Psalm 23
For exactly a decade I have suffered a rare, incurable cancer in my blood. After a harrowing initial year of surgeries and treatments, my doctors have kept it bay over the last several years.
But then, just before Labor Day, I noticed a lump on my neck. A couple of days later, I found more on my throat and the back of my head. The next day, I traced the ones that had swelled on my groin. Shortly thereafter, one of my oncologists had me sit down on the examining table. She snapped on latex gloves and began to move her fingers over my body like she was reading Braille. As she did so, I felt my heart start to race. Beads of sweat broke out across my forehead. My pulse quickened. When she finished checking the lymph nodes on my groin, I sat up and almost fell over, feeling dizzy and short of breath. As she pulled off her gloves and sat down on the round, wheeled stool to wake the computer and look at my lab work— for lack of a more precise medical term— I cracked up.
Like Humpty Dumpty.
I broke down.
I fell apart.
Into pieces.
To the doctor, I mumbled with alarm, “I don’t— I don’t feel so good. I think I’m sick.”
She stood up. She looked at my blanched face. She felt my sprinting pulse.
“I don’t think you’re sick,” she said with a kindergarten teacher’s empathy, “I think you’re having a panic attack.”
And as my blood work materialized on the computer screen, my oncologist wrapped her arm around my heaving shoulders like I was a boy in trouble on the playground.
A week later a guy with a bunch of letters behind his name diagnosed me with letters of my own.
Four letters: PTSD.
Apparently, incurable cancer takes a toll on the mental health.
Back in the fall, my therapist ended our initial session with a question, "How in the hell did you make it this long without cracking up.”
I held out my hands like he was a panhandler and I was proving to him that my pockets carried no cash. But that was not a good enough answer. So he waited, his patient gaze boring holes in me. And then he repeated his question.
“How did you make it this long without coming apart?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Prayer?” I ventured.
“Jesus?”
Of course, I realize prayer and Jesus are embarrassingly pious responses. And the truth of the matter is that I was but reaching for any answer that would quell his scrutiny of me. I assumed prayer and Jesus might be the sort of reply he would expect from a reverend. And I guessed correctly because he took me at my word and nodded and moved on to chide me for using humor to avoid my feelings.
“Prayer…Jesus?”
Again, I intended it as nothing more than a nonchalant response to avoid his trenchant gaze, and I thought no more about it for months.
But then—
After having sat for a long time with the Bible’s most beloved text, it dawned on me, like an epiphany, that although I had been sitting on my therapist’s couch, I had nonetheless managed to stumble over what the church fathers called the regula fidei.
The rule of faith.
Much like the doctrine of creation, the image of the LORD as shepherd reverberates throughout the scriptures and is a key part of the Bible’s primary discourse. In fact, to so address God is to invoke the doctrine of creation and confess that nothing that happens happens apart from the shepherding will of God. This is the precise if offensive claim Jacob makes when he becomes the first of the patriarchs to address God as a shepherd. On his deathbed, Israel blesses his youngest son Joseph, saying, “The God before whom my ancestors Abraham and Isaac walked…has been the shepherd of all of my life to this very day.”
Like a lost sheep, the image of the shepherd wanders all over the Bible.
When God’s people plead for a king like the other nations, the LORD submits to their request by giving them a sheepherding boy from Bethlehem. Meanwhile the prophet Jeremiah is the first to turn the image of shepherd against the rulers of Israel:
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my
pasture! says the Lord…The days are surely coming, says the
Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he
shall reign.”
Whereas Jeremiah indicts the royals as wicked shepherds, Jesus compares God to a foolhardy one who abandons the ninety-nine for the single lost sheep. Having compared God to a shepherd, Jesus likewise reveals himself to be the Shepherd, “I AM the Good Shepherd,” Jesus declares in the Gospel of John, “in that I lay down my life for my sheep.” Not only is Jesus the Good Shepherd, the scriptures culminate in a complementary if not contradictory vision of Jesus as a slain lamb. “Then I saw a Lamb,” the seer John reports, “looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of heaven’s throne.”
He is both lamb and shepherd.
When the prophet Ezekiel finally breaks forth with a word of gospel, through him the LORD utters a perplexing promise. The LORD's ultimate, eschatological shepherd will be both himself, the LORD, and in the line of David, “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep…And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David.”
He is simultaneously both LORD and David.
The imagery redounds throughout the scriptures; therefore, for King David to pray “The LORD is my shepherd” is no more novel than addressing God as Maker of Heaven and Earth. The image is a sheer given in the scriptures. What is surprising is not that David prays “The LORD is my shepherd;” what is astonishing is that David’s prayer is scripture.
That David prays “The LORD is my shepherd” is not startling.
That David’s prayer is scripture is bewildering.
Around the same time I met with my therapist for the first time, I visited Mike Moser for the last time.
I held his hand. I rubbed his tumored legs. I stroked his head. And I read a couple of psalms to him. As I read the twenty-third psalm, I watched Mike squint with fierce concentration, his lips turning over each of the scant verses like a jeweler appraising a diamond. Then I handed over the goods to Mike; I gave him absolution for the entirety of his sins. Finally, I knelt beside his reclining hospital chair. I took both his hand and the hand of his hospice worker, and I led us in prayer. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to help him die well, tethered to the promise of his baptism and the hope of the resurrection. When I finished praying, the three of us all together said— even Mike managed to get it out with some volume, “Amen.”
We did not say, “This is the word of God for the people of God.”
But we could have.
We could have.
As mysterious, as preposterous, as this may sound, it is nevertheless the straightforward conclusion demanded by the presence of a prayerbook in the middle of the scriptures.
The Bible contains one hundred fifty prayers called psalms. Of them, David authored nearly half. Asaph, the choir-master appointed by David, contributed a dozen. The levitical family of the children of Korah wrote another twelve of the prayers. King Solomon composed two. Heman and Ethan, temple musicians, each produced a prayer.
That’s a lot of people not named Yahweh.
And yet, their prayers to God are simultaneously God’s word to us.
Once again—
That David prays “The LORD is my shepherd” is not startling.
That David’s prayer is the word of God is bewildering.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts the puzzle, “There is in the Holy Scriptures one book that differs from all other books of the Bible in that it contains only prayers.” Psalm 23 is so familiar and the Psalter itself is so beloved and so oft-quoted that we miss the baffling fact of the Psalms: there is a prayerbook in the Bible. The scriptures are God’s word to us. Yet by definition prayers are the very opposite; prayers are human words addressed to God.
Bonhoeffer writes:
“The Holy Scriptures are, to be sure, God’s Word to us. But prayers are human words. How then do they come to be in the Bible? Let us make no mistake: the Bible is God’s Word, even in the Psalms. Then are the prayers to God really God’s own Word to us? That seems difficult for us to understand.”
How is that for an understatement?
Of course it is difficult to understand!
It is a paradoxical. It is contradictory. It is an impossibility. Prayer cannot be both our words to God and God’s word to us. Prayer cannot be human and divine. anymore than a shepherd can be a lamb.
Or a lamb the Shepherd.
Ellen Charry teaches theology at Princeton. In her commentary on the Book of Psalms, she suggests that the subtitle for the Bible’s prayerbook could be “Pain Seeking Understanding,” for such is the life of prayer. Personal experience made her a perceptive reader. Her husband Dana, a psychiatrist, died of lung cancer in 2003. Never a smoker, his diagnosis was sudden and his decline swift. After his death, Charry published an essay entitled on lament. In the essay, as what she called “a case-study in trust and lament,” Charry included some of the letters her husband wrote to family and friends as he navigated “the vale of death’s shadow.”
What’s remarkable about his letters is how even as he documents his ongoing frustration and grief that his prayers have not been answered in the manner he hoped, Dana Charry nonetheless experienced a new and profound connection to and intimacy with the LORD Jesus Christ.
On Epiphany in 2003, Dana Charry wrote:
“Dear Friends and Family,
How we wish we could send you a Christmas letter this year filled with joy and hope…Indeed…it seems clear that God’s answer to our prayers— so far— is not the one we were hoping for. This is a test of our faith which we will have to ponder in the months to come. This much we know…even as we pray seemingly unanswered prayers, we experience more love, joy, and the presence of God than in our lifetimes. This crisis has brought our daughter Tamar back into the heart of our family, and without her love and humor we would both be a wreck. We are truly in God’s hands.”
Two weeks after Epiphany, following a setback, Dana Charry updated his friends and family:
“How I wish I could have spared you this news. And yet, how very happy I am that you know, and that you are storming heaven, praying on my behalf. I pray every day that God may hear the fervent prayers of his people, and I do believe he does as the prayers of his own Son. Pray that Jesus wraps his hands tightly around all the organs of my body, and with his loving gaze and healing touch drives out all my sickness. I have never felt so vulnerable; but also, I have never felt so completely in God’s hands.”
A month later, he wrote:
“I have a new theological approach to this, which is helping me a lot. My old concept of God not being responsible for this illness led to too much frustration and lack of confidence. I now believe — perhaps because I sense him so— that God for some absolutely inconceivable reason has determined that this should happen. He’s shepherding us in the midst of this fray. It’s a tough theology, but either way is tough. Keep me in your prayers. In all our praying there is only the prayer of Jesus.”
As the season of Epiphany turned to Lent and Dana Charry neared the End, he wrote:
“I imagine you all are eager to know the outcome of my recent tests…It’s a mixed picture. And not quite the miracle we had hoped…When I let myself think about it, I do wonder what God has in mind with all these problems. The one good which we can see coming out of this is the outpouring of love; therefore, there must be other good God intends that we cannot yet see. I feel very close to Jesus. I am not struggling emotionally or theologically at all. But, I need your prayers right now because I feel this experimental treatment is the last chance for me. If you are inclined pray the psalms with your prayers, you might pray Psalm 23. I have recited it daily for the past seventeen years, praying it with Jesus.
In God’s Love and Peace, Dana and Ellen”
Praying it with Jesus.
Simply—
To pray is to find the way to and speak with God.
But Jesus alone is the way to God; no one can approach the Father except through him.
Just so, we can pray only in Jesus Christ— that’s the rule of faith.
And only with Jesus are our prayers heard.
As Paul reminds the church at Rome, we know not how to pray, but when we pray it is the Spirit of Jesus who prays in us. This is why, even as his prayers went unanswered, Dana Charry nevertheless experienced a deep and overwhelming intimacy with Christ.
Whenever Dana Charry prayed, it was Jesus praying in him.
This is true of King David as well.
As the Book of Hebrews attests, “When Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired…but a body. in burnt-offerings and sin-offerings you have taken no pleasure.” That’s Psalm 40, a Psalm of David. But according to the New Testament, the speaker of David’s prayer is Jesus.
Again: “For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying, I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” That’s the Psalm just before Psalm 23. It’s another Psalm of David. Or is it? Scripture again identifies the speaker of David’s prayer as “great David’s greater Son.”
He is both lamb and shepherd.
Yet again, the Book of Hebrews proclaims, “As the Spirit of Jesus says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, as on the day of testing in the wilderness.” That’s Psalm 95, a Psalm of Jesus.
As Bonhoeffer writes:
“In the prayers of David, it is precisely the promised Christ who already speaks. The same words that David spoke, therefore, the future Messiah spoke in him…even David prayed not only out the personal raptures of his heart, but from Christ dwelling in him. To be sure, the one who prays remains himself, but Christ dwells in him and with him. The last words of David the old man express this very thing, “The Spirit of the Lord speaks through me, his word is on my tongue.”
From there Bonhoeffer anticipates the question, “How is it possible that a human being and Jesus Christ pray simultaneously?”
He answers:
“It is the incarnate Son of God, who pours out the heart of all humanity before God and who stands in our place and prays for us whenever we pray. He has known torment and pain, guilt and death, more deeply than we have. Therefore, our prayer is the prayer of the human nature assumed by Christ. It is really our prayer, but since the Son of God knows us better than we know ourselves, and was truly human for our sake, it is also really the Son’s prayer. Prayer can become our prayer only because it is first his prayer.”
Only because Jesus is the LORD can we pray “The LORD is my shepherd.”
In other words, not all the psalms are from David, there are at least five other authors. Not all the psalms are from David, but they are all from Jesus Christ. Thus, your every prayer is one to which we could respond, “This is the word of God for the people of God.”
Late this summer, near the end of a visit with Mike, I told him that I would pray for him. And Mike’s squinted eyes betrayed the gears turning in his mind. Finally he said to me, “You know Jason— sometimes I rather think prayer is useless.”
“Useless?”
And Mike elaborated, “So often—more often than not, in my case— prayers appear to go unanswered. What’s more, most of what I need medical science can supply. So yes, sometimes I think prayer is rather useless.”
I smiled and patted him on the knee.
“You got it all backwards, Mike.”
He resumed squinting at me.
Eventually he gestured towards me, inviting me to lay my cards down.
“It’s not a question of whether prayer is useful or useless to us,” I said, “That’s like asking what role God plays in your life— that’s bass ackwards. The right way to think about it is what role do you play in God’s life. It’s irrelevant whether prayer is useful or useless to us. The point is: prayer is useful to God.”
“How so?”
“In the conversation that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God wants to include you, Mike. Think about it. The Maker of Heaven and Earth’s life is incomplete without you. God wants to hear from you. In fact, he’s so determined to hear from you that he gets Jesus to pray in you so that not even you can screw it up. God wants to talk with you, Mike. The LORD doesn’t want to be your genie in a lamp; he wants you in his life. If you ask me, that’s beyond a better gift than anything I might think to request from him.”
Mike’s squint turned to a smile.
“Would you pray with me?” he asked.
“How in the hell did you make it this long without cracking up,” he asked.
“Prayer…Jesus.”
As though my words were not my own, I had tumbled out with an answer far more correct than I knew.
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