Psalm 119.17-24
In 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer left his pastorate in London and returned to Nazi Germany to serve as the director of the Emergency Pastors’ Seminary at Finkenwalde, an ad hoc school established to serve the ordination candidates of the dissident Confessing Church. The rogue seminary convened in a donated, ramshackle house on the Baltic Sea which teachers and students together renovated. During the fall semester of the following year, Bonhoeffer offered the students sessions on the catechism he was writing for pastors to use in their confirmation programs. The catechism followed the format of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism with forty-seven questions and answers along with supporting scriptural citations. Again and again in the catechism, Bonhoeffer returns to the longest chapter in the Bible. Indeed throughout the decade before his martyrdom, Bonhoeffer appeared obsessed by the one hundred and nineteenth psalm.
For instance, the catechism’s section on Obedience:
“Question: Why have we been given Scripture and the creeds?
Answer: So that we may properly know Jesus Christ and be able to conduct our lives to his glorification.
Question: How can you recognize God’s will?
Answer: God has revealed his law to us. Only if God actually speaks his commandments to me can I know it (Psalm 119.18).
Question: What would become of you if you did not know God’s commandments?
Answer: I would be a lost human being who goes astray and cannot find the right path. That is why I must thank God from the bottom of my heart for having shown me his will. His commandments are his grace (Psalm 119.19).”
If I did not know God’s commandment, I would be a lost human being.
No less than Moses’ encounter on Mount Sinai, the Bible’s creation story is simultaneously a commandment story. God says, “Let there be light.” And the command is heeded, “And there was light.” God speaks to bring the world to pass. He utters a command. The command is obeyed. And the obeying act is the existence of the world. Among the myriad creatures the LORD makes through utterance and obedience, humans are distinct in that we are the ones addressed by God’s moral word and so bidden to obey. This just is what it means for us to be made in the Triune image; and thus, what it means for us to be human— as human as Jesus.
Once again, the existence of the world is the event of obedience; moreover, obedience is the reason for our unique existence such that our inconstancy renders us less than human. Therefore, to disobey the LORD’s commandments is not to violate a rule and thereby stir his anger; it is to lose our humanity. To sin is to frustrate your neighbor’s ability to delight in God— it’s hard to praise the LORD with tear gas in your eyes. Just so, to transgress the Torah is to do more than disobey God’s will. It is to devolve into brutishness. It is to degenerate into nihilism.
Thus to disobey is to cease to be.
The dilemma of the law is not its accusation but our disintegration.
As Robert Jenson puts it in his Large Catechism:
“God speaks Torah even where there is nothing. To hear God’s command is, therefore, to be refreshed in my very being. As the Psalmist prays, “My delight is in the LORD’s Torah, and thereon I meditate day and night.” It would seem to follow therefore that not to obey God’s commandments is not to be. It would seem further to follow that if I once am disobedient, I cannot again obey, there now being no one there to do so.”
Accordingly, the speaker of this psalm prays not for release from the burden of the LORD’s commandments but for knowledge of them:
“Open my eyes, that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law.I am a sojourner on the earth;
hide not your commandments from me!”
A year and a half ago, I preached at a Southern Baptist church in Oklahoma City. My sermon text was from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the section of the letter where the apostle addresses the church’s debate over whether or not eating meat sacrificed to idols violated both the gospel and the law. In order to clarify their seemingly arbitrary dispute, I sought to contemporize it.
Acknowledging the archaicness of the issue at hand in Rome, I preached:
“While this partisan divide may strike us as a peculiar problem to vex a church, exactly because it was about the commandments we can easily switch out meat for a different biblical mandate in order to get a sense of how this debate threatened the health of Christ’s Body.
For example:
According to polls, millions of Christians in America currently support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants from the country. Indeed Christians are the cohort most in favor of the policy proposal. On the other hand, other Christians are the first to insist the scriptures broker no compromise, “When an immigrant sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. You shall treat the immigrant who sojourns with you as a native among you, and you shall love him as you love yourself, for once you were immigrants in the land of Egypt: I AM the LORD your God.”There is more that divides Christ’s Body than what’s on the menu.”
After the worship service, as staff and volunteers stacked chairs and collected coffee cups, an old woman approached me with a floppy, worn Bible under her arm and confusion all over her face.
She held out her hand to me.
“Thanks for being with us this morning.”
“My pleasure,” I said, “Thanks for your hospitality.”
“I had one question though about your sermon.”
“Sure thing,” I chuckled, “But remember— what you think you heard and what I think I said are seldom the same word.”
She nodded, “When you were talking about how we need to be soft on illegals, what was that line you came up with? That we oughta treat illegals as natives because we used to live in Egypt? That part didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Oh that,” I said, “I was just quoting the commandment.”
“The commandment?” She sounded genuinely perplexed, “What commandment? What are you talking about preacher?”
“It’s God’s command,” I replied, “It’s in the Book of Leviticus, chapter nineteen. It’s also in the Book of Exodus, chapter twenty-two. I was just quoting the scriptures.”
Surprise lit up her eyes.
She took her Bible out of the crook of her arm.
It flopped in her hand like a creature that had only recently died.
“I’ve been going to church my whole life,” she said, “I got baptized before I let a boy…never mind. How is this is the first time I’ve heard of such a commandment?”
“Open my eyes, that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law.
I am a sojourner on the earth;
hide not your commandments from me!”
In his Sermon on the Mount, just after the Beatitudes, Jesus sets the stage for the commands that follow by teaching:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
Not only does Jesus rule out any notion that the Mount of Beatitudes is higher, so to speak, than Mount Sinai, Jesus equates beatitude with obedience to the law revealed to Moses. In the section of the psalm named for the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Gimel), the Psalmist makes the very same claim as Christ, “Deal bountifully with your servant, that I may…keep your word.” That is, the purpose of God’s blessing and a sign of his beatitude is constancy in keeping the commandments. And obedience is the fruit of blessing exactly because the law itself is not self-evident. You do not naturally know that you ought not abuse or undignify your neighbors. You need the true and living God to have dragged the Israelites through the Red Sea and out into the desert and spoken to them, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I AM the LORD.” God’s will can only be known through revelation. In his personal Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer underlined verse eighteen of Psalm 119. He also circled the words “open” and “wonders.” In the page margin, he wrote in pinched cursive, “Only the blind person cries for opened eyes.”
Notice what the believer sees once the LORD opens their eyes, “I am an alien on the earth; do not hide your commandments from me.” Alien, stranger, sojourner, immigrant— it’s the same word as the commandment: “When a ger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. You shall treat the ger who sojourns with you as a native among you, and you shall love him as you love yourself, for once you were a ger in the land of Egypt: I AM the LORD your God.”
Follow the sequence of the prayer:
To have your eyes opened to the wonders of the law is to see that you are an alien on the earth.
And to identify with other aliens is both the unfathomable wonder of the law and the sum of the commandments.
That is, the neighbor you are to love as yourself is the ger in your midst; without which, there is no love of God.
As Bonhoeffer comments in his Meditation on Psalm 119:
“When God’s word first opened my eyes, it made me a stranger on this earth. It put me in a long line of the fathers of the faith who lived as aliens in the promised land having first been strangers in Pharaoh’s land…As such an alien, it is not my prerogative to lord over or mistreat others. I owe them faithfulness and thanksgiving. I may not evade God’s call into this sojourner status by dreaming away my earthly life with thoughts about heaven. There is a very godless homesickness for the afterlife. Nothing is said here in this psalm about a homeland. I am meant to live as an alien with all this entails, not closing my heart apathetically to others…When one forgets that the Kingdom is their only homeland, they will cease to live as a guest on God’s earth.”
To disobey is to cease to be.
“I got baptized before I got my driver’s license. How is this is the first time I’ve heard of such a commandment?”
“I’m sure it’s been read or preached here before,” I said, “Maybe you weren’t in a place to hear it before— maybe the Holy Spirit opened your eyes today because it’s an issue all over the news.”
She stiffened, as though the command had shifted from surprise to threat.
“But why does the Holy Spirit need to open my eyes to it? That’s the Old Testament God. We follow Jesus.”
“There’s no distinction between them,” I said.
She put her Bible back tightly under arm.
Like it might snap at her if she gave it the chance.
“What do you mean there’s no distinction between them?”
“I mean— when the LORD spoke on Mount Sinai and revealed that commandment to Moses, it was a voice that Mary would have recognized.”
She gave me a strange gaze.
“And when the LORD passed by him,” I said, “Moses had to hide in the cleft of the rock because if Moses had seen the face of God, he would have seen the face of Jesus— the incomprehensible shock of it would’ve destroyed him.”
“So you’re saying that commandment still holds for us too?”
“I’m saying the hand that inscribed the law onto tablets of stone had a hole in it.”
In the Gospel of John, the day after John the Baptist has been washing repentant sinners in the Jordan River, John and his disciples see Jesus approaching them. And seeing Mary’s boy, John the Baptist declares an incomprehensible utterance, “Behold…This is the man of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”” Luke’s Gospel makes it clear that John the Baptist comes first in terms of time; Jesus is born after John. And yet Jesus is before John.
Who was it that the prophet Isaiah saw high and lifted up?
To know the gospel is to know to answer: Jesus!
Bonhoeffer’s catechism continues, “Question: What is the greatest commandment?” And notice the deliberate language Bonhoeffer uses.
“Answer: Christ gives the greatest commandment, but Christ gives it in the words of the Old Testament: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. That is the first commandment. The second is equal to it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus gives the commandments— in the Old Testament!
When a scribe attempts up to test Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, asking him which commandment is the most important of all, Jesus knows the answer— not because Jesus knows his Bible well but because he is the God who issued the commandment. Jesus is not antithetical to the law; he is its Author. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law,” Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “I have not come to abolish the commandments but to fulfill them.”
He does not abolish the law.
He gives it.
And then he lives it.
As the begotten of the unbegotten Father, Jesus first reveals the commandments to Moses and later comes to show how they are to be kept.
Joseph of Nazareth, Matthew reports, was a righteous man. Mary, Luke writes, was able to present the whole of her life as holy to the angel, “Behold, I am a handmaiden of the LORD.” Jesus gives the law. Jesus grows up in a home where the law is kept. And then Jesus lives the law— in obedience, all the way unto death, even death on a cross; so that, the law, once weakened by the flesh and the Powers of Sin and Death, might be fulfilled.
For you.
For you to take up.
“I’m saying the hand that inscribed the law onto tablets of stone had a hole in it.”
“So we have to obey it?” she asked, suddenly concerned.
“Not have to,” I said, “That’s not gospel. You get to try to obey it. But obey it like Jesus— that just is life itself.”
“I’m going to have to think about that,” she answered after several seconds.
“Don’t think about it,” I replied. “Jesus doesn’t want your opinion. He wants your obedience.”
Last Sunday, on the way out of worship Paul Hartley told me that he looked forward to hearing my thoughts on the situation in the Twin Cities, his hometown. Despite my reputation as a contrarian, I both try to do what others ask me to do and avoid political hot takes from the pulpit. Given this passage, I reached out this week to two clergy I trust in Minneapolis. One is a pastor. Another is an Old Testament scholar.
I asked them (what I thought were) simple questions.
What does it feel like where you are? What are you seeing?
I expected different details, maybe different emphases.
What I didn’t anticipate was how different their diagnoses would be, even though they’re describing the same situation moment from the very same perspective of faith.
One pastor wrote back and placed the blame close to home. From his vantage point, the rhetoric of local leaders in Minneapolis is the problem. He spoke of calls to confront ICE in the streets, of a police force pulled away from basic public safety to “babysit” both protesters and federal agents. In his telling, the situation is spiraling because of spectacle-making on both sides, leaving ordinary people less safe. His frustration was palpable— not ideological, but practical.
“This isn’t helping,” he said, “and it’s making life harder for everyone.”
“I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it,” he wrote.
Another pastor wrote from a few blocks away and sounded an entirely different alarm. He didn’t talk much about city leaders or policing logistics. What he named instead was the feeling— the atmosphere. Restaurants are closed. Schools have shifted online because families are afraid to leave home. Churches have quietly drawn up plans for what to do if/when ICE shows up at the door. He described masked agents, guarded entrances, ordinary citizens being stopped and watched, and said it felt disturbingly familiar. He said his mind went not to American politics, but to Chile and Argentina in the 1970s.
“This is what it feels like,” he said. “It’s like in the Nativity story, where Matthew says, “All Jerusalem troubled with Herod.””
“I started as a journalist,” he wrote, “I can name the feeling; I can describe the atmosphere here. But I don’t know what to do.”
Where I sought consensus, they both responded only with confusion. Even close to events on the ground, it can be hard to see. None of us have open eyes. We all have eyes that need to be opened.
The old woman looked like I had tried to smack her Bible from beneath her arm.
“How exactly am I supposed to obey that commandment?” she asked me, “Look around. I don’t even know if we have any illegals around here.”
Notice the prayer’s recurring petition.
Not: Save me from the sting and burden of the law.
But: Show me what obedience entails now.
In other words, Jesus is not Secretary of Afterlife Affairs. Jesus does not rescue you from the burden of being a Christian. Jesus is not an alternative to the obedient life; he is its Author. Just so, Jesus does not excuse us from walking the Way; he opens our eyes to see it. And note not only the content of the prayer but the fact that this is a prayer. This is not an epistle, like the Letter to the Romans. This is not proclamation, like the Sermon on the Mount. This psalm is a prayer.
This psalm about the eye-opening wonder of the law contains no commandments.
Instead this psalm is a prayer, asking to be shown how to obey the commandments.
This is a supplication, an appeal, a plea.
It ought to chasten us in our certainty and self-righteousness that the longest chapter of the Bible, the most sustained attention in all of the scriptures on the law and the doing of God’s will is, in fact, a prayer for guidance and illumination. Open my eyes, LORD! In other words, Jesus not only gives the law to Moses, Jesus not only empowers us to follow the law, Jesus alone enables us to understand it. Left to ourselves, on our own, God’s will for our lives, in our world, can never be self-evident.
In order to know what to do, in order to know how to do what you ought to do, you’ve got to pray. Only prayer— not wisdom or knowledge. Only prayer— not advice or Facebook posts. Only prayer— not what talking heads or political activists say. Only prayer leads to discernment; because, just as the commandments are revelation, obedience itself never ceases to be grace, gift.
“How exactly am I supposed to obey that commandment?” she asked me, “Look around. I don’t even know if we have any illegals around here.”
“Pray,” I said, “Ask Jesus. He’ll help you see what it means for you.”
“And what if I don’t much like what he shows me?”
“Then be glad that Jesus not only has a will,” I continued, “He has a body— the church. Obedience is never a solitary endeavor. It’s a way you get to walk with others.”
To disobey is to cease to be. “If the law disappeared from the world,” Bonhoeffer writes, “we would fall into nothingness.”
Robert Jenson continues in his own catechism:
“It would seem to follow that not to obey God’s commandments is not to be. It would seem further to follow that if I once am disobedient, I cannot again obey, there now being no one there to do so. And these are indeed the drastic truths [of the scriptures]: sin is death, and renewal of obedience demands nothing less than re-creation.”
He’s right. The Bible says so. The wages of sin are death. But it’s not a sudden death. It’s a slow, at first unnoticeable, disintegration.
And this would be a fatal, permanent problem for us indeed if the LORD did not delight in resurrections. He does them all the time— at least every Sunday, in fact.
Open your eyes!
Jesus has not only a will but a body. The loaf and the cup are him. He said so! Taking him at his word is your first act of obedience.
Open your eyes!
In bread and wine, to sinful, vanishing you, he gives nothing less than himself.
Open your ears, and hear the good news!
Each time you take and eat, every day you feast on him by faith, you are born again and again and again.
Come to the table so that you might be risen indeed.
And enter the world again with opened eyes.
