Psalm 50:1-6
Deus deorum
The Mighty One, God the Lord,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to its setting.
2 Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God shines forth.
3 Our God comes; he does not keep silence;
before him is a devouring fire,
around him a mighty tempest.
4 He calls to the heavens above
and to the earth, that he may judge his people:
5 “Gather to me my faithful ones,
who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!”
6 The heavens declare his righteousness,
for God himself is judge! Selah
If we read the entire psalm, then we realize these first six verses are the opening for it. I see Psalm 50 as God calling his people to account, both the faithful and the wicked. The word “Selah” doesn’t have a clear meaning but is thought to mean that the reader of the psalm is to pause at that point. If we were to read the entire psalm, perhaps the directive to pause is so that we sit with the picture just painted for us in these first six verses so that we are in the right frame of mind for what is about to follow.
God, the Lord, the Mighty One. That’s three names, three ideas of God that we are to consider. He is God. He is the Lord. He is the Mighty One. It is interesting that none of those ideas offer seeing God as father. So in summoning His people he is seen as Lord, God or the Mighty One. “speaks and summons the earth” The picture I get of from that phrase is of a judge coming into his courtroom. When someone has been “summonsed”, what comes to mind is that they have no choice but to appear in court to testify. A summons mandates that one has to appear in court. So the picture that is being painted is of God, the Lord, the Mighty One, summoning His creation and they have no choice but to appear before Him. The entirety of His creation. All of the earth. From the rising to the setting of the sun.
Out of Zion, the city of God, the city of God’s people, the mountain where the temple of the Lord, God, the Mighty One, resides. The beautiful picture of God on a mountain in a temple among his people, giving light to the holy city. Awe as a mixture of fear and power and beauty. Zion is more than just a place. It is God’s vision of His people living in community with Him in their midst. Their communal life centered around Him. God continuing to bring light to His people out of that communal idea.
This idea that God will come loudly with a devouring fire and a raging tempest, reminds us that His nature is love and that love stands against injustice and oppression and all that resists that love. As He summons all on the earth to give account, he comes to rid us of our iniquities with a purifying fire. In the story of Elijah, God is not heard in the great wind, nor the earthquake nor the fire but in the gentle whisper.(1Kings 19) God appears to us in the form we need to be Him in that moment. When being summonsed by God and called to account, God’s people didn’t need Him to be quiet and gentle and soothing. God’s people needed something to shake them up! God’s love for His creation consumes all that is evil among and within us. And we rarely let go without a fight. When purging our hearts, God is not concerned with doing it quietly and gently.
What is spoken in the verses that follow, is God launching into the concept of sacrifice.
7 “Hear, O my people, and I will speak;
O Israel, I will testify against you.
I am God, your God.
8 Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;
your burnt offerings are continually before me.
9 I will not accept a bull from your house
or goats from your folds.
10 For every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
11 I know all the birds of the hills,
and all that moves in the field is mine.
12 “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world and its fullness are mine.
13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?
14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and perform your vows to the Most High,
15 and call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”
16 But to the wicked God says:
“What right have you to recite my statutes
or take my covenant on your lips?
17 For you hate discipline,
and you cast my words behind you.
18 If you see a thief, you are pleased with him,
and you keep company with adulterers.
19 “You give your mouth free rein for evil,
and your tongue frames deceit.
20 You sit and speak against your brother;
you slander your own mother’s son.
21 These things you have done, and I have been silent;
you thought that I was one like yourself.
But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.
22 “Mark this, then, you who forget God,
lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver!
23 The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me;
to one who orders his way rightly
I will show the salvation of God!”
Israel had an elaborate system of sacrifice and offerings and much of their ideas for it came from other religions. It was never God’s idea for sacrifice to take the shape of animals being offered on an alter and he reveals that truth to them here as in other places. Again, God meets us where we are at in the form that we are ready to receive him so he was willing to meet Israel in their borrowed ideas of animal sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice is holy. But the idea of animal sacrifice is pagan, and not of God. At the heart of animal sacrifice is the notion that God is a transactional God: If we offer God something we possess that is valuable to us, God in return will grant us something even more valuable that we long to possess. This distorted view presents God’s goodness and blessings as being conditional upon our goodness and sacrifice. And it ultimately puts us in control. We control God and His blessings and goodness in our lives by how good we are and how well we sacrifice. That theology turns us into Pharisees. We trade a relationship with God into a system of merit. A chart that we get to count our gold stars every time we do something right.
As God summons His people, he opens their eyes to the idea that he does not need(nor want) their sacrifice. They are only offering him what is his anyway! “Thank offerings” were a specific type of offering but now that He has revealed that sacrifice should not involve animals being killed, he is also tearing down their ideas of what a “thank offering” is. He leads them towards a better understanding when he pairs thank offerings with the command to fulfill their vows and then in the final verse he expands it a little more saying that thank offerings prepare the way. Prepare the way for what? “that I may show him the salvation of God”.
I really have no idea what that really means but I get the sense that God is deconstructing this false notion of sacrifice being transactional. And that sacrifice should come from gratitude. Our desire to sacrifice is always good, but only when it comes from a place of recognizing what God has already done for us. It is not giving in the hopes of getting. It is the uncontrollable response we have when we recognize the abundance of God’s goodness in our lives and we want to be like God who gives recklessly and generously out of love. It is giving to and loving our neighbor even when they are ungrateful and undeserving, because we see ourselves before God in their posture. The salvation of God starts with us recognizing what God has done for us and being grateful that it is only because of God’s grace that we are able to see that.
Perhaps it takes God as The Lord and The Mighty One and God for us to be shaken up and recognize his presence in our lives. It is that epiphany that occurs that then allows us to see Christ and see God through His eyes, seeing God as Father. This being the last Sunday of Epiphany, the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday, it prepares us to view the season of Lent through the lens of thankfulness. And from a place of thankfulness we are compelled to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving. We offer a sacrifice by way of abstaining from something good that God offers us, allowing room for our thankfulness to grow even more. That we may then receive his goodness with even more gratitude.