Ps. 66.13-15 (testing into pilgrims)

I come / to your house / with burnt offerings
I will / fulfill my vows / to you
those / my lips promised
those / spoken when I was in trouble.
Burnt-offerings of fatlings / I will offer you
with the aroma / of burning rams
I will offer / bulls and goats. 

On the one hand this seems to be a rather sudden shift in perspective in the psalm. Until this point the focus of the psalmist has not only been on the nation as such but, specifically, on the exodus. It has, in this sense, been very non-personal. Here, however, the “I” not only appears for the first time, but it becomes the very center of the remaining portion of the psalm. The nation has become the psalmist and the past has become present. But, in what way does the psalmist accommodate this transition, or does he simply (and, brutally) shift focus? I think the answer is in reading this verse as following immediately on the heels of the previous. If we can read it as follows: “but you brought us out to abundance, I come to your house…”. The transition is, in effect, the Temple and its relation to the ‘abundance’ that God led his people toward. This is important as it reveals a further qualification to what we said yesterday—the time of testing is in focus of the ‘abundance’ of the promised land. And yet, as we know from Exodus, and see here, the Temple is, in a very real way, the goal of the Exodus. The Temple, as the ‘house of God’ is, very much, the premise of the abundance and life that is promised to the Israelites, and is, itself, that abundance (the Temple often is venerated much more profoundly than the land itself). The psalm itself moves in this direction as it transitions from “abundance” to Temple. And, within this narrowing down to the Temple the “us” is now made into the “I” of the psalmist. So we have this further progression in the psalm from “all the earth” (vs. 1, 4) to “all mankind” (vs. 5) to “us” (vs. 9-12) to “I” (vs. 13-19). It is in this context that we come to see the point of the previous verses and how they now relate to the current, and final, section: the psalmist sense of himself is one that is broader than the present. Indeed, he sees “us” moving through the Re(e)d Sea. His memory of the event is not a memory detached from that event but his memory is a participation in that event. His “I” is both the “us” of those around him and the “them” that were drawn out of Egypt. Understood from this vantage, there is no real (or, abrupt) transition from the past to the present and from “them” to “us” to “I”. The psalmist has experienced a subsequent exodus of his own, a deliverance from danger. At that time, he made a vow that if God delivered him he would offer him burnt sacrifices as a thank-offering. Just as Israel’s time of hardship was actually a time of testing and refinement, so too has the psalmist come to perceive his hardship as a form of refinement. (Perhaps we are to hear here, too, the fact that he was provided a “man” to lead him out of his difficulties as Israel was provided Moses.) We might even say this: the psalmist first said to “come and see” the works of God. There, we noted that ‘come and see” is a term used for pilgrims on the way to the Temple. Then, we find God testing his people so as to ‘lead them to abundance’. This abundance now shifts to the Temple itself. Here, we have “I come to your house..”. Interestingly: the ‘refining’ of the people is the making them holy people able to process to the Temple. In other words, the testing of God is his fashioning of his people into pilgrims able to offer thank-offerings to him for their deliverance. And, in that thank-offering, the entire process is reborn (through memory-participation) and carried forward into the present. One final point as the sacrifices offered here: just as “we” were led to abundance, so too, now, does the psalmist abundantly offer sacrifice to God. And that in two ways: through the offering of many animals (bulls, goats, rams and ‘fatlings’) but also by way of their being offered as burnt offerings (something not commonly done for thank offerings). There is the sense here of a profound and deep thankfulness to God, something abundantly ‘above-and-beyond’ what is normally called for.