The Christian Use of the Psalter

by A. R. Whitham

The Lord hath chosen Sion to be a habitation for Himself:
He hath longed for her.
This shall be my rest for ever:
Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.
(cxxxii. 14, 15.)

In other words, the community which speaks in the Psalter is more than a nation; she is a theocracy, a Church. Her characteristic names are prophetic; they suggest supernatural dealings and a heavenly calling. She is "Israel," heiress of him who "persevered with God" and won the blessing; she is the "seed of Abraham," in which it was promised that "all the nations of the earth should be blessed"; she is "Sion," the "stronghold," "Jerusalem," name of ideals, "vision" or "possession" or "foundation"—"of peace"! It is as this sacred congregation, this ecclesia, that the nation rejoices in the Psalms in her calling and illumination, sorrows over her failures, prays in her warfare, waits for her glory.

It is not surprising that the Catholic Church recognised here her own portrait, or that the outlines sketched in the Psalter have been filled with light and colour and detail during the Christian centuries. The Catholic Church instinctively felt herself to be the true successor of the Israel of the Psalms. The ancient titles were retained, but in a fuller meaning. To S. Paul the Church is the "Israel of God" (Gal. vi. 16) in contrast to the "Israel after the flesh." The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells his Christian readers that they are "come unto Mount Sion" (xii. 22). S. Peter applies to the Church the old titles given to Israel in the Law, "an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation" (1 Peter ii. 9). S. John in the Apocalypse sees the new Jerusalem, having not only the names of "the twelve apostles of the Lamb" on her jewelled foundations, but the names of the "twelve tribes of the children of Israel" on her gates of pearl (Rev. xxi. 12, 14). Old things had passed away, the sacred people of God remained, but no longer confined to the narrow boundaries of Palestine, nor to the dispersed descendants of Abraham: her children were "princes in all lands," all who were "of faith" were counted her seed. The Church knew herself to be the Israel of the future, custodian of a greater treasure, called to a grander work.

The Psalter indeed demands this higher interpretation. Just as the portrait of the Righteous One would have been an unfulfilled ideal had not Christ made it His own, so the glowing descriptions of Israel would have been but pious dreamings had not the Catholic Church risen up out of the fallen tabernacle of David. As the songs of the Temple falter and die away, the new spirit of praise clothes itself in the ancient forms. "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, Glory to the Righteous" (Is. xxiv. 16). The very words of the Psalter become transfigured like the garments of the Lord on the holy mount.

Nor is this passing away of the glory of old Israel into the greater glories of the Catholic Israel of God without some foreshadowing in the Psalter itself. In the 22nd, the great Psalm of the Passion, the Sufferer passes from the dogs and lions and the mocking faces that surround him to contemplate the far-off fruit of his anguish. He seems to see "a great congregation," in the midst of which he himself hereafter will praise God Who has heard his prayer. Mysteriously it seems to rise, this "seed," this "people that shall be born," out of the very hopelessness and desolation of the Cross. "All the ends of the earth" are united in it, "all the kindred of the nations" worship there. The rich and the poor alike have their place in this kingdom of the future. And the special characteristic of this new creation of God will be the sharing in a sacrificial feast, the Sufferer's thanksgiving, his Eucharist in which he "pays his vows." Here "the meek shall eat and be satisfied," here eating and worshipping are strangely intermingled—a prophecy unread and unfulfilled until the Church learnt the secret "in the same night that He was betrayed."

"Therefore we, before Him bending,
This great Sacrament revere;
Types and shadows have their ending,
For the newer Rite is here."

This ecclesiastical aspect of the Psalter is of very high importance. There is perhaps no part of the Christian faith which is more difficult for "the natural man" than "the Holy Catholic Church." An erroneous or imperfect idea of the Church seems to pass muster, among Christians even, so much more readily than error in other matters of faith. All through Christian history the true idea of the Church has been obscured, now by imperialism, with its misleading traditions of the Roman Empire; now by nationalism, as if the Church were only the religious aspect of a civil community; or again by individualism, as if she were no more than a collection of separate units. Erastianism and Puritanism in turn have led men astray. The warning against such things is written largely enough in the history of ancient Israel. The Jews of our Lord's time, while insisting keenly, even bitterly, on their separation from the Gentiles, were for the most part forgetful of what that separation really involved. Their ambition to be separate from the nations of the earth only meant for them a worldly and selfish exclusiveness. In earlier days the clamour for a king, the thirst for alliances with Egypt and Assyria and Babylon, had displayed in the opposite manner much the same spirit. Religious privileges, that Divine calling which had made them a nation, were to be used as a means to worldly advancement and security. In the Psalter there stands out a truer conception of the Church as the spiritual commonwealth, a kingdom of God in the world, but not of this world's spirit, organised for higher ends than self-protection or self-development, aiming not at conquest but at the conversion and good of mankind, glorying not in privilege but in vocation, not in self but in the law of God. And this is the pattern for all time. The Christian Church may find in the Psalter her own just self-expression in a fuller manner than ever ancient Israel did or could. Indeed, we may trace indelibly stamped on the Psalter the true lineaments of the ideal Church.

First in the Psalter there is the note of comprehensiveness. The heathen, the nations, so often denounced or prayed against in the Psalms, are, after all, not so much those who are outside the boundaries of Israel as those who are alien from her spirit. They are communities, societies, untouched by grace, governed by passion and worldly ambitions rather than by conscience or the Divine law. And side by side with threats and foreboding of their utter destruction in the day of God there are glimpses here and there of the possibility of their conversion, and even of their becoming one family with Israel. The great Psalm of Whitsunday, the 68th, passes from the thought of God wounding the head of His enemies, of His warriors dipping their feet in the blood of the vanquished, to the hope of the princes coming out of Egypt, and Ethiopia making haste to stretch out her hands unto God. So, again, the 47th Psalm looks forward to the essential sovereignty of God over all the earth being recognised even by this world's rulers:

The princes of the people are joined unto the people
of the God of Abraham.[[1]]

And lest it should be thought that such hopes referred only to an empire of external rule, like that of Solomon's, we have the startling predictions of Ps. lxxxvii. Here the people of Rahab (Egypt) and Babylon, the Philistines, the Tyrians, the Ethiopians, all types of the obstinate and idolatrous heathen world, are pictured as forsaking their natural lineage and descent to be born again in Zion, enrolling themselves there as citizens of the Lord's glorious foundation upon the holy mountains, finding there their joy and the fount of their inspiration.