Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 127

 

“May those who pass by not say, 

"The blessing of the LORD be upon you; 

we bless you in the name of the LORD."

 

For several years, I’ve been signing e-mails, notes, and even books with the word “blessings.”  I don’t remember when I started scribbling that in, but it was something I did thoughtfully. My father used to bray about the phrase “good luck,” largely because he thought—as does his son—that “luck” is something of a pagan word.  In my entire life, I don’t believe I’ve ever signed anything “good luck.” 

 

“Best wishes” always felt a bit too formal, something out of golden years of Hollywood—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  “May God bless you” is a bit pushy spiritually, and I’m just a bit timid about using the name of the Lord in a gesture of common courtesy or as seeming thanks for buying a book.

 

I stick with it because the single word “blessings” has just enough grace and just enough nature. It has an unmistakable religious foreground, but it’s not in-your-face. 

 

I think about the word whenever I use it.  I’m not trying to be saintly here, just honest.  When I sign a note “Blessings,” I swear the action is not knee-jerk or obligatory or just plain rote. 

 

But I don’t remember ever willfully not using that word either.  People I don’t know buy books, strangers I’ve never met and will not likely see again.  Yet, I’m sure I’ve written “Blessings” somewhere on the title page. 

 

Charles Spurgeon says Psalm 129’s “those who pass by” references an ancient harvest tradition among farmers, something called the seasonal blessing.  Once the crop was in, he says, farm laborers would visit each other for some kind of mutual blessing. If Spurgeon is right about this psalm, then I should watch myself, I suppose, because what the psalmist says is this: may those who hate Zion not receive even that blessing, because it is God’s blessing.

 

All of which brings us back to the question that hovers over this psalm and the other half-dozen or so others that contain such difficult “imprecations,” many of them more chilling than this one, against enemy evil-doers. It seems impossible not to hear Matthew 5, Jesus’s own words, as a sharp refutation of the imprecations of the psalmist:  "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”

 

In my life, I know this—it is far simpler to side with Jesus and pray for those who seem enemies than it is to draw a sword and side with the poet of Psalm 129. 

But then, what I do I know of evil, of persecution, of crackling fires beneath your feet, of tortures and internment, of martyrdom?  Nothing, really. In a way, it’s easier to pray for one’s enemies than it is to have to go to war.

 

I think C. S. Lewis was right, even though much of his work emerges from the horrors of bombed-out England during the second World War, even though he knew persecution.  “The ferocious parts of the Psalms serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness,” he wrote in Reflections on the Psalms, “and that . . . is hateful to God.”

 

Perhaps pluralism softens us, softens me. The gospel commands us to love, but it also commits us to vigilance.

 

Nonetheless, as I often say, “Blessings.”