Psalm 146 is a bit of an unusual psalm, or at least an unexpected psalm. It’s structured as a song of praise, beginning and ending with “Hallelujah!” which we translate into English as “Praise the Lord!”—but the heart of the psalm is instruction. That’s out of the ordinary, but what makes it particularly unexpected is where it’s placed in the psalter. I said a few weeks ago that the book of Psalms has a five-part conclusion, a sequence of five psalms which all both begin and end with “Hallelujah!” This is the first of those five, and it’s not what you might think the psalm in that position would be. You might expect the conclusion of the book to begin with a comprehensive catalog of reasons to praise God, like Psalm 145, or a sweeping invitation to all creation to praise him, like Psalm 148, but that’s not what the editor who assembled this book gave us. Instead, we get this psalm, which is more a teaching psalm than anything else, in which praise to God critiques our tendency to misplace our trust and then godly teaching inspires praise. Biblically, if something is unexpected it’s probably significant, and I think that’s the case here. I also argued a few weeks ago that the placement of Psalm 1 as the opening to the book calls us to understand our worship as God’s torah, his instruction; Psalm 146 begins the book’s conclusion with an explicit example of exactly that.
The instruction in this psalm is in two parts, negative and positive. First, it tells us where our help is not, beginning in verse 3. I’ve long called this my first political principle: “Put not your trust in princes, in ordinary mortals who cannot save.” Why? Because they’re bad? No; some of them are good, as humans go. Don’t put your trust in the good ones either, because even they can’t save you. Even the best of them die, and all they create eventually dies, and even the best are imperfectly faithful. We keep trying to put the weight of our need for salvation on our political leaders and systems, and they just cannot bear it. No politician and no political system will ever be up to that task.
That’s not just true of politicians, either, it’s any human leaders (including pastors!). Every last one of us is unequal to that sort of trust, for three reasons. One, our sin corrupts our plans. Two, our smallness limits our plans. They are limited in their reach; they are limited in the understanding that shapes and guides them; they are limited in the human and material resources to carry them out, which are necessarily finite. Three, our death cuts short our plans. Whatever we leave behind is in the hands of others to do with as they will; they become someone else’s plans, which may be anything. As Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interrèd with their bones.”
Second, Psalm 146 tells us where our hope is. There are, again, two parts to this. Verses 5-7a are a beatitude declaring the one who hopes in the Lord to be blessed, for the Lord is faithful forever. He does not die, so his plans are never cut short. He made everything that is, which means he is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere always present, so his plans are unlimited, unflawed, and uncompromised. He has no darkness in him, so his plans are always perfectly good. This is the help you want on your side, and the one in which you want to place your hope and trust. Verses 7b-9 give praise to God, picking up the emphasis in the last two lines of the beatitude on how God views and relates to humanity. There are a couple different aspects to this. The psalmist praises God for his compassionate goodness, expressed in his care for the vulnerable, the friendless, and the needy; he also praises God for his moral goodness, seen in his love for the righteous and the ruin he brings on the wicked. The linchpin connecting them is the description of God as the one who executes justice for the oppressed, raising up the vulnerable and bringing the plans of the wicked to nothing.
So then, you might be asking, what does that have to do with Luke 24? Nothing directly, but if we work them back and forth against each other I think some interesting things emerge. Look at 24:16, which demands our attention: “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” We talked a couple weeks ago, looking at Psalm 118, about the divine passive; if you weren’t here, it’s a technique the biblical authors used to avoid using God’s name so as to avoid taking his name in vain. Instead of writing, “God did x,” you would say, “x was done.” Who did it? Well, everybody knows you mean that God did it, you’re just saying so indirectly. So is Luke saying God did it? Yes, but maybe not in the way you’re thinking. He’s not saying these two disciples would have recognized Jesus if God hadn’t prevented it. Rather, I think they did not recognize Jesus when he caught up with them on the road, and we can fairly say God kept them from recognizing him in that he chose not to open their eyes at that time.
From a human perspective, the eyes of these disciples were blinded by knowledge. This is a normal human reality—which might sound like a nonsense thing to say, but it’s true. Our view of the world often blinds us to what’s around us. We see what we’re looking for, and we only look for things that fit our framework of what is possible. To pick a silly example, if I need the cumin and I’m looking for the wrong sort of container—maybe a tin from Kroger instead of a clear plastic thing from Meijer—I can go through four shelves of the pantry and not find it when there’s a container sitting right in front with a label that reads, “Cumin.” My possibility framework does not include the cumin looking like that and so I don’t see it when I’m looking right at it. We see what we believe is possible; if we know something can’t be there, we don’t see it.
So it was for these two disciples. They knew Jesus had died. This was absolutely correct knowledge. From this they presumed he was still dead; this happened to be wrong, but was a perfectly reasonable thing to think. Sure, a couple of Jesus’ female disciples had brought the report that he had risen from the dead, but remember: in that culture, women could not be called as legal witnesses because they were presumed unreliable. The women reported it, so the men went to go check it out, and they didn’t see Jesus. So, something fishy going on, but Jesus still dead, was where the matter rested for these two; and if Jesus was still dead, then the man who caught them up on the road logically could not be Jesus, so therefore he wasn’t Jesus, just a man who maybe sort of looked like him.
I’m not trying to say the disciples were consciously thinking about Psalm 146, but they knew the lesson of the psalm. They had thought they could put their trust in Jesus, and he had died, and that falsified their trust. He had died, therefore his plans (whatever they may have been) had died with him, therefore he was just another human leader who could not save and their hope had to start all over again from square one. They had been shattered, and they hadn’t even figured out what pieces were still left to them. You can’t blame them for thinking Jesus being dead meant Jesus being dead. From our point in spacetime, we can blame them for not believing the women—but honestly, even if it had been a couple guys bringing the report, it was still an unverified report, and they probably still wouldn’t have believed it. Jesus hadn’t been mostly dead, he’d been all dead, and very all dead at that. In fact, cue Miracle Max and The Princess Bride, the soldiers had gone through his pockets for loose change. The idea he could be alive again was . . . inconceivable.
It’s no surprise these disciples were blind to Jesus standing right there with them. Could he have chosen to correct that directly? Of course, but he didn’t. Instead, he chose to open their eyes to himself by opening their eyes to Scripture. I think here it’s worth bearing in mind the wisdom of the late Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner—you heard from him a couple times last Sunday, and you will again today:
When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.
Jesus has done these two disciples a great grace: he has caught them when they are raw and vulnerable enough to really listen, and so can hear something they never expected. He shows them what has always been there but they have never seen before.
When do they recognize Jesus? When he breaks the bread and gives it to them. In that moment, what is a spiritual reality for us when we celebrate communion is a physical reality for them, and they see what has been right in front of them but they had not truly seen. For them at their table, for us at ours, it’s not about something new appearing but about their eyes and ours coming into focus. Think of Elisha’s servant and the army of God; I preached on that back in February. Buechner captures this more beautifully than anyone in a sermon on the birth of Christ; this is one of the shepherds on the hillside near Bethlehem.
“Night was coming on, and it was cold,” the shepherd said, “and I was terribly hungry. I had finished all the bread I had in my sack, and my gut still ached for more. Then I noticed my friend, a shepherd like me, about to throw away a crust he didn’t want. So I said, ‘Throw the crust to me, friend!’ and he did throw it to me, but it landed between us in the mud where the sheep had mucked it up. But I grabbed it anyway and stuffed it, mud and all, into my mouth. And as I was eating it, I suddenly saw—myself. It was as if I was not only a man eating but a man watching the man eating. And I thought, ‘This is who I am. I am a man who eats muddy bread.’ And I thought, ‘The bread is very good.’ And I thought, ‘Ah, and the mud is very good too.’ So I opened my muddy man’s mouth full of bread, and I yelled to my friends, ‘By God, it’s good, brothers!’ And they thought I was a terrible fool, but they saw what I meant. We saw everything that night, everything. Everything!
“Can I make you understand, I wonder? Have you ever had this happen to you? You have been working hard all day. You’re dog-tired, bone-tired. So you call it quits for a while. You slump down under a tree or against a rock or something and just sit there in a daze for half an hour or a million years, I don’t know, and all this time your eyes are wide open looking straight ahead someplace, but they’re so tired and glassy they don’t see a thing. Nothing. You could be dead for all you notice. Then, little by little, you begin to come to, then your eyes begin to come to, and all of a sudden you find out you’ve been looking at something the whole time except it’s only now you really see it—one of the ewe lambs maybe, with its foot caught under a rock, or the moon scorching a hole through the clouds. It was there all the time, and you were looking at it all the time, but you didn’t see it till just now.
“That’s how it was this night, anyway. Like finally coming to—not things coming out of nowhere that had never been there before, but things just coming into focus that had been there always. And such things! The air wasn’t just emptiness anymore. It was alive. Brightness everywhere, dipping and wheeling like a flock of birds. And what you always thought was silence stopped being silent and turned into the beating of wings, thousands and thousands of them. Only not just wings, as you came to more, but voices—high, wild, like trumpets. The words I could never remember later, but something like what I’d yelled with my mouth full of bread. ‘By God, it’s good, brothers! The crust. The mud. Everything. Everything!’”
We put our trust in princes when we fail to see God at work; and too often, we fail to see him at work because, spiritually speaking, our eyes are out of focus. Which is no surprise—we see as the world has trained us to see, and the world doesn’t particularly want us to see God at work. It wants us focused on our physical circumstances because that’s what it can use to sell us stuff, from the grocery store to the furniture store to the realtor to the accountant to the political campaign. If we let the Holy Spirit teach us to see deeper and more truly, to bring deeper reality into focus, we can set aside our trust in princes—who will inevitably fail us—without lapsing into cynicism or withdrawal; instead, we can find wonder, and a trust that will never be betrayed.
Let me close by returning to Buechner, and letting his shepherd finish the story.
“Oh well. If you think we were out of our minds, you are right, of course. And do you know, it was just like being out of jail. I can see us still. The squint-eyed one who always complained of sore feet. The little sawed-off one who could outswear a Roman. The young one who blushed like a girl. We all tore off across that muddy field like drunks at a fair, and drunk we were, crazy drunk, splashing through a sea of wings and moonlight and the silvery wool of the sheep. Was it night? Was it day? Did our feet touch the ground?
“‘Shh, shh, you’ll wake up my guests,’ said the Innkeeper we met coming in the other direction with his arms full of wood. And when we got to the shed out back, one of the three foreigners who were there held a finger to his lips.
“At the eye of the storm, you know, there’s no wind—nothing moves—nothing breathes—even silence keeps silent. So hush now. Hush. There he is. You see him? You see him?
“By Almighty God, brothers. Open your eyes. Listen.”
Photo taken February 8, 2017. Artist unknown. Public domain. Image has been cropped to fit.