Homily preached at Morning Prayer in St Luke’s Chapel
Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut
February 22, 2017 / Wednesday after Epiphany VII
Psalm 119:145-176
My eyes are open in the night watches, that I may meditate upon your promise. (Ps 119:148)
More than any other psalm, Psalm 119 is an extended meditation on the Law. This is the most elaborate of the psalms; it is in both content and form a tribute to the perfection the Psalmist finds in the law of the Lord. C.S. Lewis points out that this is not a poem, not really. “It is a pattern,” he says, “a thing done like embroidery, stitch by stitch, through long, quiet hours, for the love of the subject” (Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, 68).
Whether this comes through in translation I will leave to you to decide, but you can hear throughout the portion read this morning the Psalmist’s love, his passionate devotion, to the Law. He rings the changes on it, moving almost mathematically through the various incarnations of the Law of the Lord. Starting at verse 153, he acclaims God’s law, his promise, statutes, judgments, decrees, word, commandments.
Many of these words, in Hebrew, are intimately related to one another. When the Psalmist writes, My eyes are open in the night watches, that I may meditate upon your promise, the word he uses for “promise” (בְּאִמְרָתֶֽךָ) at root means “commandment, speech, word” (Strong’s 565). The same is true in the previous verse: the “word” (לִדְבָרְךָ֥) in which the Psalmist places his trust is one that is not written, but spoken. This suggests some very resonant Old Testament imagery: God’s “law” is something enacted by means of God’s speech, like the prophesies – through the familiar formula, “thus saith the Lord” – and even like the creation itself – and God said, let there be light.
So when we revisit this verse of Psalm 119, we might hear it this way: My eyes are open in the night watches, that I may meditate on your spoken word.
But it is not merely the creation or the Law or the prophets on which we meditate, because God’s spoken word is his Son Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, by whom all things were made. Jesus, as we heard yesterday morning, came “not to abolish but to fulfill” the Law and the prophets (Matt 5:17). He can do this because Jesus himself is the definition of God’s every promise, Jesus himself is the means of God’s judgments, Jesus himself is the content of God’s statutes.
When we meditate on Jesus Christ in the night watches, we are empowered for our work in the world. St Paul tells us, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). It is only by this renewal in Christ that we may hope to find the transformation we seek, the transformation that we hope to bring to the world by means of “the fragrance that comes from knowing him” (2 Cor 2:14). Our lives as Christians – and our work as Christians – they begin with this spiritual renewal, and we know that the outward and visible is nothing without the inward and spiritual.
It’s no secret that we live in a time of uncertainty and division, both in the world and in the church, so let us ask ourselves: During these night watches, will the fragrance of Christ go out from us? Will we lead the church in transformation by the renewal of our minds, as we meditate on him who is God’s promise, who is God’s Word, who is Jesus Christ?
AMEN.