Ps. 1 (in the beginning)

Psalm 1

 

One of the first times that Adam hears Yhwh's voice, it comes to him as provision and command. Yhwh tells Adam that he is free to eat from any tree in the garden but that he must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that if he does so he will surely die.  This primal sound will echo throughout history. When Israel is about to enter the Land, Yhwh will, in the form of Torah, put before them 'life and death', and they are to choose life so that they can live long within the Land. And when Jesus is baptized he is immediately driven out into the dessert, so that he can 'choose life'. It is, then, no surprise that the Psalter opens with the same dynamic. Blessed is the man who avoids the wicked and who cherishes Torah. We witness again, here, a type of 'first man', a 'first born', an Adam.

 

Curiously, Yhwh's first words to Adam required of him to make a choice. Yhwh spoke to Adam and awoke his freedom. More fundamentally, Yhwh, in the very first instance, told Adam that freedom was only such when he chose to obey Yhwh. Disobedience was not freedom; it was death. As such, it is important to recognize that Yhwh's command itself already bore the markings of a type of knowledge of good and evil. Yhwh put before Adam the choice between obedience and disobedience. It is not our place here to investigate what exactly the 'knowledge of good and evil' was in this regard. It is simply to point out that Adam's (e)very movement will be, and always-already is,  a response to Yhwh.

 

And that is where the Psalter opens in Psalm 1. It begins with the blessed man's avoidance of the wicked. It begins with a decision. More to the point, it begins with obedience.

 

Blessed / the man who has not / walked by the counsel of the wicked

and has not / stood in the way of the sinful

and has not / sat in the gathering of scoffers.

 

The psalter's opening is anything but an introduction. There is no genesis-like backstory. Yhwh is not the first person to appear. Instead, it opens as if in the midst of the story. It is man-in-action. We are, as readers, simply thrown into the psalm. It places before us an ideal, blessed man, and asks us to watch him and to contemplate him.

 

For the blessed man the world is charged with the reality of good and evil. They are different spheres of activity, and they are realms that man does not so much perform as inhabit. The blessed man is attuned to the fact that the one who acts out either good or evil does not so much act out a power that lies within himself, as that good and evil take him into the sphere of its own power. In other words, to perform evil is to become encompassed by evil and be performed by it. This stands in line with the fact that man was first spoken to and did not himself first speak. Man is a response. Good or evil, when performed-as-response, are therefore prior to man and something man inhabits. It is more true to say that good and evil perform through man than that man performs good and evil.

 

Once we come to grasp that evil is a sphere of activity we perceive that it is more like a dark flame than a passive reality brought forth through voluntary act. This is why the blessed man's avoidance of evil is total and absolute. It is always already more than the act performed and, as such, it is like a contagion. Again, we should recall Adam. Evil manifests itself through the insinuating voice of the serpent. It beckons, it tempts and it distorts. It is a lion seeking to devour. To simply be in its presence is to already be in the presence of a voice that draws into itself. It is this 'pull of evil', or this 'contagion', that the blessed man is aware of and wholly seeks to avoid.  We are, in other words, to see in the blessed man's avoidance what Adam failed to do.

 

The question we must ask ourselves at this point is why the psalm starts off in the negative. Why does he begin with what the blessed man avoids rather than what he desires? There are surely several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is the way this affects the listener. In brief, by opening the psalm in this manner, the psalmist makes the reader actually begin performing the necessary steps toward blessedness.

 

By opening in the negative, the psalm makes the reader begin the act of discernment. By withholding what the content of blessedness is, or what its source is, the psalmist performs an act of purgation. It is like an act of contrition or confession, because it calls forth the act of avoidance. It looks to cleanse the vessel before the content is poured into it. If reality is itself a choice between these two spheres, and if those two spheres are inhabited by an act of the heart's discernment and by obedience, then the psalmist is here creating the reader's heart into a fitting receptacle for Torah.

 

But / in Yhwh's Torah / is his delight

And in his Torah / will he muse / by day and night

 

The psalm now shifts from avoidance to delight. And in this shift we come to suspect that the blessed man avoidance of the wicked may have a deeper significance. What I mean is this, the first three lines lead us to believe that the blessed man is actively avoiding the wicked; that he finds something tantalizing about it and therefore must make a concerted act of will to avoid it. However, what we find here makes us question that. Here, we find that the blessed man's will is actively drawn toward another sphere of reality. Torah is his delight. So, his avoidance of the wicked may in fact be his movement toward Torah. In other words, it may be that the blessed man does not need to exert much energy to avoid the wicked. To him, the wicked display neither grandeur nor magnificence. Instead, they are boorish and dull in comparison with the glory of Torah.

 

If this is the case it points to a rather profound reality of Torah's power. A thing of beauty is not merely an object of attraction. A true object of beauty is, so to speak, a world in itself, sovereignly bending the entire person according to its contours. One is captive to it; transfixed by it; and changed by it. There is no place to hide in its presence. Beauty is, quite literally, powerfully creative in this way. For the blessed man, Torah is this most profound object of beauty. And it creates in him the proper response to evil, which is, from the standpoint of desire, no response at all. Within the world of Torah, evil and wickedness hold no sway.

 

The question then becomes what the blessed man sees in Torah. For the moment, we must be prepared to let that answer develop. It is no coincidence that this psalm stands as the gateway to the psalter. The remaining 149 psalms will each provide their own answer, as the Psalter itself is a part of Torah. That said, what we can see in this psalm is that, as an object of beauty, Torah displays that coincidence of freedom and form. It is law, but it is boundless. It is instruction, but it is life. It has a clear shape, but it is prodigal. It displays, in other words, the light of wisdom.

 

It is for this reason that Torah can counter the communion of the wicked. Verse 1 shows a clear totality-walking, standing, sitting-the entire scope of human activity. For Torah, however, it does not merely encompass the scope of the wicked-it is something that is present continuously. We might say that the Torah provides an abiding, ever-giving presence. Man's ability to meditate on it 'day and night', displays Torah's ever-greater depths and fecundity. This will have important implications for the images we will explore later, where Torah is likened to a water of eternal life.

 

So shall he be / like a tree

Transplanted / by running waters

Which shall yield its fruit / in its season

And its foliage / shall not wither

 

Torah and the blessed man now become an image drawn from the natural world. In fact, the psalmist will now portray both the wicked and the blessed in terms of vegetation and harvest. Each will get four lines.

 

The blessed man and Torah, the tree and the water: It is here were we find the most succinct and layered exposition of the blessed man’s relationship to Torah. When the psalmist spoke in non-metaphoric language, he described the blessed man as being attracted to Torah, of it being “his delight” and what he “meditates upon day and night”. It was certainly a thing that attracted the blessed man but it was described more as an object the blessed man approached. Torah was, in this regard, somewhat one dimensional and passive. And, for the psalmist, it did not capture the full dynamic at work. Accordingly, he reached for the image of the tree and water. Here, the psalmist maintains the original dynamic of the blessed man appropriating Torah—he ‘drinks’ from it. However, the psalmist, importantly, begins not with the blessed man approaching Torah, but with the blessed man being ‘transplanted’ next to running water. I find this highly significant.  Meditation upon torah moves one from, we might say, a profane sphere to that of the sacred. Torah mediation is, in other words, ecstatic; it moves one out of oneself and into Yhwh’s realm. This is both the reality and experience of Torah meditation. One is, and senses oneself to be, ‘transplanted’ in a more-than-literal fashion into Yhwh’s realm. Understood from the more accurate realm of poesis, we see that the foundational movement is not of the blessed man to Torah, but of the blessed man being taken into the realm of Yhwh’s delight. We might draw a parallel in this way: in Exodus there is a fascinating interplay between whether or not Moses sees Yhwh ‘face to face’. In some verses it appears he does not, while in others it seems clear that he does. Moreover, there is the permanent declaration that “no man can see the face of God and live.” Whatever the purpose of these verses, one thing we can glean is this: that Moses ‘sees the face of Yhwh’ most profoundly when he comes to know that he is seen, absolutely, by Yhwh.

 

That experience of Yhwh’s ‘always-already’ prior and absolute gaze is, in fact, what is experienced when one ‘sees the face of God’ (at least in part). What seems to be a one-way street of gazing at Yhwh is understood to be a much deeper two-way street whereby Yhwh was and is the one who is and was. And something analogous, I would argue, occurs in Torah meditation. On the surface, it appears that man approaches Torah and takes Torah to himself. However, for the blessed man, the opposite is largely true. Once he crosses Torah’s threshold he comes to see that he did not so much take Torah to himself but Torah transplanted him in some profound and prior act of ecstatic appropriation.

 

Not so / the wicked

but they are like chaff / that wind tosses.

 

Because of the way the psalmist has structured the psalm, these lines come laden with a meaning and depth they would otherwise not have. The nature of the righteous as a transplanted, nourished tree, that produces fruit and does not wither, creates a stark and profound contrast to the wicked. The wicked become the inverse of the righteous. Whereas the righteous are ‘transplanted’ to life-giving and sustaining waters, the wicked are ‘moved’ by being ‘blown away by the wind’.  Whereas the righteous ‘bear fruit in season’, the wicked are merely the ‘residue’ and useless portion of a harvest. Whereas the righteous are solid and substantial, rooted in the earth, the wicked are, in many translations, ‘blown away from the earth’. And whereas the righteous ‘will not wither’, the wicked are annihilated.  

 

Importantly, too, ‘nature’ as it is poetically described, operates in both spheres—as ‘living water’ for the tree and as the ‘wind’ that blows away the chaff. There is no natural force that is supplanting, or strengthening, the wicked. Of course, nature is not accurate. It is creation. The water is not ‘merely water’ and the wind is not simply a breeze. Yhwh’s presence coheres within the rhythms of creation. And that ‘rhythm’ is torah. As such, torah is not merely what operates for the righteous—it also acts as a force against the wicked. It is both life giving water and destructive wind; it is both blessing and curse. And it is here that we need to signal something that we will return to later in our concluding theological reflections. In Genesis, when Yhwh creates he does so through separation: light from darkness, water from water, earth from water, and so on. This act of separation does not end, however, with the material world. It is, in fact, culminated in the first words Yhwh speaks to Adam. It is, as we have already said, profoundly significant that the first sound Adam hears from Yhwh is in the form of blessing and curse; it is an act of separation. Adam is given all the trees of the garden but one. What we see here is the culmination of Torah (man is Torah’s Sabbath so to speak), as it is finds expression in a command issued to Adam. The torah that shapes the cosmos is consummated in the torah command to Adam. Discipleship and cosmos are not two separate realities. As such, Adam’s obedience is itself a participation within the order of creation itself. When he obeys he drinks from an ever-flowing water. When he disobeys he is ‘cast out’, or ‘blown away’, in curse-like exilic fashion, and in a further act of separation. This is why the rhythms of nature are intimately connected to the expressed commands of Torah to mankind.

 

That said, torah’s destructive, curse capacity is always penultimate to its ultimate goal to fill the earth with abundant life. When it is destructive, it is such in order to allow life to flourish more fully, more prodigally, more festively. It is not, in this way, a force in and of itself, but merely a responsive one. The wicked are but mockeries of the righteous and their reality, such as it is, is only parasitic. Torah as blessing is a force in and of itself; it is not a response but a why-less, infinitely self-initiating gift (it is grace we might say). And this is why creation itself can operate as the poetic vehicle (or, sacrament(al)) of Torah—in its totality, from water to wind, it is a torah enactment. The implications for this can be stunning. Torah and creation can mutually enlighten each other. The more one reflects (or, meditates) upon torah, the more creation opens, in its totality, as torah-enactment. Conversely, the more one reflects upon nature, and its boundless rhythms and possibilities, the more one comes to see the abundant, life giving nature of torah; to look at creation (not ‘nature’) is to see torah; to see torah is to see creation. This can, of course, open up possibilities on meditatively incorporating creation’s destructive capacities into a vision of torah, which is something I find rather unique.

 

Therefore / the wicked shall not rise up / in judgment

Nor sinners / in an assembly of the righteous

 

For Yhwh knows / the way of the righteous

But the way of the wicked / shall perish

 

It seems to me there are at least two possible interpretations of these lines: 1) because the wicked have been 'blown away' by the wind, they no longer can seek a voice in the room of judgment (they are no longer present); or 2) that because the wicked are so insubstantial, they are unable to represent a threat to the righteous when judgment is rendered (still there, but not a threat). The first interpretation tends more toward an apocalyptic reading-a time when the wicked are no more. The second tends more toward an ongoing perception of the fate of the wicked 'in time'.  But are these mutually exclusive? Or, more importantly, does the psalm justify both readings (can we see with both eyes)?

 

I think both interpretations are valid and, in fact, enlighten each other. These lines, if read within the structure of the psalm, mirror the opening lines. There, it is the 'counsel', 'the way', and the gathering-of the wicked. Here, we have 'judgment', 'an assembly' and 'the way'-of the righteous. There, the wicked 'were present', but avoided by the righteous. Here, the righteous are gathered in communion, but the wicked are absent. What has changed of course is the two-fold movement of water and wind. The righteous have been planted and the wicked blown away. Moreover, the righteous have been planted as in a grove, together. They are now 'an assembly', whereas before the psalm gave the appearance of the isolated blessed man avoiding the 'assembly of the wicked'. Their tree-like solidity is a result not merely of an individual made firm in Yhwh, but of an achieved unity and communion of the righteous. The wicked, by contrast, have been separated-they are the discarded/separated chaff. Originally, they were unified; now, they are separated.

 

This separation causes them to be weak-to be subject to being blown away by the smallest wind. This is no gale force wind. It is the breeze that allows the heavy harvest to fall, cleansed of the chaff. This is one reason why I think the closing lines could be read in both ways-it could be that the righteous have now been cleansed of the wicked to such a degree that they now 'sit in judgment'. They are now the ones with authority and power. This must, however, be the result of an historical act of judgment that caused the wicked's downfall. It is not simply an interior, moral overturning.

 

The issue, then, is whether this 'act' is profound enough to be considered an apocalyptic act, whereby the wicked are utterly removed, or it is a more 'mundane' historical act. In the end, I think this may obfuscate, more than anything else. What we find here is that the 'realm of the wicked' has been made present, and it has been made present by and through an act of Yhwh-his act of "protecting the way of the righteous." Whether or not this manifests itself in a more 'typical' fashion or a more dramatic one, is really beside the point. The point is that the blessed man can be assured that Yhwh will protect him. And, if it is a more 'mundane' protection, that only speaks to the greater act that will come, such an act being present like a seed contained within the psalm, ready to grown when watered (as Lazarus is a seed of the resurrection). Every mundane act can be seen as a harbinger for the greater, final act.

 

Finally, however, when addressing this question we must take into account that this psalm is the first psalm-the gateway to the psalter. It seems to me that there should be a presumption that this psalm is intended to hold the weight of the psalter and, as such, can and should be read in as expansive way as possible. It must have, potentially, the entire psalter in it. And, therefore, it should be able to be read in the more 'mundane' wisdom fashion and the more dramatic apocalyptic fashion. Both readings making clear that when Yhwh acts on behalf of the righteous the wicked will be shorn of their power and blown away (from the face of the earth). The beauty of this vision should be the 'delight' that the righteous man contemplates in Torah (vs. 2). He looks forward not to judgment-as-such, but to a time when the power of Yhwh, as expressed in Torah, will out, will shine forth, uneclipsed by the wicked and saturating the earth in its full, bountiful, festive and prodigal power.

 

Concluding theological reflections

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. This Word was that through which the world was made and it was the Word that gave life and light to man. The Word was cosmos and command. It was, in other words, what we have come to see as Torah—that which created the world through the act of separation and that which provided man the commands that gave him life. The Word was the first word spoken over the depths, and it was the first word spoken to Adam.

 

The Word, however, was not to end with Adam. Adam was to hand over the Word to Eve and they, together, would hand it over to their children. This would become the ever-expanding fruit of the Word or, said in different terms, fruit of the Vine. It both constituted and planted Adam and Eve in the Garden’s holy-of-holies and it would produce in them a fruitful abundance, covering the earth with a type of temple holiness.

 

That is how it should have been. And that is what this psalm places before us. We do not find here simply a moral man, but a blessed man. A man who participates within the prodigal, life giving Word by and through his delight and obedience to that Word and who therefore lives a life of bounty (cosmos) and justice (command).

 

More deeply, the first word to Adam was the culminating Word of creation. It is a momentous thing to consider: that the radiance and glory of the cosmos culminates in obedience. That the ‘goodness’ Yhwh sees in the cosmos (its own docile obedience to his Word) is intensified and made perfect in man’s obedience. As such, the particularity of man’s response to Yhwh—history—is the consummation of cosmos. History is not dwarfed by the magnitude of the cosmos but is, instead, its culmination.

 

This obedience, this supreme goodness of history, this ‘way’, is what Yhwh ‘knows’ as a man intimately knows a woman, and it is what Yhwh cherishes and protects. One might say that it is the heart of Yhwh on display.

 

Yet, we must move deeper still: Yhwh and Torah produce a dynamic power, an ‘ever-living water’, that perpetually nourishes the blessed man and causes him to perpetually produce fruit. One can detect here a three-fold pattern of Yhwh, Torah and power. Torah does not end with the blessed man. Its appropriation by man causes an explosive and dynamic power to be unleashed. This is the festivity, the prodigality, of Torah and is, we must add, the ultimate aim of Torah. Just as Torah begins in a why-less gift from Yhwh, it also ends in a type of why-less banquet and joy. Prodigality is the alpha and omega of creation.

 

And, once this dynamic is perceived, we can then understand this psalm in a deeply Trinitarian way. When the Word becomes flesh, the entire momentum of cosmos and obedience are incarnate in Jesus. He becomes, in and through his obedience, the Adam-that-should-have-been, and the blessed man of this, the first psalm of the Psalter. Every step of obedience that he takes incarnates the Torah more and more, to the point where, on the cross, Torah has been fulfilled (“It is finished…”) and his very side is pierced and from it flows the sacramental elements of blood and water.   

 

Just as Eve was created from Adam’s sleeping side, so now is the new Eve created from the sleeping side of the Second Adam. Crucially, though, and in light of Psalm 1, this creation is the primal moment of Christ’s fruit-bearing. This is the culminating, explosive power of the pierced side, when God’s own heart was poured out in (now) living water. As such, it points forward to Pentecost and the sending of the Spirit. The Second Adam has now become the ‘tree that perpetually bears fruit and whose leaves never wither’. This is the Trinitarian dynamic that Adam was created for, but failed to accomplish, and that Christ inaugurated.