He is like a tree that is planted

Beside the flowing waters,

That yields its fruit in due season

And whose leaves shall never fade;

And all that he does shall prosper.

When we plant a tree, we do so in the knowledge that it is a long-term investment – ‘pears for your heirs’.  We plant and tend the tree, trusting that it will bear fruit but knowing that we may never pick it ourselves.

The blessed man of Psalm One is rooted in the Lord, not looking for any quick fix of happiness, but committed to Him for the long haul, with eyes on his eternal goal, trusting that his life will bear ‘fruit in due season’.  As the tree is fed through its roots by the abundant flowing waters, so too does the blessed man draw his strength from The Source through his hidden life of faith.  As St Paul says, ‘true, I am living here and now this mortal life, but my real life is the faith I have in the Son of God‘ (Gal 2:20).

We need to trust the Lord like that – we must persevere in our Christian lives without looking for any reward now, but with well-founded hope and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing that the Lord keeps His promises.

Here it is:

My soul is longing and yearning,

is yearning for the courts of the Lord.

My heart and my soul ring out their joy

to God, the living God. 

 

The sparrow herself finds a home

and the swallow a nest for her brood;

she lays her young by your altars,

Lord of hosts, my king and my God.

 

They are happy, who dwell in your house,

for ever singing your praise.

They walk with ever-growing strength,

they will see the God of gods in Zion. 

 

One day within your courts

is better than a thousand elsewhere.

The threshold of the house of God

I prefer to the dwellings of the wicked.

However, after considering the wisdom of Solomon last Sunday, it’s easy to imagine these sparrows and swallows nesting in the Ark’s more permanent home: the Temple of Solomon.  ‘All the kings of the earth sought audience with Solomon’ (2 Chron. 9:23) and each brought gifts to add to the riches that already outdid them all…

… and yet Jesus (who in John chapter 2, remember, speaks of his own body as a ‘temple’ or ‘sanctuary’) declares, ‘here, I tell you is something greater than the temple’ (Mt 12:6) ‘and there is something greater than Solomon here’ (Mt 12:42).  As is so often the case, the psalms reveal the hidden Christ and reflect for us now something of our relationship with him.

Our souls are constantly ‘longing and yearning’.  As St Augustine famously reflected, ‘You have made us for yourself  Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their home in you’.  Those sparrows were welcome to nest in the temple, even though they were ‘two a penny’ (in Matthew, but five for tuppence in Luke!).  Similarly, we – though unworthy – are we invited to make our home in Christ.

Let us pray that we chose wisely each and every day to dwell in the courts of the Lord and forever sing his praise.

O Praise the Lord, all you nations,

Acclaim him all you peoples!

Strong is his love for us;

He is faithful for ever.

This is a great little psalm for the childish party trick: ‘I can recite a whole psalm…’ and I remember doing something similar many years ago: ‘I can recite a whole Tennyson poem’:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies;—

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

It strikes me now that those two shorties have more than their brevity in common.

Tennyson gives no superfluous detail.  There is no scene setting, no detail of the type of flower.  There is no conjecture about these mysteries that lie beyond him; no development and no resolution.  What Tennyson does give is an opportunity to see the Creator reflected in His creation; then to reflect upon and respond to what you see.  The flower, like the poem, is small and simple, yet in the wonder of its creation it holds secrets which humanity is unable to fathom.   The poem (like the Gloria Patri) is at once tiny and immense.

Psalm 116 is even shorter and so simple that a child could have written it.  It is over in a moment*  – sneeze and you miss it.  And yet, if we do pay it a bit of attention, we soon see that this psalm is anything but tiny.

We sometimes think the Old Testament ‘doesn’t do’ a universal God but this psalm address all you nations, all you peoples in an unequivocal call for everyone to worship God.  The ‘us’ he loves is everyone – everyone without exception and without end, for He is faithful for ever.

So in two verses, the psalm asks that the whole of humanity praise God.  It declares God’s love of the whole of humanity and promises His eternal fidelity.  This is indeed a ‘whole’ psalm, for in its tiny form, it holds a global demand and an eternal promise.

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* ^{and whenever it crops up in Morning Prayer every other Saturday, it follows the rather long canticle of Moses from Exodus 15, so it is tempting to wonder if we are given it by way of temporal compensation!}

Now he has been crucified but the body is no longer in the tomb and you cannot explain events.  The man then proceeds to explain the scriptures to you in a way that makes sense in your head and in your heart, like a truth you’d known all along and yet not realised it. It is no wonder that those two who met the risen Lord on the road to Emmaus said, after eventually recognising Jesus, ‘were not out hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ No wonder, either, that they got up and returned to Jerusalem – a seven mile walk – to tell the others their news.   It must have been an amazing thing to have the scriptures, with which you were so familiar, interpreted in the light of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Skipping fifty days to Pentecost, the apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaim God’s greatness openly and confidently.  Peter realises that the words of the prophet Joel ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,’ are being fulfilled and sees also that David prophesied the resurrection of the Messiah in Psalm 15, which we hear at Mass on Sunday –

And what happens?  Those in the crowd hear the familiar psalm interpreted through Peter’s Christ-centred vision and three thousand people are baptised that day.  Three thousand people recognise Christ as the Messiah when, thanks to the Holy Spirit burning in Peter’s heart, he opens the scriptures for them. Christ now opens the scriptures for us, and breaks the bread.  Let’s pray that our hearts are always open to receiving his word and recognising him.  Let’s pray too, that we may live lives wherein others may recognise Christ working through us.

Come, ring out our joy to the Lord;

hail the rock who saves us.

Let us come before him, giving thanks,

with songs let us hail the Lord.

 

The invitation is there in that first word – ‘Come’.  Imagine you’re a half-asleep monk or nun, singing this at 5am.  You’ve done the first bit, you’re there… but perhaps only physically.  You’re invited to ring out your joy to the Lord who saves you and that requires more effort.  Thankfully, the psalmist helps us on our way:

Come in; let us bow and bend low;

let us kneel before the God who made us

for he is our God and we

the people who belong to his pasture,

the flock that is led by his hand.

 

That bowls me over every time: it’s so simple, it’s awesome.  We are invited to adore God because He made us and we belong to Him.  We can’t resist.

By now we’re awake.  We’ve remembered who made us and why and that’s just as well, because here is our mission for today:

O that today you would listen to his voice!

“Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,

as on that day at Massah in the desert

when your fathers put me to the test;

when they tried me, though they saw my work.”

 

It was in the desert of Zin that the Israelites grumbled to Moses and Aaron, comparing their present conditions unfavourably with those they’d left behind in Egypt.  It was there, at the waters of Meribah, that Moses struck the rock with his staff and produced water for the Israelites.   Relief all round, but it is temporary, for the end of the psalm records the Lord vowing that those grumblers would never reach the promised land (cf Ex 17:1-7 and Num 20:1-13).

Considering the context, then, it is plain to see that the word ‘today’ is crucial in our praying of this psalm – ‘O that today you would listen to his voice!’ Every day, we stand as though at the waters of Meribah and are invited to renew our relationship with the Lord (cf Heb 3:13).  But he only invites us and will never force us.  We always have a free choice, just as the Israelites did.

So let us respond every day, not with the hardened hearts of our fathers in the desert, but with hearts that are ready to listen to His voice, to do His will and to ring out our joy to the Lord.

O God, you are my God, for you I long;

God is everyone’s, not just mine, but here the psalmist shows his focus: ‘me & my God’.  Indeed, throughout the psalm, the only pronouns are I, me my, you and your.  It would be unhealthy and unhelpful only to consider our spiritual lives as being ‘me & my God’, but for this psalm, we’re invited to indulge a little in that cosy relationship of ‘just the two of us.’

for you my soul is thirsting,

My body pines for you

like a dry, weary land without water.

St Augustine famously said, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you’.  I suppose the quotation is so famous because it hits the spot so accurately.  We have a God-shaped space within us and – on this side of death – it seems to be never completely filled.  The yearning goes on and on.

So I gaze on you in the sanctuary

to see your strength and your glory.

This reminds me of an anecdote told by St John Vianney (the Cure d’Ars):

‘When I first came to Ars, there was a man who never passed the church without going in. In the morning on his way to work, and in the evening on his way home, he left his spade and pick-axe in the porch, and he spent a long time in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Oh! how I loved to see that! I asked him once what he said to Our Lord during the long visits he made Him. Do you know what he told me? “Eh, Monsieur le Curé, I say nothing to Him, I look at Him and He looks at me!” How beautiful, my children, how beautiful!’  (from Eucharistic Meditation #22, available here)

For your love is better than life,

Not simply better, but longer-lasting too!

my lips will speak your praise.

So I will bless you all my life,

in your name I will lift up my hands.

My soul shall be filled as with a banquet,

my mouth shall praise you with joy.

And so the inevitable happens.  The cosy ‘me and my God’ relationship can’t contain itself.  God’s love of us is so immense that to respond to it even a little means that our cosy relationship out-grows the ‘inner chamber’ of our hearts and flows into a more evangelical, truly apostolic love of God and – therefore – of neighbour.

On my bed I remember you.

On you I muse through the night

for you have been my help;

in the shadow of your wings I rejoice.

What do we think of when falling asleep, brushing teeth, driving, hanging out washing?  When our hearts are unguarded and have an idle moment or two, they show us (if we care to take notice) where our riches are.  For the psalmist, his heart is with God.

My soul clings to you;

your right hand holds me fast.

In those two lines we find the summary of the psalmist’s relationship with God.  The simplicity of it is beautiful: our prayer and works of charity need not be complicated, acknowledged or measured-out.  God only asks for our faithfulness.  We would be wrong to think that God dumps us by the wayside if we are unfaithful, if our prayer lacks fervour or beauty.  For his part, he loves us unconditionally and will not let us down.

Happy indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked; nor lingers in the way of sinners nor sits in the company of scorners, but whose delight is the law of the Lord and who ponders his law day and night.

In the psalmist’s time, the company you kept would have exerted the biggest external influence on you.  If you could read, you’d be steeped in scripture.  If, as was more likely, you couldn’t read, you’d be formed by your parents and wider family, your priests and your friends.

It was salutary, therefore, to keep a check on just whose company you kept and make sure you didn’t walk, stand or sit in company that was going to contaminate your soul. Consider the contrast with our society.

We often can’t choose the company we keep.  From day to day, we spend much of our time with colleagues or clients; circumstances throw us together with others who may not be of our choosing.  Today, the ‘company’ we keep includes the vast realm of communications media which holds such a dominant position in 21st Century Britain.

We read widely – books spiritual and temporal, magazines, newspapers, Internet.  We watch TV and films, listen to radio and music in so many different places and through so many gadgets, that our ancestors would be truly staggered (and possibly deafened). It is then, I suggest, these other influences on our lives that we might like to examine in the light of the first few verses of Psalm One, not least of all because we tend to have more control over what we read, watch and listen to than we do over what our colleagues discuss within earshot.

I remember a priest once saying that living a Christian life in our society is ‘like trying to keep clean whilst living in a dustbin’.  Yes, I know what he was meaning by that, but at the same time, we do have more control over our external influences than we perhaps realise. Lent begins a week from now.  It is a perfect opportunity to take a careful look at what we read, watch and listen to.  ‘The Counsel of the Wicked‘ could be a book title, couldn’t it?  ‘The Way of Sinners‘ wouldn’t look out of place in TV listings, nor ‘In The Company of Scorners‘ in radio listings.

In all honesty, wouldn’t our lives be purer without some of that?  ‘Happy the man who has placed his trust in the Lord’ is the response to our psalm this Sunday.  That’s a promise from God. He keeps his promises.

The first half sings the wonders of God’s creation:

The heavens proclaim the glory of God

and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands.

Day unto day takes up the story

and night unto night makes known the message.

No speech, no word, no voice is heard

yet their span extends through all the earth,

their words to the utmost bounds of the world.

There he has placed a tent for the sun;

it comes forth like a bridegroom coming from his tent,

rejoices like a champion to run its course.

At the end of the sky is the rising of the sun;

to the furthest end of the sky is its course

There is nothing concealed from its burning heat.

… and the portion we will hear on Sunday tells of the beauty of God’s law:

The law of the Lord is perfect,

it revives the soul.

The rule of the Lord is to be trusted,

it gives wisdom to the simple.

The precepts of the Lord are right,

they gladden the heart.

The command of the Lord is clear,

it gives light to the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is holy,

abiding for ever.

The decrees of the Lord are truth

and all of them just.

May the spoken words of my mouth,

the thoughts of my heart,

win favour in your sight, O Lord,

my rescuer, my rock!

You can see why that second portion is chosen for this Sunday, when we consider Luke 4:14-21 and the Law of the Lord .  Similarly, for Morning Prayer, the first portion is a beautiful meditation at the beginning of a new day (though I must admit that it most often comes to my mind when my children are starting their pudding – ‘no speech, no word, no voice is heard’!).  Nevertheless, they are two parts of one psalm.  In the mind of the composer, then, how were these seen as two parts of a whole?

It seems to me that the composer had a very beautiful and inspired perception of God.  Creation obeys the law in nature; ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower‘  wrote Dylan Thomas.  A fish cannot choose to live in a rabbit warren; a baby mammal roots around for milk from its mother, to whom it also looks for protection; and just as the sunflower turns to the sun for its control and direction, so too do we turn to God, who is our control and direction.  The psalmist sees God’s law in nature and the written law of the Torah as two parts of one cohesive, ineffable plan.  If we believe that ‘the decrees of the Lord are truth‘, then we ought to take greater notice of the opening lines of this psalm.  If  ‘the heavens proclaim the glory of God and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands‘, then when we courageously and faithfully live his law, we – who are the work of his hands – will also proclaim the glory of God.

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*Special prize available if you can tell me which day!