The Empowering, Illuminating Word From Elsewhere
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path (Psalm 119:105).
A few Sundays ago, our well-spoken pastor, Joan, recited this biblical verse as the salutation at the outset of her sermon. She did not comment further on the verse but proceeded in a compelling way to articulate the “path/way” of the gospel to which the verse refers.
I have long had a special personal attachment to this verse. In my growing up context of evangelical pietism in the “E and R” tradition, it was the custom that the pastor assigned to each thirteen-year-old confirmand a “confirmation verse.” That verse was taken to be a marker of faith for the confirmand and was often recalled and reiterated many years later at the funeral of the deceased confirmand. In my case, my pastor (also my father) assigned this as my confirmation verse. Nothing was made of it at the time, but for a long time now in retrospect I have pondered my father’s choice of the verse for me, given that I have spent my adult life engaged with and expositing the “word” of the biblical text. As a consequence, I have taken his assignment of this verse to me as a thirteen-year-old as a providential act in anticipation of the adult life and work that have long occupied me.
The verse occurs in the longest of the Psalms, Psalm 119. That long Psalm is shaped as the most artful and well-developed acrostic poem in scripture. An “acrostic” is a poetic articulation that proceeds through the alphabet with each successive line beginning with the next letter from A to Z, that is in Hebrew, from ’aleph to taw. We have other acrostic poems in the Old Testament that run the course of the alphabet as a way of completeness. (See Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 145, and Proverbs 31:10-31, Lamentations 1-4.) The scholar who has most intently and vigorously studied the acrostic pattern is J. P. Fokkelman, (Major Poems of the Hebrew Bible: At the Interface of Prosody and Structural Analysis, 2000). In each of these texts the alphabetic sequence is traced, though some of the poetry does not complete the task. Psalm 119, however, is exceptional. In all the other cases of acrostic each letter of the Hebrew alphabet occurs once in sequence. In Psalm 119, by contrast, each letter gets eight successive lines. Thus with twenty-two letters in the alphabet, and each letter reiterated eight times, we get a sum of 176 verses. It is for that reason that the Psalm is so long. Our verse 105 occurs as the first of eight verses that start with nun (n) (vv. 105-112). The first word in verse 105, the first of eight lines with nun, is “ner” (lamp). Unfortunately none of this is evident in English translation.
One can readily see in the Psalm a cluster of terms that are variously repeated and reiterated:
Commandment, decree, judgment, law (Torah), ordinance, precept, statute, word.
We may take all of these several terms as rough synonyms, all of which refer to the written Torah. The written Torah (never without thick interpretation) is a “lamp” and a “light.” It serves to illumine the path/way in which covenanted Israel is to walk. We may notice the same parallelism in Jeremiah 6:16:
Thus says the Lord:
Stand at the crossroads, and look,
and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way lies; and walk in it,
and find rest for your souls (Jeremiah 6:16).
The ancient path/way is surely the way of Torah that Jeremiah commended in chapter 11. In this verse the prophet laments that Israel has chosen not to walk in that path/way. Concerning the parallelism, remarkably in Proverbs 8:20, personified wisdom affirms the substance of the way/path commended in covenant:
I (wisdom) walk in the way of righteousness,
and the paths of justice.
The path/way of Torah is the righteousness and justice that enact love of God and love of neighbor. While wisdom commends that way/path, the prophet sees that Israel refuses to walk in it. Thus in considering the path/way of covenanted Israel, we are able to see the deep insistence and radicality of our verse that is so innocent-looking. The path/way of Israel, enunciated in the Torah of Sinai, is an alternative path/way, alternative to the predation of Pharaoh, alternative to the extravagance of Solomon, and alternative to the brutality of Babylon. It is plausible, moreover, that this cluster of terms in the Psalm refers more explicitly to the Book of Deuteronomy and to the trajectory of Torah interpretation that ensues from and is advocated by the Book of Deuteronomy. Thus Gerhard von Rad, (Studies in Deuteronomy, p. 16), could see that Deuteronomy was “preached law,” so that the preaching [interpretive proclamation] of the Torah of Deuteronomy became the engine of Judaism as reflected in the leadership of Ezra and in the sermonic content of the Books of Chronicles, on which see Gerhard von Rad, “The Levitical Sermon in I and II Chronicles,” The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 1966 (pp. 267-280), and Jacob M. Myers, “The Kerygma of the Chronicler,” Interpretation XX (1966) 259.
This same trajectory of an alternative path/way comes to clear expression in the teaching of Jesus:
Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it (Matthew 7:13-14; see Luke 13:24).
In the horizon of Jesus, this path/way consisted in discipleship that required leaving all else to “follow.” This characterization of the alternative community around Jesus as “followers of the way” (Acts 9: 24:14) indicates the requirements that we know as “love of God” and “love of neighbor.” This narrow, hard way is an alternative to the broad, easy way of the world marked by self-sufficiency and self-securing. Discipleship to Jesus is indeed an articulation of covenantal obedience to the alternative of Torah. The Torah provides guidance and illumination for how to live this alternative life in the world.
Alternatively, Karl Barth parses the matter differently. He takes “the word” to be the decisive articulation of God. It is this logos [logic that pervades creation] that is the force of the creator who “calls the world into being.” It is, moreover, this same “word” that is bodily present in the person of Jesus “full of grace and truth.” But then boldly, Barth goes further to aver that the word that creates and the word that is enfleshed in Jesus is the word as the written witness of scripture that comes to powerful performance in the word as sermon. This breathtaking force of the word in these several modes is contrasted to a world “formless and void” that is without the ordering, life-giving power of the word. Such a world devoid of the word is a world unto death.
All of this was readily on the table when our pastor moved easily from the initial salutation to her sermon on John 6:3-13 and the wonder of the loaves multiplied in order to feed a hungry crowd. She nicely finessed every “explanation” for the delivery of bread, as the four gospels, each in turn, refuses to “explain” this spectacular wonder. The text is a story, not an argument. It is a specific narrative, not a logical syllogism. The wonder of the narrative is the affirmation that in the fleshly word of Jesus’ own person the capacity of the creator God for abundance is readily available. Our pastor traced through two other narratives of abundant bread: in the manna story of Exodus 16, and the wonder of bread wrought through Elisha (II Kings 4:42-44). Her proclamation concerned the radical claim that the world governed by the creator God teems with life-giving abundance, an abundance that is quite unlike and contrasted with the world around us that is dominated by fear, greed, and violence, and thus by scarcity.
The sermon concerned the demanding either/or of scarcity-abundance. There is no doubt that our present world is powerfully dominated by an ideology of scarcity. It is this ideology that propels tax policy, readiness for war, and our greedy arguments for the exclusion and disregard of the poor, the vulnerable, and the “undeserving.” The claim of the sermon—the claim of the Torah, the claim of the gospel—is that we may walk in the light that illumines a different path of glad obedience in the world. (On the parallel claims in Judaism and Christianity, see James A. Sanders, “Torah and Christ,” Interpretation 29 (1975).) In ancient Israel that walk is the way/path of covenant. In the story of Jesus, it is the glad walk of discipleship. Taken either way, it is a summons to live differently, to live with the truth of God’s abundance in a way that resists and refuses the fear of scarcity so evident in our society. It follows that on that path/way we may be free of fear and of greed and (consequently) free of every temptation to violence.
I had two thoughts as I reflected on my confirmation verse and the sermon that followed it a few Sundays ago. First, I understood afresh the South African hymn, “Siyahamba”:
We are marching in the light,
We are marching in the light of God,
We are marching in the light of God,
We are marching, marching,
We are marching…
That “march” about which Blacks sing in South Africa is a march of faith that resists, rejects, and refuses the social reality of Apartheid and exclusiveness. That has been a hard, risky march in South Africa, just as it is always a hard, demanding alternative to the easier path of the status quo.
Second, as we gathered to hear our pastor line out the alternative path/way of abundance and generosity, it dawned on me afresh that serious discipleship requires that we be at the meeting of the faithful regularly, always again, in order to participate in the performance of the alternative path/way. The reason we must always be at the meeting of the faithful is that we are regularly and forcefully bombarded by the regent path/way of scarcity. Indeed, our pastor began her sermon by pointing out how the narrative of scarcity was everywhere pervasive including in the interminable TV ads. It is the work of “the meeting” to counter that bombardment, and to remind us of our alternative path/way. The utterance of the word does indeed guide our path/way. Without that word uttered and heard we may, much too readily, stray to the wide, easy path of scarcity that leads to “destruction”! (Matthew 7:13)
