Psalm 23
In the Gospel of Matthew, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world spins a yarn about a single lost sheep who wanders off from the flock of ninety-nine. A lost sheep is a dead sheep. The shepherd responds by breaking all the rules of responsible sheep-herding, abandoning the flock to search out the single sheep in danger. “It is not the will of my Father in heaven,” Jesus concludes the parable, “that even one of these little ones should be lost.”
We forget how the parable of the lost sheep is Jesus’ way of responding to the disciples' attempts at elbowing each other out of the way in terms of importance. The parable is how Jesus addresses their anxiety about their value, worth, and eternal security.
The parable is his answer to their question, "Who is the greatest in the house of the Lord?”
Answer: You’re all worth the search party.
The Father wills that not one of you should be lost to him; therefore, nothing can separate you from the love of God (which is everything).
So be not afraid!
In the Gospel of John, Jesus advances a similar claim when he announces to those gathered on Solomon’s Porch at the Temple in Jerusalem that he is the Good Shepherd promised to the prophet Ezekiel. The assertion elicits anger among Christ’s audience, many of whom reach for rocks with which to stone him.
Just before they stoop down to scoop up implements of murder, Jesus says:
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one.”
Notice the parallel to the parable. Jesus says that what the Father has given him (that is, you— the Bride of Christ, the Spouse of the Father’s Only Begotten Son) is greater than everything else. You are worthy of a search party. And, Jesus insists, no one can snatch you out of his hand precisely because he is safe in his Father’s hand.
What is his is his inalterably— no circumstance can undo it.
Nothing is going to break God’s grip on you!
So—
Do not fear.
Only after we have heard these two promises from the Gospels can we rightly pray the pivot in Psalm 23, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”
You can endure the journey to the Father’s House because you are in the LORD’s unsnatchable grip.
Be not afraid!
Exactly ten years ago last month, the Islamic terrorist group ISIS kidnapped twenty-one men who were working construction in Sirte, Libya. Twenty of the abductees were Coptic Christians from poor villages in upper Egypt. The lone unbeliever was a man named Matthew who was from Ghana. A persecuted minority in Egypt and a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Copts are one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. They trace their lineage all the way back to the Good Shepherd’s initial flock. For nearly fourteen centuries, the Coptic Christians have lived under Islamic rule. In the best of times, their faith has made them second class citizens. In the worst of times, aggressive persecution has been visited upon them.
It is a felony for them to gospel their neighbors.
In February 2015, ISIS released a video recorded in Libya, on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. In February 2015, I was laid up in the hospital, my belly having recently been opened up to remove a tumor the size of all the Chronicles of Narnia. I was in the middle of my first round of chemotherapy, and I was channel-surfing on the television when I saw the image flash across the screen. Originally, it had been uploaded to YouTube with the title, “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” The caption at the bottom of the video read, “The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church.”
In the video, after leading the captives along the beach, a hostage-taker attempts to compel the twenty-one men, all in orange jumpsuits, to recant their faith in Christ Jesus. Kneeling in the sand, the sea lapping at their knees, remarkably every single one of them refuse. They would not be snatched out of the LORD’s hand.
Rather than renounce their LORD, they called upon the power of his NAME.
They prayed.
Ya Rab Yasua: O LORD Jesus.
They were not afraid.
One of them, named Girgis, his lips moving patiently, prayed from the Bible’s prayerbook, “The LORD is my Shepherd…thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me…he makes a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”
Since they could not be snatched from the LORD’s hand, the masked men, dressed all in black, took their places behind the twenty-one and, one-by-one, took their heads.
“Oh my God!” my nurse on the cancer ward said when she stepped into the room and spied me watching the gruesome video on CNN. Knowing I normally wear robe instead of a gown, she pointed at the the television screen and asked the obvious question, “Where is God?!”
Just after the LORD anoints his head with oil, David finds himself in the Valley of Elah where the Philistine warrior named Goliath has been challenging the Israelite army for forty days. Still much too young for battle, how does the anointed boy end up across a bloodied field from Goliath, whose screams demand “Give me a man to fight!”
David ends up there because his father Jesse had sent his youngest son to the front lines— pay attention— to feed his brothers.
Jesse said to David:
“Take this ephah of roasted grain and these ten loaves of bread for your brothers and hurry to their camp. Take along these ten cheeses to the commander of their unit. See how your brothers fare and bring back some assurance from them.”
David prepares a table for them in the presence of their enemies.
Or rather, since it’s the LORD’s anointing that inserts David into salvation history, the LORD is the one who prepares the table in the presence of their enemies.
Despite our propensity to hear them as comforting, the images which follow after the table are no less unsettling, “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”
David’s story opens with the LORD anointing his head with oil. And immediately, David suffers persecution. As though, David is anointed in order to suffer. Immediately, the evil spirt that possesses Saul attacks David. Immediately, his brothers ridicule him. “You’re the King of the Jews!?” Immediately, he must battle against the dark powers of the world.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments on the Book of Samuel:
“The anointed David cannot escape being hated and persecuted because of his anointing. The period after his anointing is one of ongoing hostility toward him from every quarter. He is disdained and hated by the world because of the anointing. He does not even have a place to lay his head.”
And though David is a man after God’s own heart, David nonetheless must drink the cup of wrath the LORD sets before him.
Even the LORD’s anointed one must pay the wages of sin. At the end of his life David’s sins are repeated in his sons, and they are the undoing of his house. His cup overflows. But David accepts this punishment and, as curses and weeping are heaped upon him from the scornful crowd in Jerusalem, he bears the curse to outside the city gates.
Sound familiar?
David risks forsakenness. David risks sin and death having the last word on him because yet does he trust the promise of his anointing, Nothing can snatch you out of my hand!
Facing judgment, David does not fear.
Lecturing on the twenty-third psalm, Martin Luther registered dis-ease with the transition from Shepherd to Host. “I would have thought,” Luther expounded, “that the LORD should have prepared before him a strong wall or a mighty bulwark, deep ditches or armor, whereby he might be sure before his enemies and discomfort them. But instead God prepares a table.”
The table is how David ends up in a duel-to-the-death with Israel’s enemy. But David trusts the promise given in his anointing. “The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear,” David declares, “will save me from the hand of this Philistine.”
“Nothing can snatch you out of my hand!”
And because David trusts that promise, he lets his life play out. He goes into battle without any weapons, defenseless, armed only with his faith in God’s unflagging grip on him.
During the Rwandan genocide in the spring of 1994, a woman named Cancilde lost her husband and five of her seven children. A Hutu militia member butchered them with a machete. The murderer was their neighbor, a young man named Emmanuel. A year after the One Hundred Days of Carnage, authorities arrested Emmanuel and sentenced him to prison. After his release in 2003, Emmanuel sought out Cancilde. Ashamed of his crimes and dreading the cup of righteous wrath he would have to drink, Emmanuel begged the mother and wife to have mercy on him and forgive him for his terrible trespass.
Unbeknownst to Emmanuel, Cancilde attended a weekly Bible study with other women who had been made widows by the genocide. It was through the scriptures that Cancilde learned that when God baptizes a creature he makes a promise to it, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.” Just so, when she was confronted by her family’s killer, Cancilde summoned the courage to ignore the advice of her neighbors and friends. Instead she trusted God’s grip on her and took a chance. She did not fear.
“Yes, I forgive you.”
The absolution was not the end. Twelve years later another survivor, Denise Uwimana, visited the region to conduct research for a book about the genocide and its aftermath. She met Cancilde and Emmanuel who told her that, astonishingly, Cancilde’s pardon of Emmanuel had been but the beginning of a deep, familial friendship.
Uwimana recounts their conversation:
“Cancilde has become like a mother to me. When I need advice, I go to her. Before I got married, I talked over the details with her. She is the local official who authorized my marriage. Cancilde broke in, “Emmanuel is the one I ask for help when my house needs repair. He comes any time I ask, to replace a window or mend the roof. If my cow has problems, I call him. He is my son! Therefore, he knows he’s always welcome to share a meal at my table in my home with me. We pray together at this table; whenever we do, the LORD is with us.”
“Oh my God!” my nurse on the cancer ward said as she walked into my room ten years ago. And then she pointed at the television hanging above the dry-erase board that showed the names of my caregivers for the day.
“Where is God?” she asked in a tone that suggested God is like Superman, swooping in just in time to avert disaster.
“Where is he?” she repeated.
“In this place,” I said, “that can’t possibly be the first time that question has been raised.”
But she didn’t respond. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen. Like she was concentrating on taking my blood pressure, she stared at the scene of the crime. I was about to mumble some religious bromides when, in the video, one of the twenty-one seemingly answered the nurse’s question for her.
“Do you reject Christ?” one of the ISIS executioners demanded.
And in the moment before he was beheaded, Matthew Ayairga, the only one not from Egypt, answered strangely on his knees, “This God is my God.”
This God is my God.
Unlike the other twenty, Matthew Ayairga was not raised as a Christian. Until those moments on the beach, kneeling in the sand alongside “the people of the cross,” Matthew had been an unbeliever. But witnessing their faith and their lack of fear— hearing them pray in the power of the NAME of Jesus— he received faith just before he lost his life.
Notice—
To the executioner’s question, he did not answer, “Jesus is Lord.”
He did not say, “Christ is my Savior.”
He did not reply, “The Father and the Son are one with the Spirit.”
He didn’t even offer a simple no, “No, I do not reject Christ.”
He did not make a declaration; he made an identification.
He named a location.
“This God is my God.”
As though, the LORD Jesus was right there, kneeling with them in the sand and praying the twenty-third psalm right along with them.
This God— this God here— is my God.
When the prophet Samuel anoints David in Bethlehem, the Spirit of the LORD rushes upon David. The Holy Spirit is the power of God’s future. The one who lives in the Last Future is the crucified and risen Jesus. Just as the Father is the Father of Jesus, the Spirit is the Spirit of the LORD, Jesus.
As the church father Irenaeus of Lyon writes:
“The Holy Spirit is Christ’s Spirit so that Christ may give himself again.”
That is, it is Jesus who rushes upon David as his head is covered in oil. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it, from that day forward David has the crucified and risen Jesus “in his loins.” The reason so much of David’s story sounds like the Gospel story is because Christ is in him; consequently, the New Testament reads the words of the psalms of David as the words of the prayers of Jesus.
He is the me in this prayer.
The one who prays “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies” is the one who sat down in an upper room at a Passover meal and handed a piece of bread to Judas and Peter, saying, “Take and eat. This is my body given for you.”
The one who prays “You anoint my head with oil” is the one upon whom Mary of Bethany lavishes expensive ointment on the precipice of his passion. When the disciples gripe about the expense, Jesus replies, “She anointed me to prepare me for my burial.”
The one who prays “My cup overflows” is the one who, stricken with dread in the Garden of Gethsemane, prays “If it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.”
Christ is the supplicant in the Psalter.
Indeed if Jesus alone permits us to address his Father as our Father, then Jesus is the primary supplicant in every prayer.
He alone makes prayer possible; such that, he is the primary speaker in all our prayers. This God is God. This is nothing other than the straightforward teaching of the scriptures, “We do not know how to pray, but the Spirit [of Jesus] intercedes with us with sighs too deep for words.”
As Bonhoeffer puts it in a 1935 lecture entitled “Christ in the Psalms:”
“The essential difference between Christian prayer and all other prayer is that Christian prayer is mediated prayer, mediated by Christ. It is not simply a religious given that we can come to God in prayer but rather it is made possible alone through Christ. No prayer can find the way to God that our intercessor Jesus Christ does not himself pick up in his hands and pray for us.
Our prayer is thus bound prayer, bound to Jesus Christ.”
In other words, what David prays in a different prayer is true of all prayer:
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your right hand will clutch me fast.”
Whether you pray from a place of sorrow or dread, whether you pray from a place of hopelessness or unbelief even, whether you pray from a place of anger or shame or doomscrolling exhaustion, there is no place from which you can pray that the LORD Jesus is not already with you.
Even if words fail you, the Word is nevertheless there, with you.
All prayer is bound prayer.
The terrorist’s YouTube video cut back to CNN.
My nurse wiped tears from her eyes and turned her gaze to the floor.
She said, “I don’t know how they could pray in a situation like that.”
I replied, “What if they weren’t the ones praying?”
We speak of praying to God. But if God is Trinity and if one of the triune identities is Jesus, then we use the wrong preposition.
We pray with God.
Just so, “to pray is to enter into a community we cannot control.”
Samir is the father of Girgis, one of the twenty-one Coptic Christian martyrs. He lives in a poor, remote part of Egypt. With contemporary icons, Samir has erected a chapel in his son’s memory.
On the ten year anniversary of his son’s martyrdom, Samir told a reporter:
“Girgis is with Jesus. I know because Jesus is with me whenever I pray; and so, my son is also with me whenever I pray. A year after he died, my son told me— a year after he died, my son told me— to forgive the militants who killed him. It was a difficult thing to ask, but you are never in charge when you pray.”
Because prayer is a way opened only by Jesus, we should not be surprised it is a way that leads us through suffering, leaving behind the tranquil waters, taking us through the valley of death’s shadow, guiding us into the midst of enemies, acquainting us with the cost of both our anointings and our sins.
We should not be surprised that prayer is a way that leads us through suffering, for Jesus wants to give us not a good life— and certainly not what we’ve been told is a good life— but a share in God’s life. And he is the only one who can gift it. As Jesus himself says, there is only one way to the Father’s House. And it is cruciform. Goodness and mercy may be chasing you, but the cross always lies ahead.
But, that Jesus at last gives up the Spirit upon the cross means he did not journey that path alone. And neither do you. All prayer is bound prayer. The very act of prayer refutes any suspicion you might harbor that you are alone. The simplest, most desperate and doubting prayer proves Christ is with you.
As Chris Green writes, “No doubt you’ve been told that the world does not revolve around you. And that’s true. But Jesus does.”
He revolves around you. Like Jonah in the whale, so long as you pray you are inside his unsnatchable hand.
Therefore, be not afraid!
Be not afraid!
And come.
Goodness and mercy are in front of you not behind you.
Once again, the LORD Jesus has prepared a table for his unreliable followers. And as the host of this table, the Good Shepherd is not only the supplicant in all our prayers, he is also an object in our hands; so that, just as you are inside his unsnatchable grip, he can be inside of you.
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