Praise Begins in Torah (Psalm 1, Easter 7B, May 20, 2012)

Easter 7B

Psalm 1

May 20, 2012

Praise Begins in Torah

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
 First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Over twenty years ago a conservative rabbi named Harold Kushner published a little book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People.¹ This was no high-minded academic treatise on the question known to philosophy of religion as theodicy. It was an urgent quest for answers to the painful questions in his heart when he found out that his young son had an incurable degenerative disease and would not survive his teenage years. “Why, God? How does my son possibly deserve this? How do I deserve this? And where are you in all this?” Like Jacob wrestling with the night demon at the ford of the Jabbok, Rabbi Kushner grappled with these questions. Like Jacob he came away limping, but also came away with a book that was on at least one of the New York Times’s bestseller lists for over a year and for a while on two lists at once and has sold more than five million copies so far.

It seems that he was not the only person who struggles with those questions.

One of the targets of Rabbi Kushner’s passionate argument is the thinking of the Deuteronomistic Historian, the person or—more likely—the group of people who produced the book of Deuteronomy where this thinking is put forth most often and most insistently. Here’s the theory: God works through human history in such a way that there is what theologians call “moral symmetry.” Put more simply, the theory is that God makes sure that people get what they got comin’.

The Deuteronomistic Historian developed this theory to explain the catastrophe of the Fall of Jerusalem and the Exile in Babylon. The people had broken covenant with God, therefore God had sent them into exile in Babylon. God punished the people for their wickedness using the conquering armies of Babylon to destroy Jerusalem and tear them from their homes.

We know this theory. We use it. “What goes around, comes around,” we say when some scoundrel living a charmed life finally gets their comeuppance. We like to think that, at least in long run, good people will be rewarded and bad people will “get what they got comin’.”

We work the theory backwards, too, to suggest that the reason why we are pretty well off is because we are pretty good: we’ve worked hard, done the right things, etc. Prosperity is a reward given by history (and by the God who works in and through history) to the good. Poverty is likewise the punishment handed out by God to those who have failed to live as they should. This is moral symmetry. And we like the idea. At least we like it when things are going well for us and for those we love.

And yet we know it isn’t quite that simple. We buy books like When Bad Things Happen to Good People, because we know there’s more to it than that. Actually, the book I’d like to buy is entitled When Good Things Happen to Bad People which would explain why it is that God lets a small group of investment bankers who answer only to their own greed drive the world’s economy to the brink of disaster, turn four million American families out of their homes, plunge a quarter of our country’s children below the poverty line and still walk away with bonuses. I’d love to buy that book. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been written.

So, on the surface at least, we know that moral symmetry isn’t always an obvious feature of our universe. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things fail to happen to bad people. And we still aren’t as rich as we deserve to be.

So where does that leave us with Psalm One? Here it is again, in another translation:

Happy are those

who do not follow the advice of the wicked,

or take the path that sinners tread,

or sit in the seat of scoffers;

but their delight is in the law of the LORD,

and on his law they meditate day and night.

They are like trees

planted by streams of water,

which yield their fruit in its season,

and their leaves do not wither.

In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so,

but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

for the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish.

On the face of it, Psalm 1 seems to be a very clear statement of Deuteronomistic History. The good prosper. The wicked fail. God watches over it all to make sure that it is so.

There are some particular things that we should notice, of course. The goodness talked about in the psalm is not generic. It is quite specific and it has to do with Torah. The Torah refers in particular sense to the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy. We might describe the Torah variously as God’s law, God’s path, God’s way, God’s instruction, and much more besides. As our psalm makes clear Torah-delight is the rich, moist, fertile soil in which God’s people find themselves planted as fruitful trees planted beside an irrigation ditch.

The book of Psalms doesn’t really have a plot. But like our own hymnal, its arrangement isn’t entirely random, either. At least the first and last psalms have been placed where they are for a reason. The book of Psalms begins with Torah-delight. It ends with Psalm 150 which calls all sorts of creatures to praise, from the angels in heaven, to every living creature on earth. It lists all sorts of musical instruments that are to be used to praise God. I am pleased to note that the list includes the bagpipes. But whatever the instrument, and whatever the sort of sound they make, it is all to be turned to God’s praises. The book of Psalms ends in praise.

In the way it passes through the highs and lows of human experience. If we have only paid attention to the 23^rd Psalm we may have missed the fact that it isn’t all sweetness in the psalms. More than half of the psalms are laments that cry out for God to act in the face of a world gone wrong. In many laments, God’s saving answer can be seen to be approaching. In others there is no sign that God has heard, much less answered. One of them is—Psalm 88—is so bleak that its last word is the darkness that covered the face of the deep until God spoke light into being.

If the whole of the book of psalms begins with and is rooted in Torah-delight and ends in praise, it is not because the psalmist doesn’t get out much, has led a sheltered life, or is unaware that the universe is a complicated place where moral symmetry is all too rare. If the psalmist sings that whatever the lover of God’s Torah does turns out well, it’s not because she is unaware that bad things can and do happen. This is not, I am convinced, a naïve psalm.

You and I know that there are the righteous poor and there are the wicked rich. The psalmist knows it, too. So Psalm 1 is not intended to argue otherwise. It is not a survey of leading economic indicators, nor is it a study in political economics. Neither the followers of Smith nor the followers of Marx can take much comfort here.

I think we might place this psalm alongside Jesus’ statement about following him:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?²

To take delight in God’s Torah, which is in the end to take delight in seeing the world as God sees it, is a way of life. In poetic, not political, fashion the psalmist sketches what that way of life is like. It is unexpectedly fruitful, since this is a tree planted by an irrigation ditch, not by a natural river. It is a life of dependable abundance, that wonderful quality of having enough and a little more besides and having it without the anxiety that our culture teaches us to have so that we will go out and buy more insurance and vote in a particular way.

The one who delights in Torah, recites it or meditates on it day and night. That’s what our translations say, but the original is richer in its imagery. The delighter in Torah mumbles the Torah. She delights in the words, makes a feast of them, repeats them, turns them over and over, hears how they sound, repeats them until her heart beats with their rhythm. That’s Torah-delight.

The life of the Torah-delighted community is rich in ways that we have forgotten. Land is never alienated from its original owners for long, but returns to them after a time. Debt forgiveness is practiced regularly. There is rest for the weary—for the good and the wicked alike. The earth is not pushed into unwise over-production. The Torah-delighting community knows when there is enough. It knows contentment. It knows freedom from anxiety. This is the life of the Torah-delighting community. It is like a tree planted right beside the irrigating waters. It bears its fruit at the right time. It weathers drought.

Those who scorn the Torah on the other hand live a far different kind of life. They may well be rich, but their lives are worthless. They are like the covering on seeds of grain. Hard, dry and inedible, the grain has to be beaten with sticks or stepped on by oxen to break it off the grain. Then the wind blows and the useless chaff blows away, but the nutritious seed remains. Those who scorn the Torah may become rich. Wealth means more to them than justice or compassion. They end up with lives that are dry and worthless.

So the psalmist has set before the picture of two different ways of life. For the most part, I suspect, these two ways of life are themselves their own reward.

So the book of psalms begins. The psalmist leaves the wicked to go their own way. Wherever such lives go, they do not move from Torah-delight to the praise of God. But if we will begin with the psalmist in Torah-delight, then the path of the book of Psalms will be ours and, whatever struggles we encounter along the way, our destination will be praise.

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1Kushner, Harold S. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

2Mark 8:35-38.