Promises in Psalm 23

Passage for reflection: Psalm 23 

This Sunday the lectionary includes Psalm 23, perhaps the most well known and best loved of all 150 Psalms in the Psalter. There will be many sermons preached on Sunday about sheep and about God being a shepherd and leading us to green pasture and rescuing us from our waywardness. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” 

I’ve grown to love and depend on the Psalms over the past few years. When you have no words of your own to pray, the prayers of the Psalmist remind us there is no life experience or emotion we cannot bring before God. The Psalms are amazingly honest. The rawness of human existence is named, but that rawness is met by the care and dependability of God.  

The American monk and activist Thomas Merton once wrote: “The secret of prayer is hunger for God. The will to pray is the essence of prayer.” We bring what we feel and place it in the hands of God who is big enough to cope with us! I was taught a long time ago that the most important word in a Psalm might well be “but”. My day is rubbish God, I don’t know what’s going on, but I trust you and I know you are there, so come on, do something! 

Psalm 23 is full of promises, certainties, and is a divine roadmap out of bad times into a new reality of deep joy. I want to leave the shepherd bit to Sunday’s preachers, and look at three other bits of the Psalm we often don’t dwell on. 

First, this verse. 

“Even though I walk through the valley of shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” 

Someone whose husband died suddenly said  “I never realised the twenty-third psalm was about me. I thought it was about my husband, but it’s not. I’m the one walking through the valley of the shadow of death.”

For each of us, there comes a time when we realise we are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. It might be the death of a loved one, the recognition of our own mortality, the death of a dream. What comfort is there in this darkness? Why not fear evil? The psalmist says there is something of God upholding us—that God is with us in the midst of the dark valleys of this life. I often say at a funeral service we need to note we don’t die in the valley, we are led through it, which brings me to the second promise. 

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. My cup overflows.” 

I love the fact the Psalmist is lead out of the valley into an eternity of delight with God, an eternity of feasting and abundance. There’s nothing nicer than being satisfied by a good meal. I’m nicely full as I write this. We had to go into Harrogate this evening and we got some lovely Thai food full of flavours and ate it in the car in a lay-by on the A59! The feast in eternity with God is a banquet. And where is it? In the presence of my enemies! 

Even if we have walked through a dark valley, perhaps the darkest of all valleys ever, God will lead us through it so we successfully  reach the other side. The danger will be behind us and we  will transition into His marvellous light.

It is then, after we leave the valley, we  will find His holy table. The table illustrates abundance, satisfaction, and everlasting love. God’s people can feast at His table of endless love and grace and no enemy of any sort can ever take it away. And our cup overflows! At communion we speak of it being a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all people. Then we give out really tiny cubes of bread and small glasses of wine!! 

A valley walked through, a banquet overflowing with generosity where enemies are shown the grace and fun of God putting them back in their selfish and evil box, and then this:

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” 

Walter Brueggemann, in his book, The Message of The Psalms, categorizes all 150 psalms into one of three movements—orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Each of these movements exemplify a fragment of the human experience:

I. Orientation: when everything feels right and content in our lives.

II. Disorientation: when life feels difficult, dark, and broken. There is lament. There is despair.

III. Re-Orientation: when God pulls us out of the brokenness of life and we are brought to a deeper sense of awareness and gratitude.

Brueggemann argues that we go through rhythms of orientation to disorientation to re-orientation—it is part of the natural human experience. The end of this Psalm has us exclaim “surely”. We know where our faith leads: to dwell with God for ever, to know God’s goodness and mercy every day, to journey even in uncertainty confidently. 

Brueggemann further writes, “It is almost pretentious to comment on this psalm.  The grip it has on biblical spirituality is deep and genuine.  It is such a simple statement that it can bear its own witness without comment.”

So let me end like this having highlighted three promises in the six verses of the Psalm and not mentioning the sheep bit at all.  From the Feasting on the Word series, in his advice for how to preach this passage, pastor David Burns writes, “One way to approach preaching Psalm 23 is not to preach it.  Just read it slowly—preferably in the King James Version—and then sit down.” Over the next few days, why not find a quiet place and do that. What does this ancient prayer do to you? 

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul:

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil; for thou art with me:

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.