Psalm 23
I was sitting in the waiting room at my oncologist’s office, an imposing volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics on my lap. Even at my age, on almost every visit, I’m the youngest person in the waiting room— a point of irritation which I often express to the Lord with less than sanctified language. But this week, an Indian family sat across from me, a middle-aged husband and wife. Their daughter, no higher than my elbow, was snuggled in between them. The little girl’s eyes looked hollow with exhaustion, her once tan skin appeared almost translucent, and her dark hair already nearly as thin as mine.
She looked like a shadow version of herself.
I don’t know her prognosis, but death has her in its sights.
As the mother brushed the girl’s hair with her hand and whispered assurance into her daughter’s ear, I noticed a silver cross hung from her neck and lay draped against her blouse. For her part, the girl calmly looked at the glossy pictures of far away places in a wrinkled back issue of a travel magazine. When a nurse with a clipboard called the family’s last name, they stood up and gathered their things.
“Good luck,” I said to them.
I’d only meant by it a show of camaraderie, like we’ve all been drafted as teammates for a sport none of us wants to play.
“Luck?” the girl’s mother said like she hadn’t heard me right.
I nodded and gestured to the infusion lab, “Good luck.”
The mother shook her head with a look. It was just shy of disdain— surprise, I’d say. She glanced at the book on my lap and then looked at me, as if wondering why anyone would read such a book— Church Dogmatics— if they were not a believer.
“Good luck,” I said again, thinking maybe their English was the problem, “This can be a scary place.”
This time the girl’s father shook his head.
“Why would we need luck when we have Jesus? He is with us. This is not scary at all.”
I’ve got a pretty good acute bullshit meter. I could tell from his tone of voice that he was not simply saying it for his daughter’s sake. He truly believed it. And with his arm around his little girl, rendered rail thin by cancer, they walked into the infusion lab as though it was God’s heaven.
Though it happens not in a valley but in the wilderness of Horesh, when King Saul plots to kill his usurper, David does indeed fear evil. Despite the LORD himself speaking a promise of safety to David, David hides in a desert stronghold in Ziph. The Shepherd's rod and crook do not always offer David comfort. On the contrary, with Saul’s troops in vengeful pursuit of him, dread and panic fall like shadows over David. The specter of death does in fact compel David to fear.
Just so, a question:
Is David less faithful than the father of the cancer-stricken girl?
Is King David less consistent in his confidence in the LORD than a middle-aged father in khakis and a cable-knit sweater?
How is that dad different from David?
Five years ago next month, the New York Times ran a story about the chaplains— rabbis and pastors and priests— rushing to care for the sick and the dying in hospitals overrun by the COVID- contagion. Chaplains told the reporter that the Covid-19 pandemic was unlike anything they had seen before in the intensity of the sickness, the speed at which it could lay a person low, and the sheer number of deaths.
A chaplain in Seattle, Rev. Leah Klug recalled performing an anointing of the sick with mouthwash, because she didn’t have any oil on hand. At patients’ request, she often read the twenty-third psalm above the steady beep of a heart monitor. “So many want to hear, “The LORD is my shepherd,” she told the Times.
Chaplain Walker, a veteran of the Persian Gulf, told the reporter that the pandemic reminded him of serving in the Iraq War — “except,” he said, “I’m closer to Death now than I was on the very front lines of combat…Yesterday I was told, “Go to this unit — they had four deaths.” Then it was, “Go to this unit — they had three deaths.””
“It’s not just that they’re working flat-out,” a nurse commented on the chaplains’ work, “It’s that they are working flat-out, in the shadow of death, knowing that doing so puts them and their own families at risk.” “We are walking in the valley of the shadow of death, along with our patients and their families,” said the Rev. Katherine GrayBuck, a chaplain in Seattle.
“Few run towards the dying. Even fewer run towards the contagious,” Chaplain Walker observed. “It is not natural to go racing toward someone or something that is trying to kill you. It is not natural not to fear death.”
Why were those chaplains all able to practice a constancy of confidence in the face of death that King David could not reliably muster? Why were ordinary priests and pastors in 2020 less afraid of death than the LORD’s own chosen and anointed king in 885 BC? After all, the David who professes his freedom from the fear of death in Psalm 23 is the same David who elsewhere claims otherwise.
David himself contradicts the confidence at the heart of this prayer:
“My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away…”
Once again—
Why were hospital chaplains able to embody this psalm better than the one who first prayed it?
Etty Hillesum was a Jew who was only twenty-nine years old when she was first deported from the Netherlands and later murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. A law student, Hillesum had been raised in a chaotic and secular home. To the consternation of her friends, Etty Hillesum refused to go into hiding when the roundup of Jews escalated in 1942. On July 5, 1943 the occupying German army deported her first to the Westerbork transit camp and eventually to Auschwitz where she died five months later.
During those twenty weeks of the holocaust, Etty Hillesum encountered God for the first time— an overpowering and mystical experience she recounted in her diary. When she and her family were forced onto a train from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September of 1943, Hillesum quickly wrote these lines on a postcard and threw it from the train to be recovered, “The Lord is my high tower. In the end, the departure came without warning…We left the camp singing…Thank you, Lord, for all your kindness and care.”
As she prays to God from the Westerbork concentration camp— deep in the valley of the shadow of death— Hillesum nevertheless perceives the prison as a place of beauty, its darkness illumined by the love that is God.
She writes:
“All I want to say is this: The misery here in the concentration camp is quite terrible; and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire…And then time and again, it soars straight from my heart—I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force—the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall receive a whole new world.”
Etty Hillesum’s family did not survive transit from the Westerbork camp to Auschwitz, yet their deaths did not leave her alone. One of her last journal entries before she was led to the gas chamber is a prayer:
“You have made me so rich, oh God, please let me share out Your beauty with open hands. My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God. Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on your earth, my eyes raised toward your Heavens, tears sometimes run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude. At night, too, when I lie in bed and rest in you, oh God, tears of gratitude run down my face, and that is my prayer.”
Again—
How is it possible that a Dutch Jew performed this psalm more fully than David who prayed it?
According to the ancient rabbis, it was after Saul first attempted to murder David, hurling a spear at him as he played the lyre, that David uttered another prayer in contradiction to the confidence of Psalm 23. David eludes the killing blow. Saul drives his spear into the wall. On his wife’s advice, David flees for his life. And as he escapes, from that place of deep darkness so say the rabbis, David prays, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Cry of Desolation begins the psalm just before David prays, “Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.”
Why was Etty Hillesum at Auschwitz able to embody that prayer better than David of Bethlehem? How was she free from fear in a way that David, despite his words, was not? That is, how did Psalm 23 transfigure from prayer into promise?
Or rather, what happened to death?
After all, it is not natural not to fear death. So what happened? In between David and that dad at the oncologist’s office, in between David and those COVID-19 chaplains, in between David and Auschwitz, what happened?
What happened to death?
What was done to death?
Shortly before the bishop appointed me to Annandale, I conducted a funeral for a boy at my youngest son’s elementary school. Named after King David’s best friend, Jonathan was in the fifth grade when doctors discovered the cause of his persistent headaches and blurred vision. The oldest of his four siblings, his parents had immigrated here from the Ivory Coast when Jonathan was a baby. On the night he died, I accompanied the school principal to his hospital room to anoint him, to hand over the absolution, and to pray with his family. Jonathan’s mother had arranged the pictures his classmates had painted for him so that they ringed all around his body like the halo that encircles Our Lady of Guadelupe.
At his mother’s request, we prayed the twenty-third psalm.
The final words, “…the house of the Lord forever…,” were still tumbling out of my mouth when Jonathan’s little brother let go of my hand and tugged on the sleeve of my clerical shirt.
He even raised his hand like we were at school.
I knelt down to look him in the eye.
“Yes,” I said softly.
“Um, can I ask a question?”
“Of course. What’s on your mind?”
“Why did God make dying? Why did God make dying?”
In the Gospel of John, in the very same discourse in which the Lamb of God announces that he is simultaneously our Good Shepherd— that is, he is both one of us, a member of the flock, and God— Jesus makes it explicit that he is the active agent of his looming passion.“I lay down my life,” Jesus declares, “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.”
In other words—
Dying is not something that happened to Jesus.
Dying is something he did.
Dying was his deed.
“Consummatum est,” Jesus proclaims upon the cross, “It is finished.”
But again since Jesus is not the passive victim of his passion, his sixth word from the cross is better conjugated in the active voice, “I am finished.”
Dying is not something that happened to Jesus.
Jesus is what happened to death.
The apostle Paul calls death God’s final enemy. Death is God’s ultimate enemy because it is the annulment of the life God made for his creatures. But enemies, Jesus teaches, are to be reconciled. Just so, when the crucified and risen Christ lays his right hand on John of Patmos and declares, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death,” Jesus holds those keys because he has made even death his home. By becoming incarnate, God makes every nook and cranny of his creation his domain— even death.
I am finished.
Jesus is what happened to death.
Jesus is what God did to death.
The cross judges all, yes— of course. But judgement and sin are only partial aspects of the gospel. Even more so, Christ’s death heals everyone and everything— crux est mundi medicina. As the church father Gregory of Nazianzus put it, “That which is not assumed is not healed.” Therefore, what is assumed is healed, including, especially, death.
Just as in stepping into the Jordan River Jesus sanctifies the water for our own baptisms, so too in descending into suffering and death Jesus hallows them. He made them places where he can be found. He claimed even death for God.
This is the straightforward claim of the scriptures:
“When Christ ascended on high he led a host of captives (suffering and death) and he gave gifts to men. In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that Christ had also descended into the lower regions of the earth (the grave)? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, in order that he might fill all things with himself.”
In other words, Jesus took captivity captive. As Maximus the Confessor writes, “Christ died to convert the use of death, reworking it into the condemnation of sin but not of nature, making death an end of all that is inhumane and ungodly, changing death from a weapon to destroy human nature into a weapon to destroy sin.”
Christ converted death.
This is what the apostle Paul means when he addresses the church at Corinth:
“The Father of all mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”
That is, because God died, God’s creatures can die otherwise. Jesus is what God did to death. Jesus is what happened in between David and Etty and all the rest.
And take note—
Jesus did not make death good.
Jesus made it an access to God who is Good.
Thus, as Maximus insists: Christians weep at death; we marvel at Christ.
On her plank bed in an overcrowded barracks, Etty Hillesum prayed:
“Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. But no one is in their clutches who is in your arms, God. I shall never drive You from my presence.”
You are with me.
Jesus made her prayer possible.
“Why did God make dying?” David—his name is David— asked me.
I put my hands on his tiny shoulders.
“God did not make dying,” I said, “God made only living. God wants nothing for us but good.”
He stared at me, sensing the incongruity of my words with our location.
“God died,” I added, “so that, even in his dying, Jonathan is not alone.”
Just then, his mother looked up from the bed. She blew her nose and nodded and laughed a little.
“So it’s not just me,” she said, “That’s why I feel Jesus here with us.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Can I talk to him?” David asked.
“To your brother?” I asked.
“No, to Jesus.”
“Sure. Of course.”
But he didn’t pray, exactly. The second grader sat down on the chair next to his brother’s bed and he simply started a conversation with someone only the eyes of faith can see.
In the Gospel of Luke, as Jesus nears his dying, he laments over Jerusalem, weeping, “How often would I have gathered your children together as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings.” The image is a popular icon of the church. But the image of a mother hen with her chicks protected beneath her wings is only the second half of the complete picture. It’s part of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ alert that King Herod aims to kill him. Just before the verse about the mother hen and her brood, Jesus responds to the Pharisees, saying, “Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.”
You see the sequence?
Herod and the forces of death are a fox.
Jesus is a mother hen.
We are the brood sheltered beneath him.
Jesus outfoxes the fox.
Even in death’s belly, we are sheltered underneath Christ’s wings.
Thou art with me.
Jesus did not make death good.
Jesus made it so that God is at work even on the insides of death.
I am finished.
Not long before he died, the theologian Robert Jenson delivered a funeral homily upon the death of his friend John.
In the sermon’s conclusion, Jenson preached:
“In scripture, death is never seen as a good thing by itself. Rather, it is always portrayed as God’s great antagonist. Death is the enemy of love; and God is love. John was a loving man, and now we all lack that love. Despite all our efforts to hide from death, or explain it away, or say that it’s only natural after all, death by itself remains an unfathomable evil. Indeed, only by looking to one particular death, to Christ’s death on the cross, can we grasp it at all.
Christianity simply is the faith that the Lord raised him from the tomb to which we consigned him. Death by itself is indeed an unmitigated evil, but it turns out that death is not by itself. Christ lives as the one with that “and" there.
He is for all, for all eternity, Christ crucified and risen.
And that means—among much else—that we can, putting it crudely, relax a little in this life, lay back a bit. If the worst, the shadow of death, must give way to the best, to life in God, what else could there be to fear? Because Christ lives, we can be a little at ease in this troubled and dangerous world…There are, I suppose two ways of relaxing in the world.
One is to think that nothing is worth caring about, so why worry?
The other is to think—with John—that everyone and everything is worth caring about, and that we dare do that because Christ lives.”
Though in Psalm 23 he claimed otherwise, David was no stranger to the fear of death. But of course David was afraid in the valley of the shadow of death. The LORD had not yet done Jesus to death. Therefore, despite his great faith and his heart after God’s own heart, David lacked what you and I possess— just four little words, “Christ is risen indeed.”
So relax.
Lay back a bit.
And amble on up to the table.
Because our Mother Hen lives, he not only shelters us in his wings but feeds us. Because he lives, the loaf and the cup, the bread and the wine— they are “sacraments of death’s demise.”
So take and eat.
And dare to care.
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