Psalm 23
Just south of Hadrian’s Wall in England’s Lake District, James Rebanks herds sheep on a hardscrabble farm his family has worked for over six hundred years. As a youth Rebanks hated formal schooling, eventually dropping out at age sixteen to work the family farm. Improbably, he ended up doing a degree at Oxford University in history. Today he works part-time as a consultant in order to subsidize his vocation as a shepherd.
Rebanks says that he comes from people who are “built out of stories” embedded as they are in the everyday necessities of life. In his memoir The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks describes the passage of the seasons and the physical realities of farming: herding, shearing, feeding, castrating, deworming, doctoring, mending, mucking, chopping. The book is a love letter to the land, to his forebears, and to a way of life as old as the scriptures.
In the closing paragraphs of The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks reports on a single moment in his life as a good shepherd. In late spring, Rebanks returns his flock— sheep bred to survive on their own in the rocky terrain— to the craggy hills of the Lake District. Once he has herded his sheep to the fells where they will graze for the summer, Rebanks attempts to convey to his flock the safety and satisfaction of their new environs. In the hopes that the sheep will imitate their shepherd, Rebanks lies down in the grass on his stomach. With his hand he cups a sip of sweet water from a narrow stream. He rolls on his back and takes in the sky and breathes in the cool craggy air. His well-trained sheep dogs, Floss and Tan, who have never seen the shepherd so relaxed, come and lay next to him. “Tan nuzzles into my side,” Rebanks writes, “because he has never seen me lazing about.”
Rebanks then sets the closing lines of his book in verse, like a psalm:
“He has never seen me stop like this.
He has never seen summer before.
I breathe in the cool mountain air.
And watch a plane chalking a trail across the blue of the sky.
The ewes call to the lambs, following them as they climb up the crags.
This is my life.
I want for no other.”
While the scriptures do not supply the motivating occasion for each of the prayers of King David, the Bible does report the event with which David begins his practice of composing psalms. After the LORD abandoned King Saul, the LORD called the prophet Samuel to anoint David as his successor in secret. Having been abandoned by God, an evil spirit takes possession of Saul who yet remains on the throne. Desperate, King Saul dispatches his servants to procure him someone with the power to exorcize the foul spirit which plagues him. A servant replies to the king’s request, “Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite…a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, a man of good presence, and the LORD is with him.” “Therefore,” scripture reports, “Saul sent messengers to Jesse, and said, “Send me David your son, who is with the sheep.”
And so David arrives in Gibeah from Bethlehem in order to pray.
In the power of the Holy Spirit, which had come upon him at his anointing by Samuel, David prays over Saul, exorcizing the evil spirit from him. Thenceforth David serves the king until he succeeds him.
We do not know when David first prayed, “The LORD is my shepherd.” We do not know what in his life led David to so pray. But we do know the practice of such prayers is the reason the king summons the shepherd from his flock and thereupon bequeaths to David a life he had not previously imagined.
Or rather, the psalms are the mechanism by which God brings his promise to David to fruition.
David’s prayers are the outworking of the LORD’s providence.
The psalms are a part of God’s providence.
Though we cannot plot the twenty-third psalm onto a timeline of David’s life, we can surmise with some certainty that the shepherd from Bethlehem never seconded the shepherd from Britain’s Lake District, “This is my life. I want no other.”
On the contrary, David’s passions define him.
His appetites possess him.
In the valley of Elah, David is not content to fell the Philistine warrior Goliath with a sling and a smooth stone. Having struck the decisive blow, David’s desire for glory overwhelms him and he runs over to the giant’s body, unsheathes Goliath’s sword, cuts off his head, and finally parades the head into Jerusalem.
Quite unlike James Rebanks, David is determined by his desires.
David’s desire for King Saul’s daughter Michal is such that he went out and killed two hundred Philistines and delivered the foreskins of the dead to her father as a bride-price.
David wants.
After a while, his passion for Michal wanes and David dispatches his servants to fetch Abigail for him. Abigail is the newly widowed wife of a rich man named Naval. “David has sent us to you,” the king’s servants announce to Abigail, “to take you to him as his wife.”
David craves.
You know how his story unfolds. One spring David stays behind in Jerusalem as all his troops and servants depart for battle. One afternoon he rises from his couch and prowls the rooftop of the king’s house from which he spies a beautiful woman bathing, the wife of Uriah. This time David doesn’t send servants to fetch the woman. He takes her. And when she later informs David that she is pregnant, David orchestrates the murder of Uriah.
David desires.
In fact, David’s passions define him. His appetites undo both him and his family. The child produced by his rape of Bathsheba dies seven days after its birth. We do not know the context to the twenty-third psalm. We only know that David does not regard his life with the contentment which the other shepherd esteems his own, “This is my life. I want more.”
Just so—
For King David to pray, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want, “ that is, for David to anticipate the end of his appetites and the healing of his passions is nothing less than to appeal to the LORD as one who is able to accomplish ultimate and indeed impossible-seeming acts.
In an interview with the NY Times, James Rebanks explains how, despite the great varieties of breeds and the variations within them, a shepherd is able to discern and identify the unique qualities of each and every individual sheep. “Everyone is conditioned to think of sheep as commodities,” Rebanks explains, “but here they’re also cultural objects. To an amateur eye they all look the same, just as fifty Picassos might look to a novice eye. To us shepherds, however, they are objects of beauty.” Proving his point, the reporter notes how Rebanks the following morning at six o’clock, at the height of lambing season, could recognize not only each sheep in his flock but also which newborn lamb belonged to which mother.
If that shepherd knows so precisely each sheep in his flock, just try to reckon with the LORD’s absolute knowledge of you.
Therein lies the paradoxical absurdity of prayer.
The first verse of David’s prayer is only four words in Hebrew, yet it hides a puzzle. Having acknowledged that the LORD is the Shepherd of all things, whose knowledge encompasses all things and whose will superintends all things, David nevertheless petitions God to remedy his gravest lack. Such a petition is astonishingly unnecessary.
Given God’s providence, to petition God in any instance is essentially superfluous.
As Thomas Aquinas summarizes the dogma:
“God’s universal knowledge and universal will are in such sort one that God’s foreseeing determines what is seen. He is the cause of all things per suum intellectum, and in this context that holds precisely with respect of their ordering to their good. The LORD’s prevision and provision, moreover, extend to every item and single event of creation.”
This problematizes the practice of prayer.
For example—
Suppose I pray for the recovery of a friend.
If the LORD foresees from all eternity that my friend will or will not recover, and if that foreseeing determines the event, and if God thus already knows what he ordains and ordains what he knows, what role does my petition have?
Or in the case of the psalm: by definition, the LORD already knows whether or not the passions which control King David will come to an end just as the LORD has already determined what to do about those desires which rule King David. Therefore, why does David need to petition God? And such petitions are a matter of obedience. Just so, why does the LORD command us to address God as Father and pray petitions to him? The Shepherd is most certainly not going to learn new information from his sheep.
As Robert Jenson puts the puzzle:
“Prayer is, of course, a funny phenomenon, and in both senses: funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. Whyever, after all, would omnipotence enjoy our praises? And why do we need to petition omniscience? If omniscience solicits our praises, if omniscience wants information from us, this can only be described as that peculiar kind of self-awareness and humility that we call humor. It is funny when God converses with us, paying real attention to our side of the converse. Oddly, God does do just that.”
But why does God do just that?
If God indeed is already and always the One “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” why does he do just that?
Why does the LORD command us to pray?
In The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks recalls the lambing time his father missed one year during treatment for cancer. After Rebanks’s father enters remission, he joins his son to show sheep at a local competition:
“In the pens my father is showing his Swaledale sheep, and my other daughter, Molly, is holding one of his, and it wins its class. Three generations of us doing what we do. Other families are spread out like this around us. The lamb Molly is holding was sired by the tup that my father and I bought the year before, the one that he had admired on Christmas day from the window, when I thought he was going to die. He has seen this dream come true. He looks suntanned and happy. The cancer may still be inside him, and may someday have the final say, but for now he is alive— fully alive.”
Fully alive as the creature God made him to be.
When God chooses David to replace Saul, the prophet announces that the LORD has made his choice not on the basis of David’s character but David’s heart.
“The LORD has sought out a man after his own heart,” Samuel informs Saul, “and the LORD has commanded him to be king.” Though David is determined by his wants, though David is a great and grave sinner, David is nevertheless a man whose heart resembles God’s own heart.
Once again, David’s prayers are a part of God’s providence.
In that David is driven to pray to God, David’s heart mirrors God’s own heart.
Consequently, the LORD chooses David to rule as the shepherd of his people.
After all, perhaps the chief revelation unveiled to us in Jesus Christ is that the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a life of prayer. We pray to our Father only because the second person of the Trinity prays to him as my Father.
That is, God is for himself, in himself, someone who prays.
Therefore—
The imago dei consists in prayer.
In the Book of Genesis, the Lord distinguishes one set of living creatures from all the others God creates. On the sixth day of creation, Genesis breaks the preceding rhythm of “And God said…And it was so.” After the land animals have been created along the usual pattern, a new locution is introduced, “Let us make…” The odd creatures of the sixth day are imbued with a distinction from their companion creatures: they are addressed by the Creator.
God’s address and our bidden reply is what distinguishes us from all other animals. We are the animals who pray. In fact, the Hebrew word rendered into English as “image” is best translated as “counterpart.” To be created in God’s image is to be made God’s counterpart in the triune colloquy. Thus, God wants us to pray not only because prayer fashions us after God’s own heart, but also because prayer is the means by which God is omniscient.
Prayer is the way God has chosen to be all-knowing.
As Robert Jenson jokes:
“I have sometimes said (only half in jest) that of course God knows everything, but that this does not settle how he finds out.”
Of course, God knows David needs to be freed from his wants. But David’s prayer is how God has chosen to find out. In other words, God has chosen to find out in such a way that he is not God without you. The LORD is not all-knowing apart from the petitions of his people; prayer is how God constitutes his omniscience.
This is exactly why Jesus commands us to pray.
I was at the infusion center at the oncologist’s office. An old woman sat directly across from me, a red-orange tube running from a bag to her chest. She wore a blue scarf with peacocks on it around her small, bony head. Her face looked so sunken and her skin so stretched and translucent that guessing her age felt impossible. She greeted me—exhausted, her eyes only half open—with a distinct prairie accent when I sat down and cracked open my book.
I didn’t get past the first page.
She started to cry—whimper really—from the sores her chemo-poison had burnt into her mouth and tongue and throat. Beseeching the nurse, she pleaded, “make the pain go away.” She kept on like that, inconsolable, with no concern for what I or anyone else might think about her. In a different-size person you’d call it a tantrum.
Seeing her there, spent and defeated, I felt compelled to do the only work I could for her. I prayed. Quietly, under my breath, just above a whisper, my lips moving to the petitions. And when I finished, I made the sign of the cross over her.
“You religious?” the man in the next infusion chair asked me.
“Sort of, I guess.”
He went to wave me off, dismissively, but then remembered his arm was taped and tethered to tubes and the tubes to an IV pole. He’d been on the phone on work calls almost the whole time I’d been there. A gray tie that matched his hair hung loose from his unbuttoned collar.
“You really think that stuff works. I mean, prayer?”
He said the word prayer like you might use the word unicorn to describe the landscape outside your window.
“I take it from your tone of voice that you don’t put much stock in it.”
“I used to pray,” he said, “Or, I tried it when my wife was laid up in a place like this. But none of my prayers ever got a response so I said the hell with it.”
I nodded.
I waited a beat before I laid the question on him.
“Where do you go to church?”
He stifled a laugh. He flushed red, embarrassed now to be part of this conversation. And then he shook his head like I’d suggested he try riding a unicorn.
“I’ve never gone to church,” he said, “I never even considered it. Why would I go?”
“You just said you’d tried praying before but never got any answers. But prayer is necessarily antiphonal. It’s one side of a conversation. How do you expect to get a response to your prayers if you never put yourself in the place God has promised to show up and speak a word?”
He stared at me, uncomprehending.
“The gospel is God’s power in the world,” I said, “The proclaimed word is how he speaks. If you want an answer to your prayer, you’ve got to put yourself on the receiving end of a promise. And listen. He does answer prayer— you’ve got to hearken to it.”
He laughed.
When I did not, he realized I had not been joking.
Prayer is necessarily antiphonal.
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
We do not know the context to the twenty-third psalm. We do not know the why behind the what of David’s prayer. But we do know where David was when the LORD answered his prayer.
The phrase recurs throughout the story of David:
“King David went in [to the tabernacle] and sat before the LORD.”
In other words, David went to worship where he waited on a word.
It’s odd that we persist in trying to tease out answers to our prayers in the random acts and chance developments of our lives.
Events rather than words.
If the Triune identity is a colloquy, if our chief relation to God is through word utterance, if we reflect the image of God in that we are bidden to speak to God, if God creates a covenant history with us through address, then why would we think that the LORD answers our prayers by any other means but words?
And where else would we expect to hear those words except in the gospel in which God promises to give himself?
It happens all the time.
The most recent time was after the first service on Christmas Eve. A stranger came up to me in the atrium and grabbed me by the hem of my robe.
“Pastor, thank you” she said, “after your sermon tonight I know that God wants me to accept the outcome of the presidential election.”
“Uh…” I started to say.
But when I saw she was serious, I said, “That’s funny. I didn’t intend to speak to that at all. Evidently, the Holy Spirit had something he needed to tell you.”
“I’ve been praying about it,” she said, nodding.
In his memoir, James Rebanks details how a good shepherd spends an inordinate amount of time minding after the mouths of his sheep.
He writes:
"I check their teeth by grabbing a sheep and peeling back its bottom lip (sheep only have teeth on the bottom jaw). The teeth tell me a lot…As the sheep ages, the teeth get longer and start to weaken. When ewes are broken mouthed, they are sold for meat because their ability to feed themselves and produce lambs has gone…The art is to judge from these teeth whether the ewes will last several years or just a year or so. Our judgement of their value is in many ways a judgement about what their mouths will be able to handle. I check hundreds a day.”
The LORD our shepherd minds after our mouths too.
But the loaf and the cup are more than the means by which he feeds us.
Precisely because God attaches the gospel promise to them, the bread and wine can be the means by which the LORD answers your prayer.
So—
Don’t just sit there before the LORD.
Come to the table.
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