READING THE BOOK OF PSALMS

PART LXXXI

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Psalm 145

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Psalm 145 teaches a profound thought: God’s faithfulness holds creation together.  God is the glue and the binding force of the universe.  This faithfulness manifests in daily reliability to human beings, we read.  So, the God of Psalm 145 is simultaneously transcendent and imminent.

To repeat Psalm 145 is to confess the insufficiency of self and the sovereignty of God.  It is, in a real sense, to live in a different world–not in an escapist sense, but in the sense that God’s claims, values, and priorities inevitably put us at odds with a prevailing culture that promotes autonomy.  In other words, Psalm 145 invites us to live in the world of God’s reign, the world where the fundamental reality and pervasive power is the gracious, compassionate, and faithful love of God.

–J. Clinton McCann, Jr., in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 4 (1996), 1261

St. Augustine of Hippo understood the truth of Psalm 145 well:

…because you made us for yourself, and our hearts find no place until they rest in you.

When we mere mortals engage in delusions of grandeur and self-sufficiency, we miss the truth of our existence.  God is, to borrow a term from Paul Tillich, the Ground of Being.  God loves us.  God defines us.  We are precious to God.  All this should suffice.  Yet, for many people, it does not.

You, O reader, are precious to God.  I am precious to God for the same reason you are.  And we all depend upon God, as well as each other.  Interdependency should be obvious on both the micro- and the macroscales.  Soldiers depend upon each other.  In a global economy, a recession in Country A affects its trading partners.  And people depend upon the labor of others.  We all live in a web of connectedness.

Each human being is precious to God.  Yet many people are not precious to themselves.  And many other people are precious to themselves.  And many other people are precious to themselves, yet they seem to think that few others are precious.  Even the most pious and benevolent saint may experience thinking of some people as being precious, even to God.  So, we have a spiritual challenge to confess to God.  May God help us to recognize ourselves and each other for what we are: precious.  Then may we treat each other accordingly.  And may we rest in God, in this life and the next one.

KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR

FEBRUARY 24, 2023 COMMON ERA

THE THIRD DAY OF LENT

THE FEAST OF SAINT MATTHIAS THE APOSTLE, MARTYR

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