Ps. 45.4 (the king in a liminal realm)

“Then / dominate, / prosper, / and ride out – on behalf / of truth / humility / and righteousness.” We overlooked the fact in our previous reflection that all of this is occurring, most likely, during a wedding ceremony. Therefore, these lines of directives made to the king are in the form of praise at his potentiality; they are not descriptions of present activity, or a type of battle psalm. This lends to the lines its elevated sense, the “noble theme” that has moved the psalmist’s heart (vs. 1). Within this context the line reads much more like a medieval hymn whereby the king is fighting not only behalf of his people, but of the qualities/abstractions of “truth, humility and righteousness”. The king has become, in his battle glory, the one who mediates the protection of these virtues; they, in a sense, need him. The battle has been transposed, by the psalmist’s elevated words, into something like an epic. The king, as already alluded to, inhabits, in and through the words of the psalmist, some liminal realm between God and man, as he is understood as ‘wearing’ those qualities unique to God, “splendor and majesty”. He seems almost angelic. The point, I believe, is that, in the context of the wedding ceremony, all beauty and glory that infuses the world is being placed/portrayed by the king. It is clearly rhetorical in its exaggeration but the reason is important to note: that the beauty inherent within the king is something that can only be portrayed in and through this mode of elevated speech. It is, in this way, not false but entirely proper to the given situation. For everything, including his bride, is swept up within this torrent and elevated and “made noble”. The more praise that is showered down upon the king radiates, through him, to those around him. This is the inherent quality of nobility; it operates close to the border of the divine (indeed, in psalm 2, the king is understood as being adopted into the divine family). The closer the king is understood to inhabit the realm of his election, the more and more does the glory of God become seen to shine in and through him—to such a point that, at the king’s wedding, God can himself almost disappear into the background (but, understood precisely as being in the background) such that the glory that is, in fact, permeating the king is rejoiced in without restraint.