Ps 34 (reading through Christ)

I want to provide here just some preliminary reflections on how this psalm could be read christologically. The impetus behind this reading is found by way of the gospel of John when he quotes, at Jesus’ death, vs. 21 (“He watches over all his bones, and not one of them shall be broken.”). I hope to come to an interpretation of this passage in the context of the psalm because of its highly (or, seemingly) paradoxical nature: the fact that the psalm is geared completely to deliverance and yet John quotes this at the moment of Jesus’ death. But, before arriving there, a lot needs to be said by way of preliminary. As we have argued throughout, the psalmist himself has become a gateway or door through which he is asking the other ‘poor’ to pass. In effect, he is the invitation to this realm of “Yhwh’s goodness”, the sphere of Yhwh’s deliverance. Geographically, we can picture him standing on the far side of this deliverance, in the sphere of Yhwh’s power, and delivering to these listeners a type of ‘science’ or ‘wisdom’ as to how one moves into this realm. We have seen how, perhaps, in the psalmist Yhwh’s ‘plan’ moved forward—where before this experience was one of believing Yhwh to have ‘forgotten’,the psalmist now implores the poor to “look at him”, to “see his encamped angel”and to even “taste and see” his goodness. Yhwh, far from being absent, is intimately present to the poor. Understood this way the experiences delivered or enacted in his saints are not private experiences but rather ones that create spaces for others to inhabit; they are public and meant for all of Yhwh’s people. This is crucial—by opening up this experience the psalmist opens a realm that can ‘tasted and seen’. His deliverance is their deliverance—in something like a sacramental way. In this way the psalmist’s experience represents a synthesizing ‘leap forward’. Here, wisdom, history and redemption are synthesized in a new, “higher” realm. What this prepares the way for is the ‘final leap forward’ in Christ’s resurrection. In Christ, the final ‘room’ is opened, the final ‘invitation’ issued because in him, and through him, death is conquered and the final ‘redemption’ accomplished. In this way, this psalm could be read as Christ speaking to every believer from the ‘father’s right hand’. In him, a new realm has been opened up, one that is already able to be ‘tasted and seen’and yet also one that grounds this ‘tasting and seeing’ in the final act of deliverance: resurrection (to stand where Christ stands). To recite the words of ‘tasting and seeing’ in the context of the eucharist is therefore highly appropriate given the nature of the psalm: in Christ’s body given over to the Church he has sacramentally opened up the realm of final resurrection and deliverance. This leads to the second point: wisdom. From this vantage point Christ can ‘hand over’ his experience of resurrection to the church. This ‘handing over’—this ‘tradition-ing’—becomes, in the words of this psalm, his ‘teaching of the children’ how one appropriates his life into their own and thereby stand within his sphere of resurrection. Again, this is not a private but a public experience and subject therefore to communication and teaching. A third point: resurrection. The psalm, as we have seen, is one concerned with the “love of days” and the desire “to see Yhwh’s goodness”. In line with many other psalms, the focus is entirely on the bodily ability to praise Yhwh. When deliverance comes, it will come to fulfill this basic premise of wisdom: the worldly ability to flourish. We saw how to deliver one’s ‘soul’ is to also watch over ‘every bone’. For the psalmist, the ‘deliverance’ obtained, and what is the source of all wisdom is precisely this assurance. It is not one of the detachment from the world; it is not one of resignation. It is this incredibly risky, but fully creational, way of looking at and toward Yhwh. In Jesus, this perspective was brought to its final enactment. In him, this psalm was enacted fully, to the very end when he said “into thy hands I commend my spirit” (which is a statement of trust in Yhwh’s deliverance; not a resignation of death). In like manner, this psalm never waivers from this premise. Christ went to his death not ‘hoping to get to heaven’ but trusting that he would see ‘long days’ and ‘the goodness of Yhwh’. By enacting this faith to the end, he remained and became the perfect sacrifice. In so doing he also became the source of this resurrection. What we see, then, is that when Christ speaks this psalm to the Church he is speaking from this sphere of resurrection, from this place of “love of days”. In this way Christ takes to himself the wisdom traditions and moves it into a higher reality, precisely as they now come from him as the resurrected ‘wisdom teacher’ or ‘father’. He has become the permanent emblem of wisdom (the ‘alpha and the omega’), for he now inhabits what the entire wisdom tradition strives to accomplish. And this is no abstraction: what happened to one man in the midst of history opened up for everyone the reality of resurrection. This final exodus not only happened, but is something that can be entered into. This is an ongoing dramatic action, in much the same way that this psalmist’s imploring of the humble to ‘see Yhwh’ is their ‘expanding’ of the sphere he has inhabited. And now we come to the central passage—Christ’s bones. Here we find something almost paradoxical: John quotes this passage just after Christ dies (which is the antithesis of what we have been arguing is the central theme of the psalm). In his dead body, then, John sees the fulfillment of a psalm that speaks of bodily deliverance. Is this just a reference to the resurrection? Or, is there something more going on? Ultimately, I think what we are to see is that Christ is both the speaker of the psalm (speaking from the realm of resurrection) and the listener (the poor who will be ‘watched over’). What I mean is this: this psalm is quoted by John as Christ lies silent and dead. These are not words spoken by Christ himself. In the context of the psalm, these words of ‘bone protection’ are provided to ‘the poor’ and ‘the righteous’—they are words that are to deliver to them the patient endurance we have spoken of. John, then, sees in Christ the ultimate ‘righteous one’, the ultimate ‘poor one’—so poor in fact that he is now dead, robbed of everything. The psalm is then being pushed to its furthest boundary in Christ: the ultimate hiatus requiring ‘patient endurance’ is that of death. John sees in Christ’s death, then, the fact that he maintained his loving bond with his father into death, taking with him this ‘patient assurance’ into the maw of the grave. As we argued in our reflection, the first half of the psalm is focused on how one stands in front of Yhwh (it is full of directives issued at the poor: “look at him”, “see his angel”, “taste and see”). Christ fulfilled all of these as the ultimate ‘wise man’. The second half is met by Yhwh’s gaze and protection (“his eye is upon the righteous”, “his ear is open”, he protects their bones). Before, the ‘grave’ or ‘Sheol’ was where Yhwh was not; his name could not go down into the grave. Here, though, John sees in this dead body the second half of the psalm—Yhwh as the ‘protector of bones’. In other words—John sees in Christ’s righteousness such a burning and absolute intensity that he also sees in his dead body the loving gaze of Yhwh (and finds that in the fact that none of his bones were broken). It is, certainly, an anticipation of the resurrection but it needs to be filled by this vision of Christ as the perfect emblem of the first half of the psalm. His life and death became the ‘bridge’ and guarantor of the second (the redemption promised—resurrection). The resurrection, in this way, ‘grows out of’ his life and death and is not an event separate from it—in fact, it is so intimately connected that John ‘sees’ the resurrection in his lifeless body. The ‘gaze’ persists even in death.