Ps. 52.9 (liturgy of chaos, liturgy of light)

“I will forever declare praise / for what you have done
I will proclaim your name / that is so good
in the presence / of those loyal to you.” 

It is tempting to see in this declaration of forever-praise an allusion back to the olive tree and its ‘thriving in the Temple’. If so, the ‘fruit’ (the olives), that which is harvested within the Temple precincts, would be this declaration of praise “in the presence of those loyal to you”. It would, in other words, be this ceremony of thanksgiving. The purpose of which would be the recognition and praise of God’s enactment of his loyal-love in bringing down and shaming the hero, presumably the man who was delighting in the destruction of the psalmist (“…praise for what you have done.”). And, importantly, a theme that had, in some sense, been left behind, is resumed in this final verse. In vs. 3, the hero was described as loving evil “more than good”. There, we saw that made the hero into some type of agent of chaos, working against and thwarting the natural aims of creation (which God had declared “good” in Genesis). Here, in this final verse, we see the final reversal, with the psalmist displaying/proclaiming “God’s name which is so good”. By orienting this act within a celebratory framework, the psalmist is showing us that is ‘love’ is properly ordered to the ‘good’ which is God’s name. And, whereas the hero “loved every cruel word”, the psalmist delights in proclaiming “God’s name”. This is an important final point to make: the hero has been engaged in a type of liturgy of chaos; the focus on him has been almost entirely on his speaking and his attracting to words. Furthermore, his ‘liturgy of chaos’ has been such precisely because it has been for his own aggrandizement; it is a form of ‘bragging’ (vs. 1) in his own wealth and power of destruction (vs. 7). By contrast, the psalm concludes on this note of liturgical praise, not centered on the psalmist but God’s name and his enactment of loyal-love. It is this liturgy that has undergirded the whole psalm.