Ps. 72.16 (cosmos in liturgical abandon)

May there be an abundance of grain / in the land
even on the mountaintops
May his crops of grain thrive / as the trees of Lebanon
and people blossom forth / from the town / like the grass / of the land. 

The wealth of the nations flows toward the king; the prayers of the people flow toward the king; the blessings of the people flow toward the king. Now, the cosmos (creation) responds in kind producing its astonishing bounty. These are “his crops”.  Here we find an important deepening to our reflections: the small phrase “to the mountaintops” is important to pause over. It signals the total, astonishing, power of the king’s reign as it pertains to the blessing of the land. This, in turn, reveals that the ‘king’s gold’ and the ‘people’s blessing and prayers’ partake of this same amazing power unleashed by the king(dom). More to the point, just as the king’s reign went “to the ends of the earth” (that place of darkness and threat), so too now do the crops extend to places otherwise devoid of life—the mountaintops. The cosmos will be as covered with righteousness and the kingly reign as the ‘powers’ of the cosmos are covered. And, with this covering, they will become astoundingly fruitful (“like the trees of Lebanon”). The extent of the harvest will only be matched by the size of the harvest. And both partake of this ‘festive’, prodigal bounty. This is cosmos in liturgy, joy and celebration. It is cosmos in abandon. All of this points to the fact that once the cosmos are unified under the king, they will not simply be brought to their ‘completion’. They will be more-than-raised beyond their power and brought into the sphere of God’s blessing (his prodigal, festive banquet). The cosmos will be brought not only into the ‘living God’ but into Life Itself. This image is hen carried over from the harvest and into the people. The psalmist is clearly, at this point, drunk with joy at the image of the kingdom reign. The images of cosmos now seep into the images of human fruitfulness. And those images that typically signal man’s fleeting nature (“man is like grass that withers”) are here transformed into signs of overflowing vitality (“blossom forth”). There is no ‘end’ here in sight (no ‘withering’), only an ever-growing, perpetual ‘filling of an earth’ already ‘subdued’ by the king. This is the power of Eden and the promise to Abraham reaching its reality in an always increasing abundance.