The Christian Use of the Psalter

LECTURE III

THE CHURCH IN THE PSALTER

Gloriosa dicta sunt de te:

Civitas Dei.

It has already been pointed out that the personal element in the Psalms, vivid and even passionate as it appears, if they are read as mere lyrics, has been transformed by the Church's use of them as her hymns of worship. The "I" of the Psalter has become the voice of the worshipping community.

The Jews themselves recited the personal Psalms in a national sense. Even such an intensely personal confession of sin as the 51st Psalm becomes through the last two verses (possibly added by a later pen) the confession of national penitence and the voice of national hope:

But besides such liturgical adaptations, whether of letter or spirit, many of the later Psalms, especially those which clearly belong to the period of the second Temple, were written intentionally for the nation as a whole. "We" predominates, instead of the earlier "I." In these Psalms the nation reviews her past history, or cries out against her present oppressors, or looks onward to liberty and enlargement in the future.

But the nation which thus finds her voice in the Psalms is of a different spirit from the kingdoms of this world. Her patriotism is of a higher order. She is conscious of a Divine vocation, separating her from the nations of the heathen:

She has a treasure committed to her keeping, which others have not:

She has a hope that burns within her, which to the world would be foolishness:

In other words, the community which speaks in the Psalter is more than a nation; she is a theocracy, a Church. Her characteristic names are prophetic; they suggest supernatural dealings and a heavenly calling. She is "Israel," heiress of him who "persevered with God" and won the blessing; she is the "seed of Abraham," in which it was promised that "all the nations of the earth should be blessed"; she is "Sion," the "stronghold," "Jerusalem," name of ideals, "vision" or "possession" or "foundation"—"of peace"! It is as this sacred congregation, this ecclesia, that the nation rejoices in the Psalms in her calling and illumination, sorrows over her failures, prays in her warfare, waits for her glory.

It is not surprising that the Catholic Church recognised here her own portrait, or that the outlines sketched in the Psalter have been filled with light and colour and detail during the Christian centuries. The Catholic Church instinctively felt herself to be the true successor of the Israel of the Psalms. The ancient titles were retained, but in a fuller meaning. To S. Paul the Church is the "Israel of God" (Gal. vi. 16) in contrast to the "Israel after the flesh." The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells his Christian readers that they are "come unto Mount Sion" (xii. 22). S. Peter applies to the Church the old titles given to Israel in the Law, "an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" (1 Peter ii. 9). S. John in the Apocalypse sees the new Jerusalem, having not only the names of "the twelve apostles of the Lamb" on her jewelled foundations, but the names of the "twelve tribes of the children of Israel" on her gates of pearl (Rev. xxi. 12, 14). Old things had passed away, the sacred people of God remained, but no longer confined to the narrow boundaries of Palestine, nor to the dispersed descendants of Abraham: her children were "princes in all lands," all who were "of faith" were counted her seed. The Church knew herself to be the Israel of the future, custodian of a greater treasure, called to a grander work.

The Psalter indeed demands this higher interpretation. Just as the portrait of the Righteous One would have been an unfulfilled ideal had not Christ made it His own, so the glowing descriptions of Israel would have been but pious dreamings had not the Catholic Church risen up out of the fallen tabernacle of David. As the songs of the Temple falter and die away, the new spirit of praise clothes itself in the ancient forms. "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, Glory to the Righteous" (Is. xxiv. 16). The very words of the Psalter become transfigured like the garments of the Lord on the holy mount.

Nor is this passing away of the glory of old Israel into the greater glories of the Catholic Israel of God without some foreshadowing in the Psalter itself. In the 22nd, the great Psalm of the Passion, the Sufferer passes from the dogs and lions and the mocking faces that surround him to contemplate the far-off fruit of his anguish. He seems to see "a great congregation," in the midst of which he himself hereafter will praise God Who has heard his prayer. Mysteriously it seems to rise, this "seed," this "people that shall be born," out of the very hopelessness and desolation of the Cross. "All the ends of the earth" are united in it, "all the kindred of the nations" worship there. The rich and the poor alike have their place in this kingdom of the future. And the special characteristic of this new creation of God will be the sharing in a sacrificial feast, the Sufferer's thanksgiving, his Eucharist in which he "pays his vows." Here "the meek shall eat and be satisfied," here eating and worshipping are strangely intermingled—a prophecy unread and unfulfilled until the Church learnt the secret "in the same night that He was betrayed."

This ecclesiastical aspect of the Psalter is of very high importance. There is perhaps no part of the Christian faith which is more difficult for "the natural man" than "the Holy Catholic Church." An erroneous or imperfect idea of the Church seems to pass muster, among Christians even, so much more readily than error in other matters of faith. All through Christian history the true idea of the Church has been obscured, now by imperialism, with its misleading traditions of the Roman Empire; now by nationalism, as if the Church were only the religious aspect of a civil community; or again by individualism, as if she were no more than a collection of separate units. Erastianism and Puritanism in turn have led men astray. The warning against such things is written largely enough in the history of ancient Israel. The Jews of our Lord's time, while insisting keenly, even bitterly, on their separation from the Gentiles, were for the most part forgetful of what that separation really involved. Their ambition to be separate from the nations of the earth only meant for them a worldly and selfish exclusiveness. In earlier days the clamour for a king, the thirst for alliances with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, had displayed in the opposite manner much the same spirit. Religious privileges, that Divine calling which had made them a nation, were to be used as a means to worldly advancement and security. In the Psalter there stands out a truer conception of the Church as the spiritual commonwealth, a kingdom of God in the world, but not of this world's spirit, organised for higher ends than self-protection or self-development, aiming not at conquest but at the conversion and good of mankind, glorying not in privilege but in vocation, not in self but in the law of God. And this is the pattern for all time. The Christian Church may find in the Psalter her own just self-expression in a fuller manner than ever ancient Israel did or could. Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church.

First in the Psalter there is the note of comprehensiveness. The heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. And side by side with threats and foreboding of their utter destruction in the day of God there are glimpses here and there of the possibility of their conversion, and even of their becoming one family with Israel. The great Psalm of Whitsunday, the 68th, passes from the thought of God wounding the head of His enemies, of His warriors dipping their feet in the blood of the vanquished, to the hope of the princes coming out of Egypt, and Ethiopia making haste to stretch out her hands unto God. So, again, the 47th Psalm looks forward to the essential sovereignty of God over all the earth being recognised even by this world's rulers:

And lest it should be thought that such hopes referred only to an empire of external rule, like that of Solomon's, we have the startling predictions of Ps. lxxxvii. Here the people of Rahab (Egypt) and Babylon, the Philistines, the Tyrians, the Ethiopians, all types of the obstinate and idolatrous heathen world, are pictured as forsaking their natural lineage and descent to be born again in Zion, enrolling themselves there as citizens of the Lord's glorious foundation upon the holy mountains, finding there their joy and the fount of their inspiration.

Surely this is one of the most remarkable foreshadowings in the Old Testament of the catholicity of the Church, and of that new birth of Baptism by which men of every race and tongue are grafted into the one body, "where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all" (Col. iii. 11). In this and in many other Psalms (cf. lxvii., xcviii., c.) we confess the essentially missionary vocation of the Church; that she calls to all mankind, not to the Western nations only, nor to the progressive and civilised only. Hers is the one faith for all men, her citizenship unlimited by any barriers of race or temperament.

If the catholicity of the Church is so clearly sketched in the Psalter, no less clear is her social ideal. The poor, the oppressed, those who have no helper, are equally called to share in Israel's hope and her gifts. God Himself is her pattern, Who—

The Messianic King will count the blood of the poor and needy equally precious with that of the rich and great (lxxii.). The Sufferer of the Passion Psalm (xxii.) looks forward, as we have seen, to the result of his triumph, in not only calling the "fat ones of the earth" to eat and worship at his table, but in finding there an equal place for—

These are lessons which we have as yet gone but a little way in learning. Yet the Psalter, as we recite it day by day, puts in our own mouth the condemnation of exclusiveness and pride and of deafness to the complaint of the poor; it makes us confess at least the Catholic ideal of unity, of universal justice, of the imperishable value of the individual life, of the transformation of human society in the light of the Divine sovereignty of Christ.

The two lines of the Church's activity just alluded to, missionary and social, so prominent in the Psalms, are calling to-day so loudly for self-humiliation and new effort, that they may profitably be dwelt on a little further. The Psalmist's prophecy of the kings of Arabia and Saba bringing gifts (lxxii.) is still largely unfulfilled. The East is still almost untouched. Asia has not yet brought her characteristic gift to Christ. She is still under the dominion of imperfect religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. And yet India is our possession; Japan is our pupil. "The way of the kings of the East" is already "prepared" (Rev. xvi. 12), but where is the adequate response from English Christianity? "Who is blind but My servant, or deaf as My messenger that I send?"

And turning homewards, what are we to say of these grotesque and monstrous contrasts between wealth and poverty, luxury and squalor in England to-day, where rich and poor alike are baptized? What of the immoralities of commerce, of the bad work of the labourer as well as the swindling of the capitalist? Does not the spirit of the Psalter cut across it all like the keen breath of the mountain wind? Yet Englishmen are spending time and energy in ritual debates and persecutions, and educational and social strife. Worse still, the rich and intellectual, for some prejudice or political motive, are eager to deny the poor the beauties of worship or the definiteness of the Catholic Faith.

In view of these unfulfilled ideals of the Church, the Psalter provides us in such Psalms as the 78th, the 79th, or the 106th with confession of sin and failure under the figure of Hebrew history. The recitation of these may well remind us not merely of personal faults but of our own share in the shortcomings of the Church of God:

For the Church as well as ourselves we are taught to pray, "Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts." The sorrows and desolations of Zion are never represented in the Psalms as being merely the effect of heathen malice, though they are so largely that, but as calls to look back upon history, and also to look within, to consider what unfaithfulness there may have been and is, what "starting aside like a broken bow" in our fathers and in ourselves.

From this point of view the penitential Psalms"13 might profitably be used not merely as the expression of personal penitence, but as an act of reparation, an offering to God of our sorrow for the worldliness and imperfections of His Church; as an incentive also to effort, that we may do our part to remove the "reproach of the heathen," to restore the Church from within, to seek her unity and peace.

There is, however, another side to the problem of the Church's failures. Israel and Jerusalem are constantly described in the Psalms as being the marks for the malignity and opposition of external enemies. Indeed, a persistent note of the Church, Jewish as well as Christian, is the hatred which she awakens in the powers of this world. The object of suspicion and attack from Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon in early days, Jerusalem fares no better after the humiliation of the Captivity. The attempts to rebuild the Temple and restore the city arouse the bitterest hostility from the surrounding peoples, a hostility not merely political, but traceable to a deeper cause. The attempts of Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century B.C. to break down Jewish separation and to destroy Jewish worship are marked by the same spirit, working in a more arrogant and brutal manner. Our Lord Himself promises no smoother or more popular course for His faithful ones. "Ye shall be hated of all men." S. Paul recognises the same antagonism running throughout the history of the elect: "As then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now" (Gal. iv. 29).

The Psalter will not allow us to shut our eyes to this malignant and persecuting attitude of the world. The enemies of the Righteous find a place in almost every Psalm. The malice of human nature at its worst seems to be marshalled against Him, in slander and ingratitude and treachery. But there is also the opposition of the heathen as a whole against Israel. The vicissitudes of her history are typical; they illustrate a permanent principle which is found working from age to age. It was not less active nor less brutal in the first three Christian centuries than it was in the days of Antiochus. To-day, though its attack is less outwardly cruel, the spirit which prompts it is just as deeply seated, and more malignant perhaps in proportion as it is veiled. The Church has not merely to contend with the hatred of those who have chosen and loved evil, and find the righteous a standing reproach. There is gathered against her also the world's steady resentment of spiritual authority; the world's antipathy against all that refuses to come to terms, or water down its witness to suit changing fashions of men's thought. It is the same spirit which in earlier days called the Christians "the enemies of the human race," and in these later times directs its sneers and opposition against the Creeds, the Sacraments, the priesthood—"the spirit of Antichrist."

The 44th Psalm, perhaps belonging to the time of the great Maccabæan struggle, makes its pathetic appeal to God amidst the scorn and blasphemy of the heathen, and, what is worse, the bitterness of apparent failure and defeat which seem to justify the heathen.

Faith indeed does not fail the Psalmist: he clings to God; he still recognises the hand of God throughout these sufferings; he prefers to attribute them to God rather than to man:

Nevertheless, it is all a puzzle, a bewildering maze in which faith seems walking blindfold, like the Lord Himself when the malice of the high-priest's servants bandaged His eyes and smote Him in derision and bade Him prophesy! The light of God's presence seems to have gone out of the world:

Very similar is the 74th Psalm, with its same high consciousness of faithfulness to God, the same agonising sense of contradiction in the enemies of God being suffered to break down the carved work of the sanctuary, the same feeling of helplessness and lack of guidance. The adversaries' banners are manifest enough, their tokens are clear; but with the faithful it is otherwise:

O God, how long! … Remember! … Arise! … Forget not!

Probably of the same period is the 79th, written apparently in the very hour of the heathen triumph, when the Temple is defiled, Jerusalem "an heap of stones," the blood of the righteous flowing on every side like water. And there is still the characteristic turning away from self and personal humiliation to the thought of the dishonour done to God Himself. For to the faithful the honour of God is dearer than their own liberty or life.

The 83rd belongs perhaps to an earlier age. It seems to recall the great confederacy of the nations against Jehoshaphat (2 Chron. xx.). The Psalmist cries out to God against the gathering hordes who have no interest in common, except their mutual hatred of Israel and Israel's God. It is a sorry catalogue: Edomites, Ishmaelites, Moabites, Hagarens; Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek; Philistines, Tyrians, Assyrians:

But the hot indignation which prays that this rabble of malice and mischief may be swept like the stubble before the whirlwind, consumed like the dry grass before the mountain fires, is yet tempered with a higher thought. Defeat may lead to conversion and to a better mind:

Once again, the 102nd Psalm breathes out the pathetic appeal of the exile, or the lonely, friendless watcher over the desolations of the holy city. His heart is "smitten down and withered like grass"; he has "eaten ashes as it were bread, and mingled his drink with weeping." But his fasting and tears are not for himself; there is the eternal background of hope; God is unchanging; future generations will know again the happiness of worship and service—his sorrow is for Zion:

Do not experiences and prayers like these come home to Christians with a curious sense of familiarity? Is not this tragedy of faith repeated in every age? In every Christian generation it has been "given" to the Beast to war against the saints and overcome them (Rev. xiii. 7). His undying malice has too often been seconded by the impotence, the lack of unity, the fear of truth and its consequences, which have marred the Christian defence.

We find eloquent illustrations of this unceasing, heart-sickening warfare in such moments of history as that in the fourth century, when "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian";14 in the seventh and eighth, when the armies of Islam swept away the divided and bickering Churches of the East and that Church of North Africa, once so glorious, where holiness had not kept pace with zeal; in the fifteenth, when Constantinople fell, and the great cathedral of S. Sophia passed into the hands of the Turks, and this very day, where once Christian worship was offered, and Christian emblems high on its walls still make their silent protest,

in the sixteenth, when the fair abbeys of England were despoiled and suffered to fall into ruin, through covetousness and irreligion masquerading under the garb of piety; in the seventeenth, when the voice of the Church's worship was stifled, and the faithful were interrupted in their very Christmas Communion by the levelled muskets of the Cromwellian troopers15; in our own day, when liberality can tolerate everything except the Catholic Faith? Verily these Hebrew Psalms are a Christian possession for ever. They speak to us and speak for us in accents of undying truth, and every year that passes verifies their witness and points more sharply their appeal.

But not only does the Psalter tell of the Church and her ideals, of her warfare and her failures, it insists with equal conviction on her stability. God's great promise to the line of David carried with it the preservation of David's city. The attacks of the heathen seemed to have reached their climax when Sennacherib's army had taken all the fortified cities of Judæa, and Jerusalem was left isolated and helpless (2 Kings xix.). Yet when human hope was gone, the prophet's word rang out with the certainty of faith. "I will defend this city to save it, for Mine own sake, and for My servant David's sake." The sequel was one of the most startling catastrophes in history. The Assyrian hosts were destroyed in a single night, and Assyrian invasions ceased. Again, in a later generation, when the promise seemed at last to have failed, and the Temple had fallen, the city was burnt and her king and citizens in captivity, the prophets never waver in their vision of a future restoration when sin has been repented and national guilt expiated. Zerubbabel and Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, Judas Maccabæus and his descendants, restore and maintain Temple and city to last till "the fulness of the time," when the true meaning of the Davidic promises was revealed.