Towards Sunday, July 5, 2015

Reading:  Psalm 23
Theme:  Quit calling me Shirley!

"The Lord is my shepherd..." 

These first five words are sometimes all we need to say or hear, to feel the comfort of this psalm steal into our hearts and create a buffer of peace against whatever stress or distress we may be facing in our lives at that point.

But if we read or remember the psalm through to the end, what about the last two lines -- the last verse of the psalm?

     Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
     and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

The Hebrew phrase from which we get "my whole life long" is actually "for length of days," which helps explain how we end up with the traditional King James rendering of "forever," which most of us take as a reference to living in God's heavenly house (a la John 14:1-4) forever after we die. 

No doubt we will always take this meaning from Psalm 23.  The psalm never denies the reality of evil, fear and sorrow in life, and there's something in us that needs the reassurance of peace and wholeness beyond what we experience here.

But is this last promise only about the here-after?

What does it mean, for instance, that goodness and mercy "shall follow me"?  The Hebrew verb is radaph which means "to pursue" as an enemy would pursue you to over-take you and over-power you.  Does the psalm mean that goodness and mercy pursue us as much as evil and sorrow seem to, and that those with eyes to see can let it overtake, surprise, capture, and overwhelm them all the days of their life?

And when we do that, how can we not know that no matter what may come and what we may fear, we really are living in the household and within the loving reach of God our whole life long?