The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

by N.T. Wright

Good liturgy, whether formal or informal, ought never to be simply a corporate emoting session, however “Christian,” but a fresh and awed attempt to inhabit the great unceasing liturgy that is going on all the time in the heavenly realms. (That’s what those great chapters, Revelation 4 and 5, are all about.)

Our knowledge of Israel’s early history is patchy at best, forming a very uneven surface on which to hit the billiard balls of ancient evidence around the table.

It seems wisest to think of the Psalms, in their present form, being collected and shaped in the time of the exile in Babylon (beginning in the sixth century BC), when paradoxically the people who found it unthinkable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land may have found that actually singing those songs (and writing some new ones) was one of the few things that kept them sane and gave them hope.

But behind those explicit references there stands, I believe, an entire world in which Jewish people were singing and praying the Psalms day by day and month by month, allowing them to mold their character, to shape their worldview, to frame their reading of the rest of scripture, and (not least) to fuel and resource the active lives they were leading and the burning hopes that kept them trusting their God, the world’s creator, even when everything seemed bleak and barren.

The problem is that, out of many ancient worldviews, the Bible resolutely inhabits one, and much of the modern Western world has resolutely inhabited a different one.

The biblical worldview, I will suggest, is both far more ancient than Epicureanism and also far more up-to-date.

Who am I, what am I doing now (time), here (space), and in this body (matter) that God has given me?

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living. They shaped the praying and vocation even of Jesus himself. They can and will do the same for us.

They are also there for every Christian—child, woman, and man—to use in their private prayers, both in the regular discipline of morning and evening worship and in the thousand moments during the day when something happens to which the first response should be prayer, whether in praise or in panic.

In part, this will happen simply because people who pray the Psalms will be worshiping the God who made them, and one of the basic spiritual laws is that you become like what you worship.

prayer encourages a rhythm of breathing that facilitates a calmer and wiser bodily approach to life than might otherwise be the case.

they resonate with Jesus because he was the one who stood, by divine appointment, precisely at the intersection of God’s time and ours, of God’s space and ours, of God’s matter and ours.

Part of the strange work of the Psalms is to draw the terror and shame of all the ages together to a point where it becomes intense and unbearable, turning itself into a great scream of pain, the pain of Israel, the pain of Adam and Eve, the pain that shouts out, in the most paradoxical act of worship, to ask why God has abandoned it. And then of course the Psalms tell the story of strange vindication, of dramatic reversal, of wondrous rescue, comfort, and restoration.

Sing these songs, and they will renew you from head to toe, from heart to mind. Pray these poems, and they will sustain you on the long, hard but exhilarating road of Christian discipleship.

The Psalms themselves come in many shapes and forms, because God wants people-poems of many shapes and forms.

It isn’t so much that the world doesn’t believe in God. Most people simply can’t imagine what it might be like to live in God’s world, in his time, in his space, and in his matter.

Make us, in other words, to be people who know how to stand at the threshold of human time and God’s time, and there to learn both humility and hope.

The radical difference between God’s time and ours provides both the reason why we so often find ourselves perplexed at the course life takes and the reason why we can nevertheless find hope in the midst of it:

“now and not yet”

If that reminds us of Israel’s greatest prophet sensing himself utterly abandoned by God and yet still able to ask God why he has abandoned him, that is probably part of the point.)

The abuse doesn’t remove the use.

God created humans in the beginning to be his vice rulers over the world.

It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we knew better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

The significance of this cannot be overestimated. God created the world in such a way that it was to be looked after by humans who reflect his image. When the humans rebelled, he did not rescind that project. Instead, he called a human family in order that they might reflect not simply his wise ordering and stewardship into the world but now also his rescuing love into that same world, disastrously flawed as it now was.

Here is the ecstasy and the agony of the Old Testament: the rich, breathtaking vocation of Israel and the dark, tragic fact that this vocation, this rescue mission, was to be undertaken by a people who were themselves in sore need of the very same rescue.

We may wonder at this combination: What does it mean that God both forgave them and punished them?

God’s powerful rescue of his people in the Exodus that provides the template: the sign of what his power can do, and the pledge that it will happen again when Israel needs it.

These psalms look beyond the present time to the coming time. More specifically, they look back to the great moments of the past in order to frame the pain and puzzlement of the present within the hope that God will one day do again, in the future, what he did long ago,

Humans have sinned, but God will still work through them; Israel has sinned, but God will still use its people to bless the nations; monarchs have sinned grievously, but God still promises to bring the world into subjection under his anointed king.

Penitence here, suffering there; only so will the larger promises be fulfilled.

we find that they themselves express the eschatological tension and invite us to stand exactly there.

This is what poetry and music themselves are there to do: to link the present to the past, to say, “Remember,” to say, “Blessed be God,” even when the tide is running strongly in the wrong direction.

Bring the past into the present, and that will sustain us as we wait in the dark for your future.

That prayer of impatience is precisely what happens when we are caught at the intersection of the times.

We are given those psalms, I believe, so that we can pray them ourselves out of our own impatience. God in his wisdom knows that we shall want and need to express the pain of being caught in the crack of time.

The Psalms are gifts that help us not only to think wisely about the overlaps and paradoxes of time, but to live within them, to reach out in the day of trouble and remind ourselves—and not only ourselves, but also the mysterious one whom the Psalms call “you”—of the story in which we live.

Again and again the Psalms celebrate, in almost embarrassingly vivid language, the belief that the creator of the universe has, for reasons best known to him, decided to take up residence on a small hill in the Judean uplands. The living God, the Psalms declare, has decided to make his own special home at the point where the fertile western escarpment meets the eastern wilderness. It is poised between garden and desert—almost as though God couldn’t quite make up his mind whether to settle firmly in a New Eden or to remain camped with his people in their wilderness wanderings.

This is the point that Western modernity regards as so incomprehensible as to be laughable: the eternal creator coming to live at one point on the earth?

a convenient gathering point: they are the place of promise, the place of presence, the place out of all the earth where the living God has chosen to live:

The Psalms not only insist that we are called to live at the intersection of God’s space and our space, of heaven and earth, to be (in other words) Temple people. They call us to live at the intersection of sacred space, the Temple and the holy land that surrounds it, and the rest of human space, the world where idolatry and injustice still wreak their misery.

When, after the six “days” of creation, the creator completed his work and “rested,” we are to understand not simply that he sat back and did nothing but that he came and took up residence in the world he had made.

in the tension between the past (when he had surely been there), the future (when he would surely return), and the puzzling present (when one might perhaps sense his presence but not yet in the full promised glory and rescuing power).

Instead of thinking of a place to which YHWH might come and be at rest, they sometimes thought of YHWH himself as the “place” where a worshiper might go to be at rest:

Wherever you travel, all this implies, the Torah will be like a moving tabernacle, a place of refuge: “Your statutes have been my songs,” says the next stanza, “wherever I make my home” (119.54).

The psalms themselves, even while continuing to celebrate the Zion promises and the coming Davidic kingship that goes with them, already sing about, and by singing help to bring about, an implicit personal version of Temple theology. Devout worshipers, individually or corporately, can themselves become, as it were, an extension of sacred space.

The notion of YHWH dwelling in the Temple has not been abandoned, but it is translated into the notion of his dwelling with his people—within his people, wherever they are—through their study and heartfelt practice of the Torah.

The psalms are here pointing to the double intention of the creator: that the Temple in Jerusalem should be a sign not only of God’s purpose to flood the whole of creation with his glorious presence, but also of his longing to fill the hearts, minds, imaginations, and wills of his people with that same glory.

Temple. It is hard to bring out the full flavor of John 1.14 (“The word became flesh, and lived among us”); the Greek word John uses could be translated to say that he “tabernacles” in our midst. Most translations, naturally, do not put it quite like that, but that is what the word means.

The early Christians, wanting to explain their explosive sense of who Jesus really was, drew on the ancient theme of Israel’s God coming back at last to dwell in the midst of his people, to save them and bring his restorative and healing justice to the whole world.

try singing those psalms Christologically, thinking of Jesus as their ultimate fulfillment. See how they sound, what they do, where they take you.