi. We’ve got roos, but you can’t really shepherd roos into a flock like you can sheep. Not so far as I can work out anyway.

My research into Ancient Near Eastern shepherds suggests to me that if we understood more of Ancient Near Eastern shepherding, we would probably appreciate the Psalm all the more.

A guy named Philip Keller wrote a little book entitled ’A Shepherd Looks at Psalm Twenty-Three’, relating his experience as a shepherd in east Africa. The land adjacent to his was apparently rented out to a tenant shepherd who didn’t take very good care of his sheep: his land was overgrazed, eaten down to the ground; the sheep were thin, diseased by parasites, and attacked by wild animals. Keller remembered how the neighbour’s sheep would line up at the fence and blankly stare in the direction of his green grass and his healthy sheep, as if they yearned to be delivered from the abusive shepherd. They longed to come to the other side of the fence and belong to him.