It’s taken me a long time to like the 23rd psalm.
Psalm 23 is meant to picture paradise – or so my theological reading has told me – and Psalm 23 has offered comfort and assurance and hope to many of us at times of grief or other distress.
But, for myself, I’ve almost never wanted to think of heaven or paradise as being “green pastures” or of myself as a sheep. As a kid especially, my paradise preferences were mostly centered on a very good library and no mosquitos. Green spaces with still waters sound, well, buggy, to me.
For most of my life, I’ve wanted heaven to be interesting, not quiet.
And – so far as I could tell without having any very close acquaintance with them – both sheep and pastures look, overall, pretty boring.
So I wasn’t really prepared for it when, in the early weeks of my sabbatical, the 23rd psalm started haunting me.
Phrases and fragments of it would just turn up in my mind, unexpectedly and uninvited.
Often those phrases would be attached to a tune – one of the many hymn settings of the psalm [or, most often, the setting we’ll hear the choir sing in a few minutes] ear-worming its way into my consciousness.
References to the psalm turned up occasionally in the sabbath books I was reading, too, but mostly it was just images and words pushing up to the surface of my mind when I was trying to pay attention to something else. Or to nothing at all.
And gradually, I started to be glad of it.
I started to feel that those words signaled the presence of God here and now. Started to find those whispering threads of “quiet waters”; “I will fear no evil”, “I will lack nothing”, “you restore my soul” restful, reassuring, and comforting.
The words of this psalm felt true for me – or at least like I wanted them to be true for me – in a way I’d rarely felt before. It felt, for the first time, important for me to find a place for myself, a way to belong, inside this image of paradise, and abundance, and trust, and enough.
Much of the time, for many of us, this psalm – with its poetry of protection, calm, security, and, especially, of wanting nothing – seems unreal and unrealistic. Very few of us are, in fact, usually resting beside quiet waters, absolutely free of anxiety and need. When we’re personally fairly content, we’re still largely immersed in a culture built on wanting more; where leaders win loyalty by defining things we should fear or hate; where we’re expected to strive, to keep reaching for more and better of anything or everything; where that striving is meant to be good, and rewarding, a source of pride, even.
Much of the time, for many of us, no matter how attractive it might sound to rest in a quiet place for even a few minutes, that option just doesn’t seem to be available. Much of the time, for many of us, we not only can’t be sure that we have enough, or that we’ve done enough, but it’s easy to wonder if we can ever be enough.
That everyday reality for many of us is restless, insecure, anxious and untrustworthy – the opposite of the reality described in this psalm.
That’s true for me, much of the time, even when I feel most confident in my faith, most confident in God.
So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that – for a substantial part of my sabbatical time – I felt like I was failing at rest. That I worried, often, that whether I was reading, or taking walks, or planning a trip to watch baseball, or trying to nap, or staring at the ceiling, I wasn’t accomplishing rest correctly, or sufficiently, or whatever.
Because rest is profoundly countercultural.
And the conditions that make rest possible – trust in one’s companions and environment, the assurance that we have (and maybe are) enough, that we are safe, well-guided and well-guarded, and cared for – the conditions that make rest real – are profoundly countercultural, too.
And I suspect that is exactly why we read this psalm.
Maybe why it was written in the first place.
Most of human history, after all, is unstable and insecure, full of distrust, of both need and greed, where rest and renewal is a tantalizing dream always out of reach.
But the psalm and the psalmist invite us to step into this other reality. Into a true space of stability and sufficiency, of trust and protection and confidence and rest. A reality that exists right along with our other everyday realities. A reality many of us need.
An opportunity.
And, perhaps, a demand.
One of the books I took up in my sabbatical, in my time of trying to learn more about rest, grabbed hold of my soul and started to haunt me, a bit. Started to keep appearing in my mind unbidden, like this psalm has been haunting me.
Tricia Hersey, writing her manifesto Rest is Resistance, insists that rest is a defiance of evil, of the corrupting and destructive powers that insist that we are only valuable for what we can produce. And that to rest – even for a moment – is to seize, to acknowledge, the holiness of our bodies, our selves.
And if rest is a way we reject evil, it’s not just an opportunity, not just an invitation. It’s an obligation. A commitment of our faith. Radical – and potentially risky, by the demanding, achieving, pushing standards of the world we live in – radical and holy and essential to our wholeness. Essential to our salvation and the redeeming of the world.
Jesus said – you heard him today – that he came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. The sheep and shepherd imagery link the reality described in the 23rd psalm with Jesus’ identity, his self-described relationship to us as the good shepherd, and his mission – the giving of abundant life.
Abundant life which disrupts and destroys the banal evils of striving and wanting and producing, of never trusting that we have, that we are, that God is, enough.
And – recognized as a means of defying evil – those green pastures and quiet waters and banquet tables of the psalm are not, as I once thought them, boring at all.
And not optional, either.
Because the reality that this psalm describes is not passivity. It’s not indolent, monotonous “rest”, that’s a stepping out of the world. Rather it’s a vibrant, life-giving, radically interesting trust that actively receives good and rejects evil in all the varied times and places of our lives. Trust that receives good and rejects evil in the times when we are supposed to feel threatened – in the presence of our enemies. That receives confidence and hope and rejects fear in the times when we are supposed to despair – in the valley of the shadow. Trust that receives renewal, and experiences gratitude and fulfillment, when we are supposed to be wanting – so that in all those places and times in our daily lives when we are surrounded by commercials and expectations and demands that we need more, do more, be more, achieve more – we are instead free to rest. In abundance and enough.
And even, perhaps, in rejecting the demands to need, do, be, achieve more, you and I may make the world more restful for others.
Psalm 23, I’m coming to realize, is not meant to be a someday image, for a heaven out of reach of our daily lives, but an insistent, essential picture of what the good shepherd calls us to live already, here and now. A picture of what participating in our own salvation, rejecting evil, seizing holiness looks like. A picture of the abundant life that will pursue us, calling your name, and mine, in the voice of the good shepherd, in a haunting phrase that slips in and out of your mind, until we, too, are part of paradise, of life-giving rest and salvation, here and now and always.
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