Ps. 80.15 (the body of Israel)

Inspect this vine
the stock / planted by your right hand
the son / you made strong for yourself
now burned with fire / and cut down. 

Seeing and perceiving. It is not an uncommon request in the face of horror and injustice—for God to “look down and see..”. This heavenly observation occurred, for example, at the tower of Babel. And the result (or, the desired result) is always the same: a redeeming judgment. When heaven looks to earth, earth is not merely ‘observed’. The request is not simply that God be ‘made aware’, in some mental fashion. Rather, for God to see is for God to act. Importantly, what this indicates is that for God to ‘see’ is for him to simultaneously judge what he sees and act upon that judgment. It is a type of aesthetic perception—meaning, it is an observation that takes place within the realm of beauty and horror. It is like a canvas asking its painter/creator to not simply ‘look at’ the mistake in the painting, but to fix it because it represents a failure of the painting. In this realm, the realm of judgment, to ‘see’ is to act. In our psalm, this ‘gaze of heaven’ is doubly important, as we saw in the last reflection. Heaven has been sealed up to this point. It has been wreathed in the smoke of God’s anger such that his holy one’s prayers reverberate back to earth and do not penetrate into the heavenly hosts. Now, by contrast, the smoke has cleared and heaven is called upon to “inspect” the vine. Just as their prayers, before, could not ‘rise’, so too, by implication, God’s vision did not descend. The vine, without the gaze of its Gardener, withered. The gaze of the Gardner was, and is, its life; its sun. Without it, it sinks down, its barriers are destroyed and the beasts flood into it. 

Inspection. It is in this context that this request for ‘inspection’ must be heard. And there are two important points to this. First, in line with what we said above, the object of God’s gaze is not so much the enemies but the ravaged Vine. In other words, the psalmist is specifically asking God to look upon the ugliness of the Vine’s destruction. Because (as we have said) God’s vision is an aesthetic vision, ugliness must be rectified. For God to ‘see ugliness’ is another way of demanding that God redeem his Garden. What is interesting is that the psalmist is not drawing God’s attention so much to the enemy as to the Vine—the psalmist knows that the greatest impetus to God’s concern is the injury suffered to his chosen one. His love is the greatest motivation; not the hatred he feels toward his enemies. God must first look upon the injury suffered by his ‘son’, the Vine, and then, from that, he will be moved to a redeeming judgment. But the movement begins, first, with an appeal to what God finds most lovely—the Vine. The flame of God’s wrath, in other words, is ignited by his love and his perception of his son’s wounded beauty. Second, the call to ‘inspect’ has deepened the call in the previous verse to “look and see”. Now, the psalmist calls upon God to a greater activity. He wants God to, rather than simply acknowledging the damage, to minutely cover the damage done to her. There is surely a reference here to the actions of a Gardener as he examines the damage done to his Vine in order to adequately remedy the damage. It is a call for a particularized gaze, one that registers every flaw. It is, in this way, also a call to a greater fury on God’s part. More than just a glance, God is called upon to steadily be in-formed of the Vine’s wounds and injuries and to, therefore, become steadily more moved into action. 

Vine to Son. The transition in this verse is abrubpt. Throughout the psalm Israel has been imaged as a Vine taken from Egypt and transplanted into the Land. The imaging has persisted up to now. Here, suddenly, the Vine has become the very ‘son of God’. Just as the Vine was ‘planted’ and then made to grow at an extraordinary, divine rate, so now is the ‘son’ one who was “made strong for yourself”. No longer is this a Vine, an agricultural act of salvation by the Gardener—rather, Israel’s life has been one of established sonship (kinship) with God. God is Israel’s father, and his redemption from Egypt was the act of his birth, and creation by God. (Perhaps, in the slaughter of the first-born, Israel, by the blood, became the first-born son of God.). There are too many avenues one could pursue here: 1) is this a reference to the fact that the first-born son operated in a type of high-priestly role in the family prior to the Levites?; 2) is this a reference to the Davidic monarchy being explicitly called the ‘sons of God’ (Psalm 2)?; 3) or, is it both—such that Israel, as the first born of God, was to be become a kingdom of priests, uniting in himself both the priestly and kingly roles (like Seth and Melchizedek)? Are we to hear something of the kingly mission of the ‘son’ by the fact that he was “made strong for” God, in a way similar to the “rod of iron” in Psalm 2 that is given to the king upon his coronation/adoption? Whatever the depth, one thing to note between the relationship of the Vine and the Son is the fact that they are both described as unified and single. God has not, here, redeemed a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’ or the ‘tribes’. Rather, just as the Vine was single and unified, so too is the Son. The ‘fire and burning’ that occurred, has damaged the single ‘body’ of the son, not the myriad of ‘holy ones’ that comprise him. This is the ‘body of Israel’ (as the Church becomes the ‘body of Christ’, the new Israel…).