It is surprising and rewarding to read again the immense ode, the vast laudation, that is the 119th Psalm. Like many, I used to skip over it: it was long and boring and repetitive, and kept muttering about law and statutes and commandments and testimonies. Gradually, as I spent more time reading Psalms, this one began to get my attention. First I looked up all those words, and realised that while they can, in a pinch, be distinguished, they are in the poetic sense semi-synonyms, and to be taken as such. Then I discovered that the breaking-up of Ps. 119 into 8-line sections was not a quirk of the Vulgate but an original feature, since each section begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is, therefore, either a stanzaic poem or an organised collection of short poems around a central theme: the praise of God’s law.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who reminded us Christians that the law, as here seen and praised, is not the law as we tend to imagine it. When a Christian thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, it’s a criminal court he thinks of. He tends to see himself as the accused in the box, invariably Guilty and able to hope at most for mercy and forgiveness. When the Psalmist thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, he sees a civil court, with himself as the plaintiff and “the ungodly” as the defendants. But beneath that level of argument, there is a more moving vision, which shows very clearly in Ps. 119: God’s law is a clearly-traced path which has allowed the poet to emerge from a trackless and lethal desert – imagine the Nefud in Lawrence of Arabia. Finding such a trail saves one’s life.
Reading Ps. 119 in this way is already deeply satisfying and inspiring. But as Christians, we have a further way to read it that is little short of vertiginous. If we come to it after reading both the Gospels and the letters of St Paul, we need to use a new key: for the new version of Judaism that is the faith of the followers of Yeshua Meshiach, the resurrected Meshiach (Christos) does not preach, or even reform, the Law: he is the Law. The Christian does not obey the Law: his true relation to it is what Paul describes: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”(Galatians 2:20)
As we used to say in the Sixties, this blows your mind. But now try to read Ps. 119 in this way – with Christ as the Law, and all His deeds and sayings as the commandments and testimonies etc. In a sense, the whole Psalm becomes an elaboration of, and a commentary on, Paul’s stupendous text. Nothing of the original reading is lost: as Yeshua himself said, the law is not cancelled but accomplished. It’s just that a vast and dizzying new perspective is added, so that the poem becomes even more profound and inspiring.
Rembrandt: the Risen Christ
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