Ps. 101.1-2 (admiring imitation)

I sing / of loyalty and justice
I celebrate you / Yhwh / with music
I celebrate in poetry / your path of integrity
when / will you come to me? 

If we place this psalm within the mouth of the king (of David and his successors) a level of meaning emerges here that otherwise is only hinted at. That level is two-fold. We have noted in many other psalms where we can detect the voice of the king a particular, intimate connection between the king and Yhwh. The king is his “son” and the “son” wants nothing more than to please his father-Yhwh. This intimacy is rooted in the fact that this son is, so to speak, a ‘father’ to the nation; Yhwh’s love of this son is very closely tied to the son’s love of Yhwh’s people. It is this which marks out a king as “one who is after Yhwh’s own heart”. David is David (as Adam was Adam) not (only) because he loved Yhwh but because he loved Yhwh’s people. The king is, in this sense, very “close to Yhwh’s heart” and is able to reveal and open that heart to Yhwh’s people in a way that others cannot. 

This opens out into the second layer of meaning: that the king not only represents Yhwh to the people, but represents the people to Yhwh. In some fashion, the people are summed up “in their head” the king. When he stands before Yhwh, they all stand before Yhwh. They are “in him”. If he is struck, they are scattered. These opening lines, with this in mind, resonate at these levels. The king-son rejoices in his father. He ‘sings’ to him; he ‘celebrates’ him; his love of his father is best expressed (or, most deeply expressed) in poetry. And, he aches for the time when his father will “come to him”. Likewise, when he reaches out to his father, he does so as king-of-his-people. What he praises in his father are those ‘communal’ qualities that bind a kingdom together: loyalty, justice and integrity. All of these qualities, as we will see, are the ‘glue’ that hold people together. They are the ‘life of the people’. 

A third level emerges here: whose ‘integrity and loyalty’ is David talking about? At first glance it clearly appears to be Yhwh’s. And yet, what David ‘sings’ in the remainder of the psalm is his own enactment of integrity and loyalty. It is here that a deeper meaning to the question emerges that confirms our previous insight: this is not an ‘either/or’. David enacts Yhwh’s integrity, as his ‘image on earth’ and ‘son’, and, by doing so, attempts to draw his father-Yhwh closer to him and his people. In other words, in the logic of kingly-love, the interplay between Yhwh and his king-son, is not one of competition (either its Yhwh or the king) or dissolution (its really just Yhwh). It is, rather, one of admiring imitation. The question is, in other words, a complaint (and, actually makes the entire psalm a complaint) but it is a loving-complaint, a desire for Yhwh to ‘fill the space’ that the king has made.