Reflections on the Psalms - Steven Croft

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       The Psalms in the life of the Church

      ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God.’ (Colossians 3.16)

      Reading the book of Psalms is one of the very best ways of allowing the word of Christ to dwell in you and to dwell in the community of the Church.

      The book of Psalms is the core of the prayer book of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus would have learned and prayed the psalms within the family, the synagogue and the temple. According to the gospels, Jesus applies words from the book of Psalms to his own ministry on numerous occasions: in answering temptation (Psalm 91.11-12 in Matthew 4.6 and Luke 4.10-11); in describing his teaching ministry (Psalm 78.2 in Matthew 13.35); on Palm Sunday (Psalm 118 in Matthew 21, Mark 12 and Luke 13); in demonstrating that he is the Lord’s anointed (Psalm 110 in Matthew 22.44, Mark 12.36 and Luke 20.42) and, of course, from the cross (Psalm 22 in Matthew 27.46 and Mark 15.34).

      For the early Church, the words of the psalms rapidly became words that shaped worship and prayer and through which the Church responded to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Yet the Psalms were more than this: the Psalms were a place where the Church discovered and rediscovered Christ as Lord and King, as prophet and teacher, as servant and saviour.

      Yet what place do the Psalms have in our own traditions of worship and prayer? The book of Psalms is often neglected in the normal Sunday worship of Anglican congregations. Psalms are rarely read as part of the Sunday lectionary or spoken or sung together by the community. For that reason they are rarely read privately either. Many Christians therefore lack a rich and textured knowledge of one of the greatest resource for prayer the world has ever known. There is undiscovered treasure here.

       Reading the Psalms together

      There is no single ‘right’ way to say or sing or explore the Psalms. The Church has evolved two main ways of using the Psalms in worship.

      The first is to read (or chant) them ‘in course’ as part of the discipline of daily prayer, first in monastic communities and then as part of Morning and Evening Prayer in churches. In the Book of Common Prayer lectionary, the whole Psalter is set to be read from beginning to end at Morning and Evening Prayer over the course of every month (see pages 16–17). In some other schemes, the psalms are distributed over the course of the week or the month, not in order from 1 to 150 but according to different themes, but the aim remains to read the whole Psalter.

      The second way to read them is to choose particular psalms as vehicles for prayer and worship because of their theme or meaning at different times of the year. The psalms of praise have often been translated metrically as hymns. The psalms in the Sunday Eucharistic lectionary are chosen for their theme and relationship to the readings.

      Psalms need to be read with understanding, especially when read in the whole congregation. Reading the Psalter in its course at Morning or Evening Prayer is more like reading the Old and New Testament aloud (except that the whole congregation shares in both reading and listening). We are not meant to put ourselves into the words quite as we do when singing a hymn or saying a prayer together. The normal pattern of reading in this way is antiphonal: different parts of the congregation say alternate verses or half verses with a pause at the colon to take in the parallelism in the poetry. We read to one another and reflect on what we read.

      Reading or singing the psalms according to their theme is a different matter. Here we are using the psalms as vehicles for our praise or lament. We are meant to put ourselves into the words just as we would when singing a hymn. The normal method of reading in this way is either all together (congregational) or with a reader or cantor singing the words and everyone joining in a regular refrain (responsorial).

      Reading the psalms privately as part of daily prayers is somewhere between the two. On some days, saying the psalm as part of the Daily Office can seem like an additional Bible reading: we are listening to the text more than praying it aloud. On other days, the psalm will put into words exactly what we want to say to God that day.

       The vocabulary and grammar of prayer

      The psalms form and shape our prayers in deep and significant ways. They provide a deep vocabulary and grammar for our prayers as we allow the word of God to dwell in our own lives and within our community in this way. We learn the vocabulary and grammar of praise: learning to rejoice in all circumstances; to set delight in God at the centre of our lives. We learn to praise God for his nature, for his actions, for his constancy, for his grace. Yet we learn as well that, in William Blake’s words, joy and woea are woven fine. We discover how to cry out to God in our darkest times. We are taught how to pray in anguish, in doubt, in fear, in abandonment, in rage and in every kind of danger.

      It is often hard to put both positive and negative emotion into words. The psalms offer us a vocabulary and grammar to bring the whole of our lives before God, the neat parts and the mess, our sin and our thankfulness, and make it somehow an offering of prayer. It is particularly important, in a lifetime of discipleship, to bring our struggles, our wrestling, our anguish to God and to be able to articulate anger, doubt and sometimes even hatred as part of seeing those emotions transfigured and transformed. The psalms have verses that are, by tradition, bracketed as not suitable for public worship but which nevertheless inform and shape our private prayers in those most challenging of times (see for example Psalm 137.7-9).

      The Psalms as a whole offer us a quarry where we find over the course of a lifetime many rich and good things: phrases, verses, half verses that become food for meditation, that we set deep within our spiritual life like jewels, that become intrinsically part of who we are as followers of Jesus Christ. Part of praying the psalms is taking time to discover these channels of grace, to live within them and to allow them to dwell within us.

       Christ the King

      The Psalter has always been both an invitation to dwell on God’s written word (caught by Psalm 1) and a witness to God’s living Word, the Christ (caught by Psalm 2). As we have seen, many of the psalms were originally composed for use by God’s anointed, the king. Psalms 2 and 110, and many others, speak directly of the king who will come, the Messiah, the Christ (Hebrew and Greek for anointed). To the Christian, therefore, the Psalter is more than a rich resource for prayer. It is also a handbook and guide for exploring the inexhaustible riches of Christ. Use it deeply and use it well.

      Steven Croft

       Psalm table for reading the Psalms over the course of a month (BCP)

      In the Book of Common Prayer lectionary, the whole Psalter is set to be read from beginning to end at Morning and Evening Prayer over the course of every month, according to the following table.

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Psalms 1–5 Day 1 Morning Prayer
Psalms 6–8 Day 1 Evening Prayer
Psalms 9–11 Day 2 Morning Prayer
Psalms 12–14 Day 2 Evening Prayer
Psalms 15–17 Day 3 Morning Prayer
Psalm 18