The Christian Use of the Psalter

But Thou hast abhorred and forsaken Thine anointed:And art displeased at him.Thou hast broken the covenant of Thy servant,And cast his crown to the ground.

"Lord, how long? … Lord, where are Thy old loving-kindnesses? … Remember, Lord!"

The 132nd, also apparently a Psalm of a later age, though ascribed to David, dwells with joy on David's love of the sanctuary of God, pleads for the fulfilment of the promise, asks that the lamp may not be put out, nor the face of God's anointed "turned away" in confusion.

Rightly are such Psalms as these called "Messianic." We feel that even those who originally wrote them looked for more than "transitory promises." They were learning to look for the redemption of Israel and of the world itself through Israel and her kings. They were bold to believe, even when the crown was gone and the purple faded, and Israel was no longer a sovereign state, that the ancient word of God to David could never be exhausted. So when at last the great message of the Archangel came to the virgin of the house of David, it was felt by those who had read aright the history of their nation that here was no mere fanciful resuscitation of a dead past, but the vindication of God's undying purpose: "He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High: and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David: and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of His kingdom there shall be no end" (Luke i. 32, 33).

It was therefore strictly legitimate, and in line with all the history of revelation, that the Christian Church should adopt these Messianic Psalms as her own thanksgiving for the mysteries of the Incarnation. Thus on Christmas Day she welcomes the Nativity in some of the Psalms already alluded to—in that which tells of the reconciliation of mankind with one another and with God under the figure of the marriage between the anointed King and the king's daughter "all glorious within" (xlv.); in that which pleads the great promises to him who so loved God's presence that he would not "suffer his eyes to sleep nor his eyelids to slumber" until he had found a permanent resting-place for that presence among men (cxxxii.); or in that, again, which in the strength of faith can gaze even on the casting down of the throne and the breaking of the covenant, resting still on God's faithfulness among "the rebukes of many people" (lxxxix.).

But there are other Psalms which, if they cannot strictly be called Messianic, yet bear their witness to another aspect of the same great hope of Israel. In the voice of prayer, or joyful confidence, they look forward to some coming of God to earth, some visible manifestation of His righteousness and His world-wide purpose:

For He cometh, for He cometh to judge the earth:And with righteousness to judge the world,and the people with His truth(xcvi. 13),

or—

Bow Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down:Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.(cxliv. 5.)

In the 85th, one of the Psalms appointed for Christmas Day, this advent of God is spoken of in words which are re-echoed in the prologue to S. John's Gospel (i. 14) as a dwelling or "tabernacling" of God's glory, not in the darkness of a Holy of Holies (as the later Jews imagined the Shekinah), but as a new and permanent fact in the moral order of the world:

For His salvation is nigh them that fear Him:That glory may dwell in our land.Mercy and truth are met together:Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.Truth shall flourish out of the earth:And righteousness hath looked down from heaven.

In such prophetic visions as these, as well as in the Psalms that speak of the glories of the Messianic King, the Christian conscience has rightly recognised definite predictions of the coming of Christ, of Him Who was both "the effulgence of God's glory" (Heb. i. 3) and also, by His human birth, the Son of David and King of Israel, and Who manifested the holiness of God in human flesh and blood. He Himself, when He came, selected from the Psalms one striking phrase, in which both ideas, the Divine glory and the human calling, are combined. For He quotes, as a witness to Himself and as a corrective of imperfect views, the 110th Psalm (again a proper Psalm for Christmas Day), where the Messianic King is spoken of both as Ruler and Victor and Priest of humanity, and as standing also in a unique relationship to God, which exalts Him far above any mere earthly connection with David:

The Lord said unto my Lord:Sit thou on My right hand—If David then calleth him Lord, how is he his son?(Matt. xxii. 45.)

But besides all these prophecies, which look onward to the great outcome of Israel's history, there is another and wider sense, as the Christian Fathers apprehended, in which the whole Psalter is the book of the Incarnation and speaks of Christ. "David," says S. Jerome, "on his harp and ten-stringed lute, sings throughout of Christ, and brings Him up from the dead." However fanciful and over-subtle the early Christian commentators may seem to us in their working out of this idea, they had grasped a profound truth. When we once recognise that Christ, knowing Who He was and why He came into the world (cf. John xiii. 1), must in the Jewish services or in private prayers have recited the Psalms with a perfect intention, and found in them the true expression of Himself, with regard both to the eternal Father and to His brethren, we are compelled to admit the possibility of each verse of the Psalms having some bearing on the Incarnation. It is a conclusion which might at first sight seem extravagant; but it forces itself upon us as we realise the true humanity of the Saviour. He is "the Son of Man"; He took of the substance of His Virgin-mother the fulness of human nature; He has a human body, a human soul, a human spirit; He is "the second Adam," the great Head of our race, Who, in the striking phrase of S. Irenaeus, has "summed up" (recapitulavit) all humanity and all the long history of man. "For verily, not of angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham" (Heb. ii. 16). He has gathered into Himself all truly human experience, the hopes of humanity, and its sufferings; its infinite pathos, its capacity of sorrow and of joy, its progress towards God, and its final apprehension and vision of God.

This is the key to the most constant feature of the Psalter, the portrait of the Righteous Sufferer. Whether we regard it as the personification of the holy nation or the self-expression of human conscience in its moral witness and its conflicts, it is an ideal that is only fulfilled in the Just One, Jesus Christ. He appeared in the world as the pattern Man, in Whom the Divine image is perfected and Whose moral nature corresponds with that holiness which is God's essential character. He appeared, too, as the perfect realisation of the filial spirit, that spirit of sonship which is the true attitude of the creature towards the Creator. Therefore it is in Christ Himself that the witness of the Psalms to righteousness, their expression of man's effort towards his ideal, is taken up, illuminated, made perfect. Therefore it is that a New Testament writer is found applying directly and without question to Christ not only the descriptions of the self-revealing God of the Old Testament, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of Thy hands" (Heb. i. 10, from Ps. cii.), and the portrait of the Messianic King, "The sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of Thy kingdom" (ib., from Ps. xlv.), but also the description of man in his ideal excellence and supremacy:

Thou madest him a little lower than the angels;Thou crownedst him with glory and honour,And didst set him over the works of Thy hands(Heb. ii., from Ps. viii.),

and that word in which some unknown psalmist and prophet had consecrated the free obedience of his will to God, as a higher offering than the sacrifices of the Law:

Wherefore when He cometh into the world, He saith,Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not,But a body didst Thou prepare for Me;In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sinThou hadst no pleasure:Then said I, Lo, I am come(In the roll of the book it is written of Me)To do Thy will, O God."(Heb. x., from Ps. xl.)

This line of interpretation may be followed out with great spiritual profit in the varied aspects of the Psalms. The thanksgivings of the Psalter are in the same spirit as those recorded by the Evangelists from our Lord's own lips, as when He thanked the Father for the revelation made to babes rather than to the wise and understanding (Matt. xi. 25), or at the grave of Lazarus gave thanks that His prayer was heard (John xi. 41). The prayers of the Psalter might well be those in which the Incarnate Son communed with the Father. For He fought our human battle with the human weapons of faith and prayer. The great description given by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews of Christ as "the Author and Finisher of our faith" (Heb. xii. 2), implies One Who inaugurated our effort of faith by Himself first taking part in it, and Himself perfectly accomplished it by bearing to the very final and utmost strain our human temptations. Hence we may hear the voice of Christ Himself in those pathetic outcries of the Psalter; in its appeal of faith as the Righteous One wrestles with doubt and depression or faces the contradiction of sinners; in its stedfast hold on God even when sin is triumphing, and a world created good seems given over into the hand of the wicked. All these utterances have a new meaning, a fuller efficacy, when we recognise in them the words of the "Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief." There is nothing either fantastic or presumptuous in this reading of the Gospel in the Psalter. Did not He Himself vouchsafe to shew us something of this human struggle of faith in the words spoken on the eve of His Passion, when He confessed that His soul was troubled, and He would fain have said, "Father, save Me from this hour" (John xii. 27)? Did He not lift the veil even further in admitting us to the dark sanctuary of Gethsemane, in suffering us to hear even His utterances from the Cross?

The fourth Word from the Cross, so often misunderstood, is the opening of the 22nd Psalm. This cry at the climax of the Passion is really the voice of faith, faith triumphing over desolation of spirit, faith holding on by the unseen, amidst the falling away and the vanishing for the time of every consolation. It is not merely "Why didst Thou forsake Me?" but it is "My God, My God," the fundamental confession of a personal faith in a personal God, seeing Him Who is invisible, waiting for Him Who hides His face, believing, even though His truth and justice seem blotted out of the world, that God is, and that He is still "enthroned upon the praises of Israel" (v. 3). And this faith finds its last utterance of peace and thanksgiving and renewed consciousness of union with the Father in the seventh Word, again from the Psalter, "Into Thy hands I commend My spirit" (Ps. xxxi. 6).

One of the most fruitful lines of Christian meditation will be found in this Christological aspect of the Psalms. It throws a wonderful light on the inner life of our Lord, and gives the Psalter a value which no merely literary study could give.

The five Psalms appointed by our Church for Good Friday are a rich storehouse of the secrets of the Passion. The 22nd and the 69th bear upon it very directly, and present many points of similarity. In each the sufferings of the Righteous are described minutely and pathetically, in each these sufferings lead on to triumph and to the assurance of their world-wide efficacy:

All the ends of the earth shall remember themselves,and be turned unto the Lord:And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Him.(xxii. 27.)For God will save Sion, and build the cities of Judah:That men may dwell there and have it in possession.The posterity also of His servants shall inherit it:And they that love His Name shall dwell therein.(lxix. 36, 37.)

Each, again, in its picture of undeserved suffering, brings out the true nature and the malignity of sin. In the 22nd sin is portrayed in its cruelty and its irrational character, as if men led by it were but wild beasts, "wild oxen," "bulls of Bashan," "dogs," and "lions." In the 69th we see its ingratitude, and its pitiless and causeless malice, and the fact that, whatever its immediate object, it is really directed against God Himself:

For Thy sake I have suffered reproach.*     *     *     *     *The reproaches of them that reproached Thee are fallen upon me.

Both these Psalms, again, contain what we must confess to be definite predictions of details of the Passion. The 22nd tells of the very words and gestures which the chief priests and Pharisees in their blindness made use of to insult the Crucified:

All they that see me laugh me to scorn:They shoot out their lips, and shake their heads, saying,He trusted in God, that He would deliver him:Let Him deliver him now, if He will have him.(Cf. Matt, xxvii. 39-43.)

Another startling prediction is that of the piercing of the hands and the feet. No such punishment was used by the Jews, or endured, as far as we know, by any of the martyrs of the Old Testament. All the four Evangelists, again, note the literal fulfilment of xxii. 18:

They part my garments among them:And cast lots upon my vesture.

Indeed, this 22nd Psalm along with Isaiah liii. stands forth beyond all the other writings of the Old Testament as a witness which is proof against all attempts to explain it away, to the truth that "the Spirit of Christ" was in the prophets "testifying beforehand of the sufferings of Christ "(1 Peter i. 11).

The 69th (like the 40th) may have been originally suggested by the persecution of the prophet Jeremiah, when he was thrown into the miry cistern (Jer. xxxviii.); but it contains an anticipation of Calvary, whose fulfilment is described by all the Evangelists, in the wine mingled with myrrh, and the vinegar and gall offered in mockery before the Crucifixion:

They gave me gall to eat:And when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.

S. John, the nearest to the Cross and to the heart of the Crucified, tells us moreover that this verse was consciously appropriated by Christ Himself, when, "knowing that all things are now finished, that the Scripture might be accomplished, He saith, I thirst" (John xix. 28).

Each of the other proper Psalms for Good Friday bears its witness to the suffering Christ. The 88th, at first sight one of the most difficult in the Psalter, a Psalm whose darkness seems scarcely illuminated by any ray of hope, is clearly chosen to illustrate Christ's desolation on the Cross, the Three Hours of darkness, His Burial and His descent into Hades. The Sufferer is absolutely alone, lover and friend are in darkness; He is fighting the battle with that last enemy of mankind, the King of Terrors, yet overcoming the sharpness of death by faith and patient endurance; He is looking on to the dawn of Easter:

Unto Thee have I cried, O Lord:And early shall my prayer come unto Thee;

or—

In the morning shall my prayer come before Thee (R.V.).

May not even those strange words "from My youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind" have been on the lips and in the thought of the "Man of Sorrows" as the Cross cast its shadow over Him, perhaps from His earliest years? "For not even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself," says The Imitation in one of those chapters which sweeten the tears of the world, "was ever one hour without the anguish of His Passion as long as He lived" (Imit. ii. 12).

Both the 40th and the 54th suggest that inner secret of the Atonement which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has fixed upon as giving Christ's Passion its universal efficacy:

An offering of a free heart will I give Thee.(liv. 6.)I come—that I should fulfil Thy will, O my God.(xl. 9, 10.)

"By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10). For the Passion is the supreme oblation of the freewill of man, the re-direction into the right attitude of that high faculty by which man had sinned and fallen originally, the consecration of it to its true end, voluntary obedience to God. "Not My will, but Thine be done"; that Christ as man should bring the human will perfectly into conformity with the will of God is what "in the volume of the book"—i.e. in the writings of all the line of prophets—was written of Him; for this "the body was prepared" for Him in the pure flesh of the Virgin-mother; for this His "ears were opened," that as child and youth and man He might perfectly hear and obey the word of the Father.

But the 15th verse of the 40th Psalm suggests an obvious difficulty in the application of the Psalms as a whole to Christ personally:

My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am not able to look up:Yea, they are more in number than the hairs of my head, and my heart hath failed me.

How can we ascribe these words, or any of the confessions of sin in the Psalter, to the sinless Lamb of God? Are not these at least all our own? And yet He Himself must on earth have repeated them. In their original meaning they referred either to personal or national guilt. In either sense the recitation of them, at first sight, would seem to be alien and external to His pure conscience. But do they not take a deeper and more solemn tone when we consider them in the light of the prophet's great description of the Atoning Sufferer, "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Is. liii. 6), or of S. Paul's statement, "Him Who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf" (2 Cor. v. 21)? Such words as these contain more than the mere bearing of the punishment of sin; they imply some inward connection between the Sufferer and the sin. Indeed, rightly understood, they help to remove the difficulty that many have felt as to the apparent injustice or unreality of a vicarious Atonement. Christ was not merely a Victim suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and making reparation for all the age-long sin of man; speaking of it as if it were His own sin, so closely has He made Himself one with us in our extremest need.

Cardinal Newman, in one of the most eloquent of his sermons, "The Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion," has developed this thought in language whose daring is only justified by its devotion. It is a description of Christ kneeling alone in Gethsemane:

His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the Fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old giants, and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt, and the ambition of Babel, and the unthankfulness and scorn of Israel. Of the living and the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and of saints, all sins are there.... It is the long history of a world, and God alone can bear the load of it.... They are upon Him, they are all but His own. He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim. His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole satisfaction, the real penitent, all but the real sinner.9

Connected closely with these confessions of sin, these outcries of suffering and expiation, with the Miserere and the De Profundis, are those solemn declarations of God's wrath upon the impenitent sinner which have already been alluded to in a previous lecture. Viewed as the utterances of the Son of Man such Psalms are more rightly to be called judicial than denunciatory. It is He to Whom all judgment has been committed by the Father, He Whose coming into the world was inevitably "for judgment," Who seems here to be delivering sentence. He is taking up and confirming the fragmentary utterances of older days, in which the human conscience, imperfectly perhaps, and not without some mixture of personal feeling, yet on the whole rightly, had cried out against falsehood and wrong, and appealed to the wrath of God. The words of such a Psalm even as the 109th might have been used by Him Who twice scourged the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and Who denounced in words that burn like fire through the centuries the cruelty and hypocrisy of scribes and Pharisees; Who Himself in mercy warned us of the outer darkness and the unquenched flame.

But the Psalms not only illustrate the Passion of Christ in its mercy and judgment; they also supply words befitting His Resurrection and Triumph. It may be true that there is no clear or continuous line of prophecy in the Old Testament concerning the life after death. But it is at least equally true that the belief is there, grasped in moments of intuition by the saints of Israel, disappearing for a time like a buried river, but coming ever and anon again to the surface. So in the Psalms there are certainly evidences of the undying hope of the faithful that truth and justice must one day visibly triumph, and that man, in proportion as he is true to these things and therefore true to God, Whose nature they are, and true to himself, as made in God's image—man must also be immortal. He will not go down into silence; an endless future opens before him, as yet unfathomed and unknown, but certain. So in the Psalms which the Christian instinct, illuminated by the Spirit of Pentecost, seized upon in its first words of witness (Acts ii. 25-8) as prophetic of Christ, we have the assurance:

I have set God always before me:For He is on my right hand, therefore I shall not fall.Wherefore my heart was glad, and my glory rejoiced:My flesh also shall rest in hope.For why? Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell:10Neither shalt Thou suffer Thy Holy11 One to see corruption.(Ps. xvi. 9-11.)

And again:

As for me, I will behold Thy presence in righteousness:And when I awake up after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it.(Ps. xvii. 16.)

So again, in that profoundly spiritual Psalm, the 73rd, the writer turns from the puzzles of the moral order and the misgivings of his own heart, and seeks refuge in the abiding fact of his personal fellowship with God. He finds there the assurance not only that the wicked will pass away "like a dream when one awaketh," but that the righteous is undying:

My flesh and my heart faileth:But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.

Such Psalms as these find their full meaning only in the light of Easter. The Resurrection of Christ was no mere portent or isolated miracle; it was strictly in line with all that man had risen up to in his highest spiritual intuitions in the past. It is true, in a much fuller sense than that of accomplishing a mere prediction, that Christ "rose again, according to the Scriptures."

This essential immortality of the righteous, through his union with God, is implied throughout the Easter Psalms, especially in the 118th (part of "the Egyptian Hallel"), words which must have been recited by the Lord and His Apostles at the Passover Supper, in the very imminence of the Passion.

The voice of joy and health is in the dwellings of the righteous: …I shall not die, but live:And declare the works of the Lord.

Ascension Day completes the triumph of man raised to immortality through his union with God in Christ. It inaugurates the accomplishment of man's ideal, in the eternal mediatorial reign of Christ as the Head of the human race. The appointed Psalms are again most suggestive. The 8th sings triumphantly of the supremacy of man over all the works of God, man crowned "with glory and worship." The 15th and the 24th describe the moral perfections which are the condition of this exaltation:

Lord, who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle:Or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill?Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life:And doeth the thing which is right, and speaketh the truthfrom his heart.*     *     *     *     *Whoso doeth these things:Shall never fall.(xv.)

The 21st and the 108th look back to the promises to David and to the typical character of his wars and victories. They shew that these events were part and parcel of the Divine warfare; they were a foretaste of the triumph of God Himself. They suggest that the Ascension of Christ, while it gathers into itself all the moral victories of the past, is the beginning of a new order. It brings in a Catholic empire of truth and righteousness, which, in spite of puzzles and warfare and contradictions, parallel to those which vexed the heart of the prophets of old, is now absolutely certain in its hope: