Lectionary Reflection for Easter Sunday A on Psalm 118:1–2, 14–24

THE CANDLE IN THE WINDOW

As a child, I was told that, long ago, wives would light a candle and leave it in a window to guide their seafaring husbands home. I loved imagining myself having long been away, walking home tired and cold, and then seeing this small, welcoming light in the darkness. It filled me with a sense of comfort and safety in a world that even then seemed so unpredictable and frightening. It turns out, though, that I had the story wrong, and that placing a lit candle in a window is an Irish Christmas tradition of welcoming and providing shelter for Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus on their travels. This tradition has expanded into a simple practice of hospitality to all. The candle is “a message to travellers that food, fire, and friendship could be found within”.^¹

Whatever the origins of this story may be, the idea of a tiny light welcoming us into a place of safety and shelter can be a profound symbol of hope, courage, and kindness in times of struggle and insecurity. When those who are obsessed with power, prestige, and personal prosperity at the expense of ordinary people seek to silence, confuse, disarm, and control us, we need a candle in the window, a stable GPS coordinate to ground us and give us a sense of shelter from the storm. When we are overwhelmed by the grief and loneliness that inevitably visit us all, we need a candle in the window to comfort us and give us a place of refuge, even if only in our hearts. And for many people of faith, that candle has come in the form of the Psalms. As Walter Brueggemann writes:

The Psalms, with a few exceptions, are not the voice of God addressing us. They are rather the voice of our own common humanity—gathered over a long period of time, but a voice that continues to have amazing authenticity and con­temporaneity. It speaks about life the way it really is, for in those deeply human dimensions the same issues and pos­sibilities persist. And so when we turn to the Psalms it means we enter into the midst of that voice of humanity and decide to take our stand with that voice. We are prepared to speak among them and with them and for them, to express our solidarity in this anguished, joyous human pilgrimage.²

The Psalms have given voice to human joys and griefs for millennia. They have inspired prayer and hope and celebration. And they have helped innumerable people through the ages to find a firm foundation when their world, or the world, has shifted beneath their feet. As Brueggemann notes, when our prayers connect the Psalms with “the extremity of our experience”, we learn to be more aware of realities and possibilities that remained hidden, and we are empowered to give voice both to our pain and hope in bold new ways.³

For Christian worshippers, the Psalms are both a reflection of our human condition and an ancient window through which the mission and message of Jesus can be experienced and understood more deeply. We cannot truly understand the most significant events in Jesus’ life without reference to the Psalms. And so, as we enter the Easter Season once again, there is great value in turning to the ancient songbook of Israel as a window through which the welcoming and enlivening candle of the resurrection can be seen, even in the darkest nights of our souls and our world.

A SONG OF LIFE

Psalm 118:1–2, 14–24 is included among the readings for Easter Sunday in all three years of the Revised Common Lectionary. It is the final Psalm in the collection known as the “Egyptian Hallel” (Psalms 113-118). The name derives from the emphasis in all of these Psalms on praise with specific reference to Israel’s liberation from Egypt (Hallel is the Hebrew word for praise).⁴

Psalm 118 expresses the thanksgiving of someone who has been saved from defeat and death by God, and who invites all people to join them in thanksgiving and praise for God’s faithful love (CEB). The problem is that scholars are divided in their opinions on who the speaker in the Psalm is, what deliverance the Psalm is referring to, and the setting in which the thanksgiving was expressed.⁵ So while the language used has echoes of the Exodus, which is a familiar symbol of God’s deliverance throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, we cannot know the background to this song with any certainty. The advantage of this, though, is that it can speak freely to people and circumstances in every age,⁶ and the scenario of God rescuing one who is surrounded on every side (118:11) resonates with a common human experience that we all know only too well.

As they sought to understand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the first Christians often found helpful images and insights in the Psalms, and they connected metaphors from these songs that they knew so well with what they had witnessed and experienced in Jesus. As Jerome Creach writes, “All four Gospels report that the crowd at Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem recited Psalm 118:25–26 (Matthew 21:1–11; Mark 11:1–11; Luke 19:28–40; John 12:12–19)”.⁷ Jesus was also viewed as “the stone rejected by the builders” who had now “become the foundation stone” (118:22 CEB), and his resurrection was “the day the Lord acted” (118:24 CEB) or “the day that the Lord has made” (NRSV).⁸

But the key to the message of the Psalm and how it helps us interpret Jesus’ life is right at the beginning, where four times the psalmist declares that God’s faithful love lasts forever. The word used here in the Hebrew is hesed, which can be defined as “a free-flowing love that knows no bounds”.⁹ Or, as Michael Card puts it, “The best translation I have found for this untranslatable word takes an entire sentence: ‘When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything’”.¹⁰

It is God’s hesed that makes Psalm 118 a song of life for all of us who know what it is to feel threatened, surrounded, and attacked. It was God’s hesed that was the defining quality of Jesus’ life and teaching. And it is God’s hesed, and the resurrection that is the ultimate expression of it, that can be the candle in the window which sustains us, strengthens us, and brings us to life as we navigate the turbulence of our human condition, the complexities of our human relationships, and the chaos and horror of this current era of human history.

THE STABLE COORDINATE

We can easily lose ourselves in debates about the state of the world, but whether we feel things are ultimately getting better or are worse than ever, living in a world of trouble is nothing new. The reason why the Psalms have been found meaningful by so many people over the centuries is that they address every aspect of our human experience. But even as they give words to our grief, anger, doubt, and shame, they also whisper of comfort, calm, assurance, and restoration. As Walter Brueggemann describes it, referring to his famous framework for classifying the Psalms:

I suggest, in a simple schematic fashion, that our life of faith consists in moving with God in terms of:
(a) being securely oriented;
(b) being painfully dis­oriented; and
(c) being surprisingly reoriented.¹¹

With this Psalmic awareness of life’s seasons and challenges, we can learn to recognise and embrace the signs of God’s hesed even in our most difficult moments. For followers of the way of Jesus, the resurrection can become a metaphor, a symbol, and an experience that defines God’s hesed and enables us to keep it as a stable coordinate, a kind of fixed point, by which to direct our lives in an unstable and constantly-changing world. It’s not just that we believe in Jesus’ resurrection as a past miraculous event. It’s that we recognise in the biblical resurrection narratives (including Paul’s experience mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:4-8) a reality in which we are invited to participate.