Ps. 101 (enacted by Christ)

At this point I want to detail, briefly, how Christ enacted this psalm. However, we first should back up and summarize some themes we have noted so far. The first is a constant type of ‘Echo of Eden’ that can be detected in this psalm. In particular, Adam (and Eve’s) role in the garden as its protector and defender and their failure. “Wisdom” plays a prominent role in the Garden story, there couched as ‘the knowledge of good and evil’. As we have said, ‘wisdom’ is the preeminent quality a king must have in order to internally order his kingdom; externally, it may be his military prowess. The reason is because ‘internally’ the ‘enemy’ is a failure of virtue, a failure to protect himself and his people against those moral qualities that lead to entropy and social death. The king must ‘judge’ his realm. Now, Adam and Eve failed miserably at this in protecting their ‘realm’, ‘Eden’. At the precise moment they were ‘gaining wisdom’ they were utterly failing in its enactment because they were listening to, and acting upon, the serpent’s words. This simultaneity is key to understand: they 1) listened to the serpent and they 2) grasped at wisdom. Now, when the kingdom was again established, in Israel, David’s son, Solomon, is regarded as the wisest of all kings. He was, in other words, re-igniting the Adamic mission of internally ordering his (and Yhwh’s) kingdom ‘in wisdom’. More intriguing still—he, not David, is the one who actually erects the new ‘Eden’, the “Temple”. And yet, perhaps more intriguing still, he eventually fails because, like Adam, he ‘listened to his wives’. The point, however, is that Solomon obtains wisdom is a way utterly different than Adam. Whereas Adam ‘listened, saw and grasped’, Solomon puts wisdom before all other things (that he can see) and requests it from Yhwh; his ‘mission as king’ is paramount. Now, when we move to Christ we move to one is “greater than Solomon” and speaks about his ‘rebuilding of the Temple’; he constantly speaks about the ‘wise man’ who builds “his house” on a firm foundation. More intriguing, however, is his constant ability to discern the “thoughts and intentions” of those around him (from his disciples, to the observers to the Pharisees). What we see here is a ‘new Adam-king’ who, as the psalmist-king does in this psalm, is ordering his realm according to Yhwh’s ‘integrity’ and wisdom.  This king, however, completes his mission. Just like the psalmist in this psalm, he protects himself and his realm from all of the secret agendas of wickedness. He is able to parse out and limn the contours of evil and thwart its incursion into his kingdom. He does not listen to the ‘serpent’ in the dessert. It is an intriguing view of Christ’s mission: to be the new king that re-constitutes the kingdom around himself through constant and vigilant application of wisdom in order to build up and protect that kingdom. Further, just as we have commented on, this ‘wisdom enactment’ is not an heroic act of individual effort; rather, it involves and constitutes people ‘around the king’ who can ‘minister to him’ (the apostles and the disciples). In addition, if we read the ‘Temple cleansing”, on some level, as Christ’s enactment of the final verse, we sense the ‘movement of the king’: “In the morning, I have destroyed all wicked countrymen, ridding Yhwh’s city of all evildoers”. Finally, this ‘wisdom enactment’ in the form of protection is not something that ceased with his death and resurrection. Rather, this wisdom was bequeathed to his disciples, in and through the Holy Spirit, who now constitutes the Church as Christ’s Body, carrying forward Christ’s ‘king mission’ into the world. This is manifested, in the Church, by and through the teaching of the apostles and the magisterium, founded on the teaching ‘keys’ that were given to Peter, the rock against whom the netherworld cannot destroy.