A young political commentator came on a television show this past week and demonstrated great enthusiasm for the subject matter that he was addressing. In the midst of this, and with all good intentions, the young person said something that sounded like this: “In our current era, we realize the importance of social justice. Now we really understand it and what it means.”
He said that with all good intentions, but sitting on my lap and having been on my lap for nearly a week as I listened to the television was a document that was over three thousand years old. The document that I had been looking at was Psalm 72, today’s text. When I read that three thousand or so year old document, I read these words: It is the role of the king, and they pray for the king, to judge the people with righteousness and the poor with justice, and then at the end, the monarch should preserve the poor, should take care of the oppressed and uphold them.
So when I listened to this well intentioned young man, and then I read this three thousand year old document, I thought he hadn’t discovered anything new at all. This is something that from the very beginnings of our faith has been true. That notion of justice for the poor, that notion of freedom for the oppressed, that notion of responsibility for the dependent and the weak, for Psalm 72 has been with us for a long time, and for both Jews and Christians, we have wrestled with Psalm 72.
We have wrestled with it because throughout those three thousand years, and for Christians two thousand years, we have lived under all manner of governments and forms of government. We have lived under monarchies, which is the reign and the rule of an elected or maybe just appointed monarch, a king or a queen. We have lived under oligarchies, where power is concentrated in the hands of one or a few people without any accountability. We have lived under theocracies, where religious people have taken over the power of ruling the country and the nation. We have lived under democracies, where the people elect people to represent them and to govern and to have power. We have lived under what Robert Dahl, the political theorist in the 1950s and 1960s, called a polyarchy, where there are shared levels of government, where power is defused and different forms govern in different ways. We have lived through them all, and probably some that we haven’t even dwelt on.
In this passage from Psalm 72, a prayer either written for the monarch at the time or about the monarch of the time, the desire was that the monarch should exercise justice for the poor, and they should bring righteousness to the needy. It is that very core belief that has been an immutable sense of what God’s will and God’s purpose is, regardless of the different forms of government under which we have lived.
It is also fascinating to realize that Christians have also believed that government, that the rule of law in whatever form that it might take, is part of the order of creation, and that it was God’s will and intention that there be governance, that there be people who are responsible for making sure that the common good is upheld, that there is a reason for law and there is a reason for order, and there is a reason for justice. These are not just things that arise within the minds or the consciousness of any person at any time, but they are part of, an integral part of, our very faith. So Psalm 72 has always been and always will be one of the great standards by which governments and nations and rulers are judged, for at the heart of the belief of the entire Scripture is that all forms of government are ultimately accountable to a higher power.
Now, this Sunday is Epiphany. It is the Sunday when we celebrate the fact that God has revealed God’s self in his Son, that the Lord God, the King of the Universe, has come and dwells among us. From the very beginning, from the very origins of our faith there is the recognition that the whole world comes and worships and adores him. The story that we have of the Magi coming, for example, is highly symbolic. It is a sign that either monarchs or wise men or Magi, the words can be used interchangeably, but clearly leaders, those who are known and identified as kings, come to Jesus, and as Tom Troeger, the great American preacher says, “They pay homage to the Babe of Bethlehem. They bring their gifts, they offer themselves to him, they kneel and they bow before him.”
The exception of course in this story is Herod. Herod, who was the very monarch of the very country in which Jesus had arrived, and of course unlike those who had come from the east who were Gentiles, Herod was threatened by the arrival of this new monarch, this new king, who would bring in the reign of God. Herod, rather than coming and bowing and worshipping before Jesus, tried to trick The Magi.
I must say there are times, particularly in the immediate post-Christmas period, where I get really uncomfortable. I get really uncomfortable because of something that happened to me just in the last few days when I was in a store and I was immediately recognized by a mother and her young child. The mother came up to me – not a member of our church, but had been here at the Pageant – and she immediately came over and started to talk to me.
The young child I think was a little bemused and wasn’t quite sure who I was, so she felt it was important to introduce me to her child, and she introduced me as “The Reverend Herod!” Now, can you imagine if I put that on my calling card? Oh, I had a wonderful pastoral visit, I called on the Reverend Herod, and he was so helpful and caring! Not! I nearly died. I don’t mind playing a part in a pageant, but by gosh, taking on that mantle is too much for me to bear! Why, why is it so disturbing?
It is disturbing precisely because he was antithetical to the reign of God and the coming of the Christ Child. He was the opposite of the wise kings who came and knelt. We don’t know how many kings there were, we know there were three gifts, but nothing more than that. But they represent something that lies deep – believe it or not – within Psalm 72. The reason we read Psalm 72 at Epiphany is because it says the kings of Tarshish and Sheba and Seba will kneel and bow down before the King of Israel. The kings from the east will come and worship the monarch of Israel. This of course for the Early Christians was Jesus. This is what his reign should be. It is a reign that sends a message, and the message is that the reign of God endures. This was the hope, was it not, of Psalm 72: that there would never be an end to the reign of God through the monarch.
I don’t know about you, but every time my little light lights up on my Blackberry to tell me that I have a message, my heart races a little faster than normal. Or, when I get a note “You have mail” on your computer or on your Facebook, a lot of you know what I am talking about, somebody wants to make contact with me. Isn’t this great! And it can be complete nonsense. In the end, it can be advertisements, it can be all kinds of things – it can even be bills. But you are just excited to think deep down that somebody wants to contact you and sends you a message.
For that one moment even until you know what it is. or, you get a letter in the mail and are just dying to open it because you want to know what the sentiment is, or at Christmas what the card says and who it is from. You love to get that kind of message sent to you. Well, the New Testament and the early Christians felt that way about the coming of Jesus. There was an excitement that God had a message and had come and deliver it in person.
The message that was brought was that his kingdom will endure, and that the reign of God, even in the dark times such as the time in which Jesus arrived, would nevertheless still be confirmed by the power and the presence of God. Nobody picks this up greater and has more influence on the way in which I think we read Psalm 72 than the great Sir Isaac Watts. He wrote this incredible hymn, the opening stanza of which goes like this:
Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Does its successive journeys run
His kingdoms stretch from shore-to-shore
Till moons shall wax and wane no more
This is what the Christians believed, that it stated in Psalm 72 that God would reign, and this reign is fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, over the centuries there has been this belief that the reign of God is manifested in the coming of Jesus: that the nations bow before him and that before Jesus every knee shall bow, which we sing.
Our nation is conceived of this idea. In 1864, Sir Samuel Tilley, who was one of the fathers of Confederation, suggested that Psalm 72 be the great Psalm for the dominion of Canada – have dominion from sea-to-sea. George V in 1921 thought it should be on our coat of arms. This notion that a nation would be under the Lordship of Jesus, would under the reign of God was something that was held dear.
This does not mean in any way shape or form that we conceive of our nation as being a theocracy, run by the religious. It does not mean that it subscribes to the belief of the divine right of kings. It does not mean that in fact it becomes a tyranny of the religious. On the contrary, it is the general recognition, which is there in Psalm 72 that all the nations recognize the sovereignty of God. Therefore, in our lives and our devotions, when we approach Jesus and we approach the post Christmas story, we do it like the Magi, on our knees and we humble ourselves before him. We acknowledge that even after “the moon has waxed and waned no more” he reigns.
It is not just about that. There is also a message that this is an ethical kingdom of which we speak. For the psalmist, there is no question that the monarch is judged by one standard and one standard only: the way that the poor are given justice and are cared for. There are three different words according to Rick Tobias, who used to be the head of The Yonge Street Mission, to describe the poor in this particular Psalm. There are more in The Bible, as David and I were talking about between the services.
The three that are here suggest the following. There are the poor who have been the victims of violence: those who are unable to care for themselves because they have been the victims of the violence of somebody else and their terror and their torture. There are those who have been the victims of an infirmity – mental or physical – who have become dependent on others because they cannot care for themselves anymore. I watched this last week a program on the sheer number of people in our society who have Alzheimer’s disease. I couldn’t help but think of the word in Hebrew is Dal– to describe them: the poor who are dependent because of an infirmity. Then there are those who are poor by virtue of economic systems and economic circumstances and are vulnerable and dependent because they simply do not have access to money.
For the writer of Psalm 72, it doesn’t matter if you are the victim of violence, if you are infirm, if you are the economically poor, you should be treated with righteousness and with justice and you should be lifted up. When I look at The New Testament and the life and the ministry of Jesus, you can see why people thought he was a sign of the reign of God. You could see why they understood Jesus to be this king, this monarch.
Look how he cared for all of those groups. To those who are been crucified with him on a cross he says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” To those who were infirm through leprosy or blindness or through physical ailments and disabilities, Jesus comes to them and heals them, and he lays his hands upon them and he identifies with them. To those who were the economically poor and the outcasts, to those who were collecting alms outside of the Temple, Jesus points to them as a sign of the kingdom of God. From the very moment that he stood up in the beginning of his ministry, in reading Isaiah from the great prophet, he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is come upon me to bring good news to the poor.” From the very genesis of his ministry, Jesus the Messiah had come to identify with the poor.
Is it not surprising therefore that when early Christians looked back and read Psalm 72 and then they gazed upon this Jesus of Nazareth they said, “This is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.” Like Handel in his Messiah, “His reign will be forever and ever and ever.” Kingdoms will rise and kingdoms will fall, tyrannies will come and tyrannies will go, and the justice and righteousness of God prevails.
Years ago, on a notice board in a church in Gaborone, Botswana, there was a little piece that was written and I have never forgotten it after all these years. I made a note of it at the time. I know it is a tautology, I know it is a syllogism and it makes its own logic, but it sums up I think everything that I am talking about. It went as follows:
If you love Jesus, you love the poor
If you love the poor, you love justice
If you love justice, you love Jesus
This isn’t something that we have just discovered; this is something we have known from the beginning of our faith to which we bow and acknowledge and follow. Amen.