Lectionary Reflection for Easter 6A on Psalm 66:8–20
THE TWO-FACED, HIDE-AND-SEEK GOD
“The problem is that God is unreliable.”
As a young minister-in-training, I was shocked to hear my colleague and supervisor say these words so bluntly, but they struck a chord in me. They echoed the simple admission spoken by the British Christian writer and comedian, Adrian Plass, in a live presentation I attended in the 1990s: “We know two things about healing: God heals, and God doesn’t heal”.
It is not uncommon to hear people claim that there are two Gods in the Bible. One—often called the “Old Testament God”, but I’ll say the God of Death or Necrophilia—is angry, wrathful, judgmental, violent, and unforgiving. The other—the “New Testament God”, the God of Life or Biophilia1 —is gentle, kind, forgiving, accepting, and peaceful. Of course, this binary between the First and Second Testaments is a caricature of how God is portrayed in the Scriptures, but it does contain a seed of truth. If we read no deeper than the surface of the biblical texts, God does seem to have two faces.
Since we are now in the Easter season, let’s use the resurrection narratives as an example. No two Gospels agree on the events that happened, and the post-resurrection Jesus seems to be playing hide-and-seek the whole time. The tombstone gets rolled away, but Jesus is nowhere to be found (24:1–9). In Matthew’s Gospel, the women suddenly encounter Jesus on their way to tell the men about the empty tomb (28:1–10). But in John, Jesus is so unrecognisable that Mary, who stayed at the tomb and was one of his closest friends, thinks he is the gardener. In Luke, two men walk down the road and find themselves suddenly accompanied by a stranger who later turns out to be Jesus. But the moment they recognise him, he disappears. He also seems to have the unsettling ability to walk in and out of locked doors at will. And the Hebrew Scriptures are not the only place where God’s wrath is seen. In Acts 5:1–11, a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, are struck dead for lying to the apostles about withholding some of the money from a property they sold. If we don’t find the Bible disturbing, we’re not paying attention.
All of this demonstrates that working out what God is like is not as easy as we might believe. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to do this work. Richard Rohr is right when he says, “You become the God you worship“,2 which means that choosing our God matters—and it is a choice. But here’s something that no one ever talks about: whichever God you choose, you have to reject or reinterpret parts of the Bible to make it fit. Even the Bible itself was written by human beings working out their understandings and experiences of God. As Richard Rohr rightly notes:
Life itself is always three steps forward and two steps backward. We get the point and then we lose or doubt it. In that, the biblical text mirrors our own human consciousness and journey. Our job is to see where the three steps forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, simplicity, inclusion, nonviolence, and trust) and to spot the two steps backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, exclusion, a rather petty and insecure god, law over grace, incidentals over substance, and technique over actual relationship).3
So to do this work of discernment and choosing as we read the scriptures, and to be careful about the God we worship, is not to deny God, or backslide, or fail to take the Bible seriously. On the contrary, it is spirituality at its most responsible, especially in the world in which we’re now living, where our views of God literally decide whether people live or die.
This means that reading the Bible requires us to go deeper than the surface of the text. We need to engage with the tension between ancient wisdom and contemporary knowledge about the Cosmos. And we need to avoid the temptation to read things literally and transfer old understandings of God into our times without discernment or critical thinking. The Lectionary Psalm (66:8-20) for Easter 6A is particularly good for practising this approach, because it is a little like the Bible in miniature.
THE GOD OF PSALM 66
Rolf A. Jacobson describes Psalm 66 as “a poem that morphs through three types of praise—a hymn of praise (vv. 1–7), a communal song of thanksgiving (vv. 8–12), and an individual song of thanksgiving (vv. 13–20)—introducing the history of God’s actions on behalf of Israel and inviting all to join themselves to this story”.4 After beginning, in the section that the Lectionary skips over (66:1–7), with praise for God’s deliverance of Israel, the writer offers some details about God’s saving work and the response of God’s people. But what interests me is that it contains images that fit with both the God of Death and the God of Life, and so, in a small way, it can be interpreted as including Rohr’s “three steps forward, two steps backward” principle.
In verses 10–12, God could seem to be the callous tyrant who tests the people. In verses 13–15, God could seem to be the greedy narcissist who demands promises before acting, and requires sacrifices in ‘payment’ of God’s salvation. And in verse 18, God can seem to be the controlling judge who refuses to answer prayer unless the petitioner is sinless and pure. For those who choose to define God in this way, there is certainly evidence here to support that position.
But we can also find images of the God of Life in this Psalm. In verses 8–9, God is the compassionate rescuer. In verses 16–17, God is the generous restorer. And in verses 19–20, God is the faithful lover. There is much here to support a kinder, more humane understanding of God. As Joel LeMon puts it:
But how does the psalm understand God’s activity? The psalmist gives a very complicated portrayal of God’s relationship to the community. God is the source of salvation to be sure (verses 8-9). Yet the community also attributes its hardships to God’s action, God’s inaction, and the community’s own actions.5
These seeming contradictions highlight the choices we have to make as we read—and it doesn’t take much to realise that the God of Death is not the preferable selection, especially in the light of Jesus’ message and mission. We have to recognise that the psalmist, and the community they represented, lived with a worldview in which there was no contradiction between the Gods of Death and Life. The gods of the ancient world were inherently fickle, and divine wrath, demands for sacrifices, vows, and purity were common. And so for this writer to speak of God testing, refining, and capturing God’s people in nets would not have been unusual or shocking. But as we read now, we have to keep in mind the Christ who said, “When you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:10), who preached the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12), and who declared that he was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
(Luke 4:18-19)
Ultimately, we cannot know for sure what the psalmist and their community actually believed about God, but it is unlikely that they would have thought of God as a God of Death—even if we assume that their wrathful, judgmental language was meant literally. So we are free to engage with their song openly and with Christ as the lens through which we interpret the writer’s words. And when we approach the psalms in this way, what we find is not a two-faced, hide-and-seek God, but a God who is whole and is present in all of creation.
THE GOD OF LIFE
Reading Psalm 66 with the expectation that it will reveal God’s wholeness, presence, and compassion gives us a very different picture from the one presented by those who benefit from a wrathful, divisive, exclusive God. To begin with, we can recognise that, while the psalmist may have seen God as actively testing God’s people, that is not what God is like. When we view God not as a being among beings, but as Being itself, we can recognise that God’s agency does not operate in this way. Rather, God is the impulse of Life that creates, transforms, and unifies the universe.
While it is not God who tests us, that doesn’t mean that we don’t face ‘tests’ or ‘trials’. In a still-evolving world where both life and death are necessary parts of the process, pain, suffering, and times of struggle (or ‘testing’) are just part of the package. Our hardships are not signs of God’s judgment. They are not the result of God’s design, God’s neglect, or God’s attempts to teach us. They are just a natural and essential part of how life grows and develops. But this is the point: we are living beings who are also constantly evolving, and who get to choose how we will evolve. Evolution always involves, at the very least, the pain of letting go of the life and world we had and entering into the new life and world that are emerging. So whether we believe in God or not, whether we choose spirituality or not, whether we seek to evolve into our best lives and best selves or not, we will experience pain. It is how we respond to that pain that matters. And this is the meaning of testing. To quote Richard Rohr again:
Two universal paths of transformation have been available to every human being God has created: great love and great suffering…Only love and suffering are strong enough to break down our usual ego defenses, crush our dualistic thinking, and open us to Mystery. In my experience, they like nothing else exert the mysterious chemistry that can transmute us from a fear-based life into a love-based life.6
If we decide that pain has nothing to teach us, and we seek to avoid it or just get past it, then our suffering will make us bitter, angry, and sorry for ourselves. We will be unlikely to find God there, because we will usually believe that God has abandoned us. But if we decide we want to evolve toward Life, toward beauty, truth, and goodness, then we will engage our pain as a teacher, as a creative process that takes us into “the spacious place” (66:12b). And when we embrace this process, we discover that God (Being) is there, sustaining us, loving us, filling us with life, and leading us—through circumstances, friends and loved ones, intuition, and memory—to a richer, deeper, and more sustainable life.
The word for “spacious place” in the Hebrew has the same meaning as “my cup overflows” in Psalm 23:5, and it refers to a place of abundance after, or sometimes even in the midst of, our troubles.7 The writer of Psalm 66, then, is describing a personal and collective time of deep suffering through which the people learned to trust in the presence of God in the midst of their pain, and in the ultimate victory of beauty, truth, goodness, and love. At the heart of this journey through pain to the “spacious place” is God’s concern for justice. In the words of Jerome Creach, “Indeed, God shows his concern about justice and equality by rescuing Israel from bondage but also by punishing Israel for unfaithfulness”.8 To put this another way, the psalmist reveals how they and their community connected with God’s grace and love in their time of trial, and chose to learn from their pain how to become more loving, serving, and whole people.
Part of the psalmist’s response to the presence and activity of this God of Life is to bring thanksgiving offerings to God in fulfilment of the vows they made in their time of difficulty. Making and keeping vows in this way is not about buying God’s favour or bargaining with God to make God intervene.9 It is relational. It is about trusting in God’s integrity and faithfulness—in the benevolent Cosmos and the ultimate power of Love to overcome the love of power. And it is about practising, ritualising, that same integrity in our own lives so that we build habits of trust and trustworthiness, of connecting and respecting the other, and of living truly, beautifully, and well.
The point is that God acts in the midst of human struggle and pain.10 God is, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, “present and powerful always at the edge, at the extremes, at the crisis points where life is genuinely at risk”.11 When we actively engage and cooperate with the divine impulse of Life that we call God, we are transformed into people of wholeness, goodness, and freedom—we “become the God we worship”. And then we become agents through whom God brings wholeness, compassion, goodness, liberation, and love to others.
CHOOSING THE GOD OF LIFE
It’s all very well to talk of connecting with God in our suffering, being transformed by pain, and of becoming agents of God’s wholeness and love in a broken and hate-filled world. But how do we connect with God and find the sustaining grace to transcend our hardships as the psalmist did? This, I believe, is one of the profound purposes of sacred practices. When, in times of comfort and peace, we engage in life-giving sacred practices, the habits that keep us connected with God, ourselves, others, and the world become second nature. Then, when suffering comes, our automatic reaction will be to find the creativity and growth, and to be enlarged rather than diminished by our pain. As Jerome Creach rightly says, “...ritual can remind us of how we ought to live when we don’t feel like living”.12
Psalm 66 offers three simple but effective practices that can sustain us and help us to evolve consciously and positively in our times of pain. Firstly, we can nurture sacred memories. Like the writer of Psalm 66, we can actively remind ourselves of times in the past when we have been in tough places and come through them. We can read stories of others who have come out of great hardship with their humanity intact. And we can remember that we’ve been here before and have overcome, and we will again.13 Secondly, we can practice stubborn praise (66:17). In the midst of our most painful times, we can actively seek out things to celebrate, honour, and give thanks for, as a way to constantly seek out and embrace what is beautiful, true, and good.14 This is not about stroking God’s ego. It is about refusing to have our perspectives and experiences defined by those who peddle ugliness, falsehood, and evil. And finally, we can commit to sustaining our integrity (66:13–15), which is simply about being true to our values and keeping our word to ourselves, others, God, and the world.15 This is what it means to not “cherish evil” (66:18) in our hearts. And again, this isn’t about being good so God will hear us. It is about choosing not to be defined by our worst.
There are many in our world today who read psalms like Psalm 66 and take them as definitive descriptions of God as wrathful, judgmental, focused on pious purity, and constantly putting humans to the test. In the name of this God, and believing they are doing God’s bidding, these Christians have rejected, insulted, harmed, and even killed God-beloved people who look, think, dress, speak, believe, and love differently than they do. But the scriptures, when read in the light of the revelation of God in Christ, cannot be used to justify this kind of hateful faith. On the contrary, the psalmists constantly call us to justice and love in the name of the God of Life. And now, perhaps more than ever, it is crucial for us to choose the God we worship and follow. The future of our world and our species depends on it.
Matthew Fox often refers to evil as the love of death or necrophilia and goodness as the love of life or biophilia. See Prayer: A Radical Response to Life. (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), xv.
Richard Rohr, “Baking the Cake from the Bottom Up,” The Center for Action and Contemplation: Daily Meditations, January 2, 2017; https://cac.org/daily-meditations/baking-the-cake-from-the-bottom-up-2017-01-02/.
Richard Rohr, “Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward,” The Center for Action and Contemplation: Daily Meditations, February 22, 2016; https://cac.org/daily-meditations/three-steps-forward-two-steps-backward-2016-02-22/.
Rolf A. Jacobson, “Psalms,” The New Interpreter’s Bible One-Volume Commentary, eds. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and David L. Peterson, (Abingdon Press, 2010), Kindle, 859.
Joel LeMon, “Commentary on Psalm 66:8-20,” Working Preacher, May 14, 2023; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-psalm-668-20-5.
Richard Rohr, “Love and Suffering,” The Center for Action and Contemplation: Daily Meditations, August 14, 2022; https://cac.org/daily-meditations/love-and-suffering-2022-08-14/.
Nancy deClaissé-Walford, “Commentary on Psalm 66:8-20,” Working Preacher, May 10, 2026; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-psalm-668-20-6.
Jerome Creach, “Commentary on Psalm 66:8-20,” Working Preacher, May 25, 2014; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-psalm-668-20-4. Once again, we need to be careful to adopt, uncritically, the language of God punishing Israel, and consider that what the biblical writers call punishment is probably closer to what we would call consequence. But that is a topic for a future article.
Creach, “Commentary on Psalm 66:8-20.”
Beth LaNeel Tanner, “Psalm 66,” Psalms for Preaching and Worship: A Lectionary Commentary, eds. Roger E. Van Harn and Brent A. Strawn, (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009) Kindle, 183.
Walter Brueggemann. The Psalms and the Life of Faith (Fortress Press, 1995). Kindle, Location 559.
Creach, “Commentary on Psalm 66:8-20.”
Bishop Marianne Budde and Gary Alan Taylor speak insightfully about this practice in “Bishop Trumps President with Rev. Marianne Edgar Budde,” Holy Heretics
Tanner, “Psalm 66,” Psalms for Preaching and Worship, 185.
deClaissé-Walford, “Commentary on Psalm 66:8-20.”