Psalm 118 is a psalm of triumph. We have a number of voices speaking in this psalm, but the central voice is the king, and he and the people with him are praising God for victory in battle. What king? What battle? Victory over what nation or coalition? We don’t know. In typical fashion, the author of the psalm has left all that bit out so the psalm can be used as widely as possible. We do know the truly important details, however. It was a victory against overwhelming odds, in defiance of all human expectation; as far as the folks on the other side were concerned, the only thing left to do was run up the score. There’s an indication that the enemies the king faced were domestic as well as foreign, and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. The main point is that this is not a victory won by the king, this is God’s victory, and so the king is leading a triumphal procession through the streets of Jerusalem to the temple, bringing a rich thanks offering to lay on God’s altar.
The psalmist here draws heavily on the “Song of the Sea,” recorded in Exodus 15, which is Moses’ song of praise after God has parted the waters for Israel to pass through, then brought them crashing back down on the Egyptian army. Both poems end at the temple of God on Mt. Zion—obviously Moses is envisioning a future reality rather than describing a present one, but the parallel is striking all the same. The psalmist borrows a fair bit of language from Moses; Psalm 118:14 (“The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation”) is the first half of Exodus 15:2, while 118:28 strongly echoes the second half. Verses 15-16 of the psalm, following the direct quote from Exodus 15:2, echo the language of Exodus 15:6 and 15:12.
Verses 14-16 are at least part of what the king and his followers are shouting as they move through the streets of the city—they are quoting Moses’ song of deliverance as they process toward the temple. This is a way of setting the present victory in the context of God’s mighty acts of deliverance in the past. Doing so establishes, one, the God of Israel has not changed, but continues to be both faithful and powerful to deliver those with whom he has made covenant; and two, this victory is one more step in God’s ongoing salvation of his people.
This psalm is irony-rich, beginning with the fact that the victory it celebrates was a reversal of all expectations. The irony reaches its peak after the king arrives at the temple. In verse 19 we see him give the sign to the guard at the temple gates; in verse 20, he receives the countersign and is allowed to enter. He then begins giving thanks to God in verse 21—and in verse 22, we get perhaps the greatest reversal of all. The ESV obscures this a little, sadly, in following the older translation “cornerstone,” because the meaning of that word has become much more specific over the centuries. What’s in view here is not the first stone laid in a new building, which provides your zero/zero point for the building’s dimensions. The point here, rather, is that this stone has become the keystone. The keystone of an arch holds the integrity of the arch and makes it work; it transfers the weight of the wall above it outward and down the arch to its vertical supports. It is the prize stone in that section of the wall, because if it breaks under the pressure, the wall is coming down. That’s why it’s often emphasized in some way.
The stone the builders rejected has become the keystone. “Has become” is what’s called a divine passive, which was a common way for Old Testament writers to say God did something without having to use his name. The builders rejected the stone, but God trumped them and made it the keystone of the arch. Now, this is the temple—it’s God’s building; but who are the builders? The leaders of Israel. In the same way, the nation is God’s building, but the leaders are those entrusted to do the work of building it, and it seems they were trying to take over the project. This is why I said earlier it looks like the king was fighting enemies among his own people who were trying to seize the throne. The leaders of Israel rejected God’s chosen one because they wanted to build the nation with their own materials—their own chosen one as king, set in place by their own chosen methods. Instead of bowing before the power of God, they tried to use the power of his enemies, foreign armies which worshiped idols, to build Israel in their image. Their efforts failed, because God’s power was greater than anything they could muster.
The king rightly declares his survival and the victory he experienced on the battlefield to be miraculous. It is the Lord’s doing first to last. There is no one else to credit, and no one else to blame; there is simply no other possible explanation. Not even all human power and all human brilliance can encompass his deliverance, and so there is nothing to do but give thanks.
Now, this psalm intersects with our New Testament text this morning because Psalm 118 had come to be a standard part of the Passover feast. Given the way it reaches back to God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, it makes perfect sense that it would be included in the yearly celebration, of that deliverance; and there’s more to it than that. There’s a sequence of six psalms, 113-18, which came to be sung at the great feasts of the Jewish year, but which were especially closely associated with Passover; it was labeled the “Egyptian Hallel,” hallel being the Hebrew word meaning “praise.” They’re not all directly connected with the Exodus, but they all fit together. Psalm 113 opens the sequence with praise to God for raising up the downtrodden, leading in to 114 which directly celebrates the Exodus in extraordinarily vivid language. 115 praises God as Israel’s help, contrasting Israel with the nations, whose gods were dead things of their own making. 116 is a personal song of praise and thanksgiving for deliverance, while 117 is a brief summons to all nations to leave their idols and worship the one true God. 118, closing the sequence, draws these themes together as a coherent whole.
During the Passover celebration, there were four cups raised and blessed over the course of the meal. The last four psalms of the Egyptian Hallel were recited all together during the fourth cup. That cup thus becomes the cup of salvation and the sacrifice of thanksgiving referred to in Psalm 116, themes which are then picked up in 118, which celebrates the Lord’s salvation of his people and ends with the sacrifice of thanksgiving being laid, bound, on the altar of the temple. With all of this, especially if those scholars are correct who think the Passover pilgrims would have been reciting the Egyptian Hallel on their journey to Jerusalem along with the Songs of Ascent (Psalms 120-134), you can see why Psalm 118 would have been very much on the minds of the crowds in Jerusalem. Fittingly, that position in the celebration of the Passover meal also meant it would be the last psalm Jesus and his disciples would share before his crucifixion.
As we say this, we need to recognize that in shouting “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” the crowds are in fact quoting Psalm 118:25-26, even if they then go beyond that. Which is to say, “Hosanna!” is not a shout of praise—it means “Save us, we pray!” Which, if you think about it, is an odd note in the psalm in its original context, crying out for salvation in the middle of celebrating the salvation God just accomplished. Maybe it’s the recognition that any political or military salvation is temporary at best; at worst, I guess, it’s pure illusion, like Neville Chamberlain coming back from Munich in 1938 proclaiming “peace in our time.” If that’s the kind of salvation we’re looking for, I suppose there’s nothing to do but keep praying God will keep saving us, as each deliverance only lines us up for the next crisis.
The plea for salvation slots more neatly into the usage of this psalm in the Passover observance. We don’t know when that began, but it seems safe to say it was at some point after the people of Israel returned to Jerusalem from exile. After that physical return to the Promised Land, they began comparing the circumstances they saw around them with the promises God had made through prophets like Isaiah, because they didn’t line up. Jewish teachers came to the conclusion that though they were back in their own land, the exile hadn’t really ended; the new exodus Isaiah had promised was still in the future, awaiting the coming of the Messiah. Given that the Messiah is the heir of David and Psalm 118 is a royal psalm, including it in the Passover celebration is a way of praying for and looking for the Messiah and the new exodus. It’s the same prayer, but on a much bigger scale: “God, you saved us before—please save us again!”
That’s where we get the messianic edit offered by the crowds in Mark 11:10: “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” From their understanding, they aren’t changing the meaning of the original psalm at all, they’re just making it more explicit. Including Psalm 118, with its prayer for salvation, in the Passover ceremony had been abstract, theoretical, future-oriented—until the day when the crowds identified the Messiah coming through the gates of the city. As the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner observes, “those who took part in such a ceremony could never have foreseen . . . that it would one day suddenly enact itself on the road to Jerusalem: unrehearsed, unliturgical, and with explosive force.” Which, of course, completely freaked out the powers that be; which, of course, was part of God’s plan that no one saw coming. The crowds’ identification of the Messiah was correct. Their understanding of what that meant was cosmically wrong.
So, what should we learn from them? How then shall we sing? I would like to suggest two things this morning. One, their faith in the promises of God should be a model to us. Every Passover, in reciting or singing the Egyptian Hallel, they declared with Psalm 116, “You have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living”; then, a few minutes later, with Psalm 118, “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord. The Lord has disciplined me severely, but he has not given me over to death,” followed swiftly by its urgent plea for God’s salvation. It would be easy for those words to become rote and dead, just a nice idea that isn’t how the world works. It would be equally easy to spiritualize them away from any real-world meaning. Either of those approaches would be ways of avoiding the constant collision of hope and disappointment, paying lip service to God’s care for his people without actually expecting anything from him. Whatever these approaches might sacrifice, they would be psychologically safe—and that’s worth a lot. The pilgrim crowds don’t do that. They keep hope bubbling on the front burner.
Second, we need to watch our “therefore”s. The crowds see Jesus and cry out, “This is the Messiah!” Yes! “This is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Yes! “This is the answer to our prayers to God to save us!” Yes! Therefore, Jesus is the conquering hero who will drive out the Romans and restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations! . . . No! They had everything right up to the “therefore,” and everything wrong from there; and so, in just a few days the crowds acclaiming Jesus as Messiah now will be goaded by the powers that be into screaming for his blood—not really because they were “fickle” but because their expectations had been betrayed. What they failed to see (in part because the Jewish leaders hustled them along before they could) was that the problem was not with Jesus but with their expectations.
If we’re honest, we’re no better in that way than the crowds were. When something exciting, or potentially exciting, happens, we think we can figure out what it means, and thus discover what’s coming next. Our focus shifts from what’s in front of us to what could be—and unfortunately, the temptation to wishcasting is both strong and insidious, and our ability to justify believing what we want to believe seems effectively limitless. We end up forming our judgments about our circumstances and the choices we face based not on what is but on what we think might be, and what we want to see happen.
The problem with therefore is it’s terribly easy to be far too sure of it, and thus to put far too much weight on it. When we evaluate life by therefore, we set ourselves up for trouble and grief. We forget the truth of the observation that “making predictions is hard, especially about the future.” We think we see something good coming, and we grab hold with both hands. We let ourselves believe it’s bound to happen because this and this and that happened, not realizing—or not admitting to ourselves—that our hope is no more solid than a pipe dream and no more stable than a will o’the wisp. When it fails us and fades away, where are we then?
When we base our view of God on therefore, we make it harder to have faith, and easier to lose hope. Often, when people talk about putting their faith in God, what they really mean is this: there is some thing out there in which they want to put their faith—a career opportunity, a new relationship, a financial windfall—and they are putting their faith in God to give them that thing so they can put their faith in it instead of in him. When this is our approach to God, we end up judging his faithfulness to us not by what he actually promised but by what we wanted those promises to mean. God not doing what we want becomes reason to question his goodness, his power, or both, and we assume if we feel defeated, so does God.
We need to recognize that when we say, “God promised this, therefore that,” everything after the “therefore” is from us, and may not have anything to do with what God is actually on about. We’re called to hold fast to our faith in God not in any generic sense but as one who has made promises to us which we can trust him to keep. Our understanding of what those promises mean, though? That, we need to hold with open hands. Follow Jesus today, for this day; take this step because it’s the next step we see; trust he is guiding our feet even when we can’t feel it, and trust him for the rest. We can release the anxiety that we need to make life work for ourselves. We can release the fear that if life doesn’t work the way we want, it means we’ve failed. We can even release our hopes, trusting that he will hold them better than we can, for he truly knows us, what we need, and what’s good for us better than we ever could. Our hopes are usually too small because our vision is too small; his is perfect.
Will this be easy? No. We follow the Crucified One, and if we’re following him and that’s the road he walked . . . well, you can do the math. We cling to our ideas of the future not just because we want pleasure and success but also because we want to avoid pain and loss and failure; releasing our grip means admitting those things will come, and accepting them as part of God’s plan for us. Our hope is that the Crucified One is also the Risen Lord, and that resurrection is at the center of his purpose. We can trust him for the dark road and the valley of the shadow of death. We can trust him for the low points, the times we fail, and the times we fall. We can trust him because when those times come, he’s already there with us, and he will never leave us nor forsake us. Amen? Amen. Let’s pray.
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