Doors into the Psalms
It appears to me that the Book of Psalms is a sort of palace, a large house of prayers, as it were. This lordly residence, moreover, is not only furnished with many rooms, many chapels, but is also provided with several portals of entry. While any one of the psalms, perhaps, may serve the latter purpose, some of them appear to do it in more obvious ways.
Such, for certain, is Psalm 1, the book's opening meditation on "the blessings of the man who strays not in the counsel of the ungodly," and so forth. Psalm 1, simply because it is first, seems a promising place at which to start. So let us knock and see if this is a door.
Our first point of inquiry, surely, should be the identity of this person of whom the Psalmist says, "his delight is in the Law of the Lord." Just who is this person? We ask, in the words of the Ethiopian pilgrim, "Of whom does the prophet say this?"
And behold, the door begins to crack open. We observe that Psalm 1 does not portray this person simply as a "man" in a general sense; he is not just a human being (Hebrew 'adam, Greek anthropos, Latin homo). The psalm identifies him, rather, as the Man; the psalm has in mind a particular person. Indeed, this person is even specified as male (Hebrew 'ish, Greek aner, Latin vir).
Here, then, is our first door into the whole Psalter. This particular Man appears in the first psalm, because he is the one who goes on to pray through all the psalms. In the very next psalm, for instance, this Man declares, "The Lord said to me, 'You are my Son; today I have begotten you." And in the psalm after that, the same Man cries out, "Arise, O Lord; Save me, O my God!" Then, in Psalm 4 he affirms, "The Lord will hear when I call to him." And so on through all the psalms.
Now among the sundry prayers of the Psalter's righteous Man, there are no lines, I venture, more theologically significant, than these:
I have seen the Lord ever before me, for he is at my right hand that I be not shaken. Therefore, my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad. My flesh, as well, will also rest in hope. For you will not abandon my soul into the nether world, nor will you give your holy one over to see corruption. You made known to me the ways of life. You will fill me with joy before your face (Psalm 16 [15]:8–11).
If my translation seems unusual, let me explain: I translate these lines, not necessarily as the Psalmist wrote them down, but in the form St. Peter quoted them from memory in his sermon on the morning of Pentecost. The apostle himself then went on to explain that David,
being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, he would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the Resurrection of the Christ, that his soul was not left in the underworld, nor did his flesh see corruption. (Acts 2:25–31)
If we bear in mind that this was the first psalm quoted in the very first sermon of the Church, then, according to the history recorded in Acts, Psalm 16 was the Church's first door into the Book of Psalms. According to the witness of Peter, the voice in this psalm, the prosopon, or person speaking, was the incarnate Son who prayed to his Father. It was through this psalm that the Church began to understand all the psalms as conversations between the biblical God and his Son. This, then, was the original doorway into both the Psalter and the mystery of the Incarnation.
The very next verse of Peter's sermon indicates this to be the case. I mentioned that the apostle was quoting the psalm from memory. Now it is interesting that, quoting from memory, he omitted the final few words of the psalm: "the delights at your right hand forever."
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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