Psalm 23

Psalm 23 is so well known and loved that it is almost impossible to exposit; we will there fore attempt to dramatize it. it is a good exam pole of the dangers of Bible reading, because if you read the Bible enough you won't have to read it at all. The words will leave the page and rattling around your head. This is reason enough to cease such practices in the public schools, for modern children should not internalize beauty or holiness, wisdom or righteousness should them/ This would interfere with the really important things of life. Still, even today, it is a safe bet that as much as half the population more or less knows Psalm 23 by heart. Some have thought that it should be rewritten, that the pastoral metaphor is outdated. 

The LORD is my programmer, cinematographer, librarian? This is the same bunch, or at least relatives, who find that the zeitgeist is the determiner of meaning, that kerygma does not depend on specific details. For them meaning is only general, can be transposed, transferred, translated or transmogrified into any specifics you may have at hand. When the refrigerator of culture provides the jello to today must we not eat it? These chaps go blooming on, they have to make a living too.

Psalm 23 begins with the pastoral motif and ends in a banquet. That the soul is sheepish and needs shepherding is the point. Sheep are not the most capable of creatures, not at least the tame ones kept in herds. Lambs up to and beyond six weeks in age can actually die of fright and do if large animals, like dogs, frighten them badly. So our souls when undeveloped are easily twisted by evil, and example of which you may view in the paintings of Edward Munch. Full grown sheep will run into a pond to escape dogs, but they can't swim, and when their coats absorb the water they go into the yellow submarine. This can happen quickly. Of course what recourse do they have than to run? They can't even do that very well. Sheep have no protective mechanisms at all unless you count their massive numbers which seemingly can sustain individual loses. Their domestication has robbed them of their tails too. We eat them and wear their skins. Who eats us and wears ours is at least in part the subject of this Psalm, but more so, it concerns the sheep-soul analogy in general.

 

The world is a bodily event however so the soul is denied by some; there is not much scientific proof that it exists (and is not science to be our salvation?) Do not repeat this, but the chief proof of the existence of the soul lies in the fact that we are alive before birth! The soul is a fit subject of Zen aphorisms and biblical paradox, but if your true identity is as a lamb darling, how will you live? Yes. "The LORD is my shepherd." How could I want/ He moves the flock when our pasture needs renewing. his angels keep off the beasts. he himself goes to seek out the lost and returns it to the fold. The fields are green with his rain. he stills the waters and the storm and leads me into those paths of life where the reality of my redeemed human nature will eat (walk) the tree of life. That's how he restores my soul. The LORD is a restorationist. I was old furniture, a garden in disrepair, a fallen king, an ancient text but he restored me to myself so that, reconnected, I could offer him a place to sit, to grow, to rule and to enjoy what from antiquity he had made. it is all for his name's sale (see Psalm 20).

When in danger he has put this Psalm into my heart to speak, and I sing it too. it echoes off the dark green of trees that hang with dusk; it rises, a long melody in human voice and hands with the last light, then falls to the pitch of my gas stove, whistling red on blue to warm me on my way. It is a valley I pass through. When you see me next i may be what I am. i can tell you this much: fear no evil. It is God who rules heaven and earth: "thou hast brought me into the dust" (Psalm 22:18). I will fear no evil because it is only God who loves me. What! Do sheep doubt? Hardly. They obey. They follow. Sheep are not proud, neither are the lambs on the hillside.

Where were we? Oh es, in the shadow of All my hopes and fears. My hopes are shadows because they make me anticipate them and take my mind from the shepherd. My fears do the same. But he is with me. his rod and his staff are terrible weapons to my foes, but also tools for guiding me through this darkness. When we come through he has already gotten up a fine feast (not lamb we hope) for souls. It may be solar lamb, Jubilate Agno (Smart). Speaking for Everyman, Lewis complains about the imprecation of feasting while our enemies go hungry. It is not a literal feast, notwithstanding the Ugaritic precursors. We don't have to read it allegorically, we just want to. The enemies of the righteous have already had theirs; they paid for it by robbing the poor, disqualifying them from the wedding feast. Oh foolish virgins! Likewise the oil is not a literal oil, not nard, more precious. Critics and scholars must spend their lives studying the outside, the external text, poets study within. Who has read the soul's palimpsest? No guessing! Oil is...? And the cup? What a shame no one will tell the fisher what is in the cup. And why does the point of the lance bleed? Oddly, no cognitive knowledge of these is required. The critics exults: "I bared the text," meaning that he erased the palimpsest, the second meaning that was the real life. This fellow is learning to be shabby. he angers us. Why mutilate meaning? Not cognitive, not necessarily reasonable is it to resolve conflict into harmonious states. The lion that lies down with the lamb is in good company as Virgil knows, for "the ram himself in sweet meadow will change the color of fleece; he will glow soft purple, then turn to saffron yellow. Oh! New lambs at pasture shall be born scarlet." The lion learns to herbivore and his diet, thus diversified, will eventually prove the loss of his weapons: no teeth (ayin) but peace. In another space and time the lion and the lamb might pasture moons.

 

To get goodness and mercy to follow me around like friends and associates is not so much the result of all this as that they are the result of my doings. i leave them in my wake "all the days of my life." I know where the house of the LORD is, a temple not made with hands, but with breath and with fingers.