# Psalm Sunday

It’s Sunday again, so neither of us really ought to be here. Yet here we both are. If I was doling out Ben-Them like God allotting Manna I’d give you two episodes on Saturdays so you could save one over for Sunday, but I’m not and I don’t so you can’t.

I was surprised to learn that my friend Emily doesn’t like chocolate, and my godson David doesn’t like music. When I told my Japanese students, who I help practice conversational English, that I don’t like mushrooms, they were agog. Disliking mushrooms seemed to them absurd, as if mushrooms were in the small category of things that everybody accepts by default.

An equivalent Christian revelation might be that I don’t like the Psalms very much. I hear from tons of people who absolutely love the book of Psalms, those 150 sung prayers which range from worship to desperation, to appeals for salvation or vengeance, then back to worship again. So many worship songs are based on the psalms, but I’m rarely inclined to sit down and read one. I do, sometimes, if I think ‘I’d like to read some Bible today but I don’t think it matters what bit’, which is possibly an unhelpful attitude to take. Good that I’m reading some. Maybe not good that I’m selecting it on a whim. Hmmm, pick a number from 1 to 150, and hope it’s not a long one. The whole Bible is good and edifying, but if I’m turning it over to chance, I may well be approaching it with the wrong mood and mindset.

What can I say. I like narrative. I like proverbs and histories. I like the philosophy of Ecclesiastes or Job, or the spiritual guidance of the epistles, or whatever’s going on in the second half of Daniel. In the psalms I get emotions without people attached. For a lot of people Psalms are the highest highlight, but for me they’re a sorbet. I don’t dislike sorbet, but I’d rather eat a big porridge.

My favourite psalm, though, is Psalm 8. It’s short, so I’ll read it.

O Lord, our Lord,

How excellent *is* Your name in all the earth,

Who have set Your glory above the heavens!

Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants

You have ordained strength,

Because of Your enemies,

That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

What is man that You are mindful of him,

And the son of man that You visit him?

For You have made him a little lower than the angels,

And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;

You have put all *things* under his feet,

All sheep and oxen—

Even the beasts of the field,

The birds of the air,

And the fish of the sea

That pass through the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord,

How excellent *is* Your name in all the earth!

That’s it! I like it! It’s good!

Verse 4 and 5 get particular attention:

“What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
5For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.”

The NIV translation puts verse 4 like this:

“what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” which I prefer for its gender-neutrality, but it often comes up as a test case in discussions of gender-neutral translations, because: some argue these verses are about humans. That humanity is a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour, given dominion over the earth’, while others argue verse 4 should remain ‘the son of man’, and that these verses are explicitly about Jesus - a prophecy of his place under God but over the things of the Earth, written 1,000 years before his birth. The writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews quotes that verse to make it the link explicit. ‘****But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.’

But what was the intention of the psalmist, and does it matter? I tend to reckon a song can be about two things and a prophecy can be about two things. I’ve heard it argued that, in the Bible, every prophecy is about two things: one in the short term and one yet to come. The psalmist might have written the psalm with an eye on humanity, but the words were meant for another meaning too. Writing is a funny thing. Writing the scripture, probably doubly-so. The psalms all want a bit of interpretation, so read them alertly and interestedly, and ideally aloud, and certainly with prayer. It’s Sunday so that’s all I’m saying.