Beginning on page 27, after
quoting Ephesians 5:19, “Speak to one another with psalms,” and Colossians 3:16,
“Teach and admonish one another…and…sing psalms,” Bonhoeffer explores what it
means to pray the Psalter. He begins by pointing out difficulties in praying
the Psalms as our own prayers – there are places where what we read just doesn’t
fit with who we are – the psalms of innocence are an example, when I arrive at verses that speak of my own innocence I cannot pray them directly for, as
they are written, I am not innocent. Then there are psalms of vengeance – and I
sense that I ought not to touch them as they are written, that they are above
me; and then there are the psalms of suffering…while I may identify with some
of them, I cannot identify with many of them. What to do? How to pray them?
They are God’s Word so I am called to pray and sing them, but they are not me
so how can I speak them?
Bonhoeffer’s answer to this dilemma
is the answer that Christians down through the centuries have given – these are
the prayers of Jesus Christ; he writes, “The Psalter is the prayer book of
Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter, and now it
has become his prayer for all time…The Psalter is the vicarious prayer of
Christ for his congregation” (Page 28). [See Patrick Henry Reardon’s, Christ in the Psalms, for a wonderful
treatment of this subject.]
According to Bonhoeffer there
are three reasons to pray the Psalter: 1) It teaches us to pray as Jesus Christ
prays; 2) we learn what we should pray; 3) we learn to pray as a community. On
page 28 he writes, “Now that Christ is with the Father, the new humanity of
Christ – the body of Christ – on earth continues to pray his prayer to the end
of time. This prayer belongs not to the individual member, but to the whole
body of Christ.”
We have at least three
difficulties encountering Bonhoeffer’s text; the first is that few people in
the West appear to set aside daily dedicated time for prayer and praise; the
second is that congregational prayer has mostly become like congregational
Bible reading, something to quickly get through on Sunday mornings; and the
third is that in the West, even in our Eucharistic churches, we have become so
individualized that we do not think in terms of the Body of Christ, either
locally, globally, or transcending time and space.
The Psalter is not a soft
drink that is to be gulped and guzzled; but rather wine aged through suffering,
joy, perseverance, thanksgiving, despair, hope, and the holiness and majesty of
God. The Psalter is complex, spanning ages and generations and reaching from
heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven. There is always someone somewhere
praying and living each psalm, whether verbatim or in the crucible or euphoria of
experience – we are invited to the fellowship, the communion, of the psalms.
The voice of Jesus Christ is the voice of Psalms; to hear His voice we must be
listen, even as we read aloud the words we must listen – whose voice is it that
we hear? Is it our voice? Is it our voices? Is it Christ joined with us? Is it
us being joined to Christ by Christ? Can we hear the voice of Christ in His
Body through the ages?
In an age of distraction we
are called to mediation, contemplation, antiphonal reading and praying and
singing, sustained engagement; in an earth-bound world we are called to enter
His courts with His words on our lips, His images on our minds, beholding Him and
entering into His glory. We come not just individually, but we come as His
people, His flock…we come as we experience life
together.
No comments:
Post a Comment