One of the important ways that the Church gives clergy to stay on track with religious and spiritual growth is the requirement for daily recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours. That requirement makes the practice truly a Divine Office, part of our official duties. But there are two ways to envision a duty. The first is “this is something I have to do, so I do it, but I don’t much like it.” The other is “this is an important part of framing my day in loving service.” All ministers who assume the duty must make a daily decision as to what moves them to pray. Hopefully, that motivation involves our desire for theosis (divinization), daily becoming more like Jesus Christ.
Early in my ministry, I noted that there are several different options that invite us to start our day of prayer. They fulfill the “invitatory” psalm requirement. So, since as a chorister I had already memorized the original Grail translation of Psalm 100, for most of the past quarter century that was the psalm I chose to pray. It was brief, had its own Gelineau melody I already knew, and can start out a day well with “Cry out with joy to the Lord” affective ideas. I could “cold boot” daily into prayerfulness without a book, while physically preparing for the day.
Nonetheless, the psalter used in the Office also assigns Psalm 100 as the last psalm of Morning Prayer (Lauds) every couple of Fridays and directs the cleric for the third psalm to use Psalm 95. It was a bit frustrating to turn back to the required psalm, so I took some time to memorize Psalm 95 and began to pray those words every day for the invitatory. The new protocol, once it became habitual, transformed my daily prayer life. Let’s see why that can happen.
Psalm 100, my original invitatory prayer, is worded thus:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands!
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!Know that the Lord is God!
It is he that made us, and we are his;[b]
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him, bless his name!For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations. (RSV Catholic translation)
Like psalm 50 and many others, this processional hymn is marked as תּוֹדָה todah. It accompanies “thank” offerings and implies that the worshipers are in the temple because of special favors received from the Lord, perhaps the subjects of a vow made in stress. The central thought is found in verse 3: “know that the Lord is God,” and is the maker of His people Israel, who are to Adonai as a flock of sheep are to their shepherd. Three invitations before this verse, “Make . . . serve . . . come” are mirrored by three invitations after, “Enter . . . Give thanks . . . bless”1 The psalm the ends with an oft-found paean to the goodness, חֶסֶד chesed (enduring love) and אֱמוּנָה Emunah (covenant faithfulness) of the Lord.
As an Invitatory psalm, Psalm 100 serves very well, since there are three invitations to the worshiper(s) to prayer, communal awareness of our dependence on God, and a clear tie-in to what appears as the fundamental identity of our God (His faithful love). Looking at this prayer as a kind of early-morning “reboot” of our own identity, the psalm works well to kick off a day of work and worship, either in choir or individually. It stimulates the imagination toward heavenly realities; we can imagine it being used in the Divine Liturgy pictured in the later chapters of Revelation, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb and the Church in glory.
In contrast, those of us who are still immersed in the real world rather than the notional one (thanks for the distinction, St. John Henry Newman!) may relate more completely to Psalm 95 for our daily dawn wakeup prayer. Let’s look at the whole psalm with that use at the front of our minds. I have strophed the psalm as it was found in the 1976 version of the Office, the original Grail translation, but using the RSV Catholic edition:
- O come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! - For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it;
for his hands formed the dry land. - O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand. - O that today you would hearken to his voice!
Harden not your hearts, as at Mer′ibah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your fathers tested me,
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. - For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who err in heart,
and they do not regard my ways.”
Therefore I swore in my anger
that they should not enter my rest.
The psalm begins with an invitation to thanksgiving and praise, much as Psalm 100, but intensifies that appeal by using the verb רוּעַ rua, which connotes a noisy cry, even a battle cry.2 That word is used in both verses 1 and 2 for emphasis. The prayer is clearly a wakeup call. In the Christian context, it means “Soldiers of Christ, come and make a praise-racket.” God is called צוּר tsur, a rock (§6697) of יֶשַׁע yesha salvation (§3468). To the modern eye and ear, that is reminiscent of the rocks in the book and movie Dune, the only safe zone for humans being pursued by the huge subterranean sandworms of the mythical planet Arrakis.
Notwithstanding, “rock” for the ancient Israelite was a key word from their desert existence with Moses, Aaron and Miriam, a symbol of Mount Sinai/Horeb. It also called to mind the rock struck by Moses with his staff, the source of huge amounts of water provided by God to Israel on their journey. St. Paul appeals to an old rabbinic tradition that the water-source rock followed Israel in their desert wanderings when he writes, “all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” (1 Cor 10:4)
However, unlike Psalm 100, this psalm anchors itself firmly in the history of Israel by calling God a “rock.” This anchoring is confirmed in the fourth and fifth strophes by an appeal to the worshiper not to repeat the errors and sins of the desert-bound Israel after the Exodus. We’ll see that shortly.
In strophe 2, we encounter the first anthropomorphing of God, one requiring us to think hard about what we mean by “God.” God is a “great king,” a political ruler. He is above all “gods.” He is אֵל el, “God” above all אֱלֹהִים Elohim, “gods.” At this line I have developed the internal habit of praying, “a great God above all other ‘gods’ so-called,” since the Lord God does not belong in the same category as angelic (or diabolic) spirits here called “gods.” God simply is. As Psalm 31 teaches, anything else called “god” is שָׁוְא הֶבֶל (shav hebel), a “phony idol.” That second word, shown here as “idol” can also be translated as “vapor.” They are not divine; they are nothing. St. Paul, following Deuteronomy, calls them demons (1 Cor 10:20).
We also encounter in strophe 2 the image of God as a physical, human-like Being, with hands in which He can hold the earth, the depths, the mountains, and the dry land. We imagine God forming things out of the dust of earth and crafting the sea with those hands. God is not only the maker of all the earth, but also the proprietor, the owner. Having used those terms, of course, we may seem to have “boxed in” the Lord, but we must recall and agree that He is entirely “other,” and our assigning properties to Him is really a waste of time and ink. Therefore, our only realistic response is laid down in what follows.
Strophe 3 is a liturgical direction that outlines what we must do because of the immense (immeasurable) divine reality we now confront. We worship with heart, mind and body. We bow down and kneel, following St. Paul’s example in his letter to the Philippians (2:10–11), “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth.” The gesture of bowing the knee or the entire body appears throughout the Old Testament as the physical response of an inferior person to a superior one, particularly as a movement of worshiping Deity. It is also a forbidden action when in the presence of a foreign, false idol.
“For He is our God.” YHWH/Adonai is not only the God who created all things, whose essence is to be. He is the God of Israel, who chose their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be His own representatives on earth, and whose descendants had duties outlined in Torah for right worship and right conduct. As such, they have responsibilities to their God, and He has a duty of protection to them, much as a shepherd to His flock.
Challenges
In strophe 4 we arrive at something psalm 100 never considers. The flock only follows the shepherd if they listen to His voice of instruction, especially His calls to avoid the many perils they face. What happens if the sheep (we, God’s people) stop listening to His voice, speaking particularly in the “Ten Words” of Torah and the Law of Love of Christ, to love each other as He loved us? The flock breaks up, follows any tempting patch of grass rather than the Shepherd, and becomes the prey of wolves and lions. When concupiscence rules, Satan is master.
There is one specific instance of the Biblical flock, literally in the desert, moving heedlessly out of communion with the Divine Shepherd. It is referred to as a place where the Israelite human sheep allowed their hearts to be “hardened.” That area, between the desert of Sin and that of Sinai, is identified as מְרִיבָה Meribah, “place of strife” (§4809) and מַסָּה Massah, related to “testing.” (§4532) The ancestors of those praying this psalm had tested the Lord by complaining against the lack of water in the place, even though they were day by day seeing רָאָה raah His work, in their freedom and especially in the daily supply of “bread from heaven,” the מָן man or manna. The sin of the people was not their thirst, and not even their asking for water, but their accusation, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3). They were indicting Moses, and by implication, God, of ill will, and of planning the Israelites’ destruction, as they rebelled on other occasions. They put God “to the test” yet He once more saved them by instructing Moses and the elders to go ahead and strike the rock with the staff used before to strike the sea at the escape from Egypt. This yields abundant fresh water and becomes the Rock that follows them in the desert.
A hardened heart is one that refuses to listen and change a human’s direction. The prototypical hard heart, for Torah, is the heart of Pharaoh (Ex 7:13), who saw but discounted the miraculous signs associated with God’s direction to let the Israelites go worship. The psalmist of Ps 95 hears God’s call for the Israelites (and, by implication, anyone hearing the psalm) not to imitate Pharaoh. A like illustration is “stiffness of neck,” which prevents the listener from turning and changing his mind or behavior.
By contrast, the author or editor of Torah offers the image of a heart that is circumcised (Deuteronomy 10:16). Jeremiah picks up the same illustration as a taking away of the “foreskin of your hearts,” an even more robust picture. (Jeremiah 4:4) St. Paul writes similarly, extending the analogy to a circumcision by the Holy Spirit (Romans 2:29). In this fourth strophe, the psalmist switches voices, imagining the Lord Himself uttering the accusation, “when your fathers tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.” This strongly emphasizes the seriousness of the remembrance of rebellion. It is a recollection that each of us should begin our day by doing.
The fifth strophe expands upon the final metaphor of the fourth and gets specific by enlarging the complaint to the entire forty years of the desert wanderings. The God of the psalm uses the highly anthropomorphic verb קוּט qut (loathe) to express an attitude toward the generation of Israelites freed from Egypt. No additional infidelity is catalogued here, only the judgement against their לֵבָב lebab, or inmost mind and will. (§3824) They תָּעָה taah (go astray, §8582) in their decision-making. How? They refuse to יָדַע yada (know, in the sense of obeying what they understand, §3045) God’s ways.
Because of this failure in the Israelite heart, God swore an oath against Israel, at least against the Exodus generation. In Numbers 32: 11, God says that none of those men who came out of Egypt, twenty years old or more, would ever see the land God swore to give to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This oath is sworn using the same verb, שָׁבַע shaba (§7650), used to describe the original oath God swore to Abraham, giving his descendants that land. In Genesis 22:16, we read after Abraham was prevented from killing Isaac in sacrifice, “By myself (God) I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you. . .” This oath affirms the land-grant and the multiplication of descendants expected from Isaac. It also promises victory over the foes of Israel and the use of Israel’s name in blessings over all the earth. The oath to Abraham established a permanent relationship between God and man. The oath against the rebellious generation cut relations with a definite part of the Israelite community, defined more by their attitude and performance than by their age-grouping. These people would not receive the reward of fidelity, here called by the Lord “my rest.”
The ending strophes of Psalm 95 are interpreted by the author of the letter to the Hebrews with a significant difference. “The Hebrew version of Ps 95 focuses on the defiance of Israel at Massah and Meribah (Ex 17:1–7) but the Greek version quoted here [in Heb 3:7–11] laments the rebellion at Kadesh, where the Israelites, paralyzed by fear of the Canaanites, refused to seize possession of the Promised Land (Num 14:1–38). For this, the Lord swore an oath of disinheritance that condemned that entire generation. . .”3 There are clearly several differing interpretations right in the Scriptures for the disinheritance of most of the Exodus survivors from the land promised to the patriarchs, but all have the same underlying motive. Every story is about some act of disobedience by the Israelite leaders or people.
Moreover, for those of us praying the psalm today, the final Hebrew words of the song are warnings to each one, whether cleric or layperson, to keep our attention on the Word of the Lord and obey God’s ordinance.
Doxology
Psalm 95 appears to conclude on a downbeat melody, a warning to avoid disobedience, and so it does. Psalm 88, which our Office offers more than once in the four-week cycle, ends even more darkly: “Friend and neighbor you have taken away: my one companion is darkness.” (Grail translation) Even bleaker in our breviaries is psalm 137, so dark in the whole that our edition omits several concluding verses: “O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” The original Hebrew of several of the lamentation psalms confronts such “downers” by adding a doxology like “Blessed be God forever.”
In Catholic prayer books, we add one that Jewish books cannot: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.” (the Gloria Patri as will be translated in the soon-to-be-published revised Breviaries.) This, of course, is the most uttered prayer by Catholic clergy, and probably by the laity as well. It suggests what we all know from experience: the Lord loves to hear praise from the lips of sinners like you and me. Why? Because He loves us more than we could ever express in human language. That means He wants the good for each human being, and we experience goodness most authentically when we give God praise and thanks.
We can perhaps best conclude our meditation on this psalm by quoting St. Augustine, as he gathered evidence refuting the heretical Pelagius: “We began with exulting joy: but this Psalm has ended with great fear: Unto whom I swore in My wrath, that they should not enter into My rest . . . It is a great thing for God to speak: how much greater for Him to swear? You should fear a man when he swears, lest he do somewhat on account of his oath against his will: how much more should you fear God, when He swears, seeing He can swear nothing rashly?”4
Praying Psalm 95 along with the antiphon of each day (a short prayer that helps us define our day’s motive), is an excellent help in our theosis journey. In the psalm, we are reaching out to the transcendent One who daily reaches out to us. The words help us give thanks and praise, repent of our offenses, and petition for the assistance we all need. Its words stimulate our imagination and historical sense to lock us into a deeper understanding of God’s love and our ongoing need for seeing His transforming Face, until the day we fall asleep for the last time and awake for the final purification that will bring us into the Divine Presence and our own divinized identity.
About Deacon W. Patrick Cunningham
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