Psalm 147—Inside the Losing, You Hid Another Life

"You made your rumor run under the wind, wild as wolves..."

Rendition of Psalm 147

Praise the Lord,
For it is good to sing praise to God;
For a song of praise is right and fitting.

God rebuilds Jerusalem,
He gathers together all who have been driven away.
He heals those who carry their wounds within them
And binds up all their brokenness.
He knows the number of the heavenly host
And gives them all their names.
Great is the Lord and great is his power;
His understanding is beyond measure.
The Lord lifts the humble up again,
But the wicked he lays low.
Sing to him with confession and thanks;
Give God all the song you have.
He covers the heavens with darkness and clouds;
He prepares rain for the earth;
He makes grass grow on the mountains.
He gives the animals their food,
And feeds the young ravens that call out to him.

His greatest delight is not in the strength of a horse,
Nor in human swiftness,
But the Lord delights in those who fear him,
Who hope in his unchanging love.

Praise the Lord, Jerusalem!
Praise your God, O Zion!
For he strengthens your gates,
And blesses your children.
He sets your land at peace;
And fills you with the finest wheat.
He sends out his commands in all the earth;
His word runs swiftly out from him.
He sends snow like wool;
He scatters frost like ashes.
He flings hail like crumbs;
Who can stand before his cold?
He sends his word and melts them;
He makes the wind blow and the waters run.
He makes his word known to Jacob,
And declares his judgments to Israel.
He has not done this for any other nation,
They do not know his law.

Praise the Lord!

Notes on the Rendition

“Praise the Lord!"

The psalm starts and ends with the same phrase, “praise the Lord!” Units of biblical text that start and end with symmetrical lines or ideas should signal us that a chiasm might be lurking about. James Hamilton, in his biblical theological commentary on the Psalms, says that is exactly what is happening in Psalm 147.

A chiasm is a literary pattern that builds meaning by nesting repetitions inside one another. They are all over the Bible, both in poetic and narrative sections. They can be as small as a couplet or as long as a whole book. Chiasms use repetition to highlight the writer’s main idea, make comparisons, and connect the main idea to other subtopics.

They have a symmetrical structure that can look like this:

• A

  • B

    • C

      • D: The center of the chiasm is often a really important idea

    • C2

  • B2

• A2

We might map out the chiasm in Psalm 147 like this:

• A Praise the Lord (147:1).

  • B God rules his creation with power and love (147:2-9).

    • C What pleases Yahweh (147:10-11).

  • B2 God rules his creation with power and love (147: 12-18).

• A2 Praise the Lord (147: 19-20).

I’ve changed the stanza breaks on my rendition of the Psalm above to highlight that structure.

“God rebuilds Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem is more than Jerusalem. By that I mean, the meaning of the city of Jerusalem in the Bible is much larger than the actual physical city of Jerusalem, though plenty of important things happen in and around the actual city. Rather, you can tell the whole story of the Bible through the lens of God trying to rebuild a place where he can dwell with his people again in perfect peace and harmony, the city of God. Throughout the story, the city pops up here and there only to fall short of becoming the true and ultimate Jerusalem. Then, in Revelation 21:3 we read,

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God.”

And, sure enough, it is the arrival of the heavenly Jerusalem, the new Creation, that is being announced. In that sense, rebuilding Jerusalem is not a side-project for the Lord. The psalmist begins Psalm 147 by evoking God’s main work in salvation history.

“He makes grass grow on the mountains.”

The Psalms are happy to praise God for the mundane and the spectacular alike. He is the God who “knows the number of the heavenly host” and the God who makes it rain on a tiny patch of land so that grass can grow. There is nothing so common and ordinary that we can’t look to it and see the works of a God whose “understanding is beyond measure” and who gives his care and attention even to “young ravens who call out to him.” The psalm makes no distinction between the supposedly “spiritual” things God does (humbling the proud, sending his commands through all the earth, healing the brokenhearted) and the supposedly “secular” and earthly things he does (making clouds, feeding birds, scattering frost). It is all spiritual because God is in it all.

The distinction between “sacred” and “secular” is entirely human-made. It got smuggled into modern Christianity as detritus from the unbiblical thinking of an earlier age and we can’t quite seem to shake it. When we think about what we might do to please God, we think about praying, being moral, reading the Bible, etc. But we don’t think about mowing the grass. However, if we reduce the realm of the “spiritual” to overtly religious tasks, we have disowned the view of God and of reality which the Psalms are coaxing, wooing, and calling us to adopt. As the Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole of creation over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”

Therefore, if it is a spiritual act when God makes the grass grow, then it is also spiritual when we mow it.

Notes on the Poem

Connections Between the Poems

These poems are beginning to talk to one another. Frequent readers will recognize this poem in dialogue with the poems for Psalm 88 (“She pressed her hand to the wall and rattled/in the space between two trains.”), Psalm 46 (the setting of the English L’Abri), Psalm 1 (birds bursting from cover), Psalm 34 (the epigraph), and Psalm 84 (the sunlight on surfaces). There is more of that to come. As the project grows, the themes and interlinkages between the poems and psalms will grow too.

“Cascading in the Summer hollyhocks grow head high and higher.”

Last week in England the hollyhocks were just past their bloom. The plants sprout flowers on a long stalk and then tip over and fall down. T. S. Eliot, also a resident of southern England, wrote about them in the Four Quartets:

“What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?”

The Four Quartets often appears in this project, but these lines have popped up in the Darkling Psalter more than any other lines of his: snowdrops in Psalm 1 and Psalm 88, late roses and snow in Psalm 121, and now the hollyhocks in Psalm 147.

Poem for Psalm 147—Inside the Losing, You Hid Another Life

For Miranda.

I.

She gives you thanks, O God,
That you made your rumor run 
Under the wind, wild as wolves, 
Catching, coy, quicksilver—
Purple in fingers picking blackberries,
Gasping in the azaleas,
Cascading in Summer hollyhocks 
Grown head high and higher. It is there 
In the throaty chuckle of the ravens brooding 
Like a gang of a black toads in the oak trees.
It is there at the spot where they found the fox den
When the kits showed themselves before going to ground.
Suddenly, the ravens burst from their cover and threw shadows
Down on her that almost had substance. 

So your love passes in bright, slow time.
So you show yourself to her and dance away.

II.

She gives you thanks, O God,
That all that year she was a skein of something
Hoping to be raveled. You heard her prayers
But didn’t answer as she begged for blessings
And answers that would have ruined her. 
So she pressed her hand to the wall and rattled
In the space between two trains,
Waiting for it to pass. 
Meanwhile, every Saturday the choir came 
To practice Sunday’s songs
And she listened from another room.
Every night, the grace gathered
Around the table at dinner,
In the hallowed halls of the real world 
Ready to be passed again from hand to hand
In bits of bread and rolled grandly into cups of wine.
She walked the lane and was harrowed.
The trees were all louder 
Than she could remember them being.
She was arrested mid-stride
By the way the light fell on things.
She joined the lyric of the lives of others
And fell into conversation to the clatter of tea things
With people who were kind to her.
After dark, the stars crowded the sky
As if it was the world’s last night.
Her breath steamed up at them
And slowly the fear crept upon her and it was good.

So you sometimes curve strange mercies down on us.
So inside the losing, you hid another life.

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Psalms: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74, 75, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 100, 107, 110, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 142, 147, 148.

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