Ps. 48.9b (Zion: the center reveals the periphery)

“To the ends / of the earth – your right hand / is full of righteousness.” Now, from the intimacy of being in the Temple, to the praise of God’s name, we now expand into a world-wide vision of God’s sovereignty. We alluded to this movement in a previous reflection: that from the center of the Temple emerges a flowering of contemplative insight into the entire earth. If Zion is the ‘center’ of the world, it is also its heart, the well-spring of the earth’s protection. This is an important insight for two reasons: first, the psalm began with a praise of Zion as the ‘exultation of the whole earth’. There, the exultation seemed linked to its ‘elevation’ which, as we saw, was geographic elevation signaling the throne of God in Zion. Its ‘elevation’ was its being the source of all power. Here, something similar is at work. The “ends of earth” are now, not ‘exulting’ in God, but are full of God’s ‘righteousness’. Zion herself is both the object (“exultation”) and the source this utterly expansive view of the earth. She engenders not only this vision but this reality. We must recall: all of this begins with a contemplation of God’s lovingkindness in the Temple. Second, this insight into God’s righteousness follows the dethroning of the “kings”, who represent the earth’s powers. As was made clear in our reflection on that section, Zion’s authority is so utterly total that its mere sight “casts down the wicked from their thrones”. In other words, contained within this judgment is a simultaneous vision of the entire earth being subject to this same act of righteousness. Zion is not merely a city, but the “city of God”. For that reason it, like Eden, is the earth in microcosm. What happens in (or, to) Zion is, in a sense, a concentrated form of God’s judgment/righteousness throughout the earth. The more one sees the sovereignty of God deployed in and through Zion, the more one comes to see his righteousness as “filling the earth”.