For those who want a change from the Gospel

Easter 2 – Low Sunday – Psalm 133

For many years it was our custom as a family to go each Easter to the Spring Harvest Festival, first in Prestatyn and later in Minehead or Skegness. This was a greatly anticipated week, and as time went by more and more people from our churches would form a party and make the journey. The teaching and worship were great, but equally exciting were the journeys to and from the holiday camps. Me driving our car with the family soon became me driving a minibus, and eventually us hiring a coach. The journeys would consist of joyful anticipation on the way there, and much singing of the newly-learnt worship songs on the way back. If you have been to such Christian festivals, and especially if they have become a traditional annual pilgrimage, you’ll get something of the feel of the Songs of Ascents in general, and this Psalm in particular. It’s about going to get blessed, and returning full of blessing. And it’s about doing it together.

It has been suggested that this Psalm begun its life as a proverb. Originally the words might have been something like:

How great and pleasant it is when brothers and sister live together in unity.
It is like precious oil on the head, which runs down on the beard. And it is like the dew of Hermon.

This proverb, extolling the virtues of unity, used two images, oil and dew, both of which were highly important commodities in Israel. Olive oil would have been used, often with added perfumes, in the home to moisturise and soften hard dry skin, and as a primitive kind of Brylcreem for the hair. The oil in v.2 isn’t ‘precious’ – that’s a mistranslation. But it is ‘good’ stuff. And dew was important during the summer months of very little rainfall to keep the land fertile. But, it has been suggested, this proverb mutated in its spiritual significance by the addition of two motifs which are less homely and domestic and more spiritual. The hairdressing lotion becomes anointing oil, and not for anyone: for Aaron himself, the original high priest. And the dew which famously fell on Mount Hermon, a snowcapped peak way up north on the border between Syria and Lebanon, now drenches the Temple in Jerusalem, some 125 miles away. Everyday necessities have become spiritual and liturgical blessings for the companies of people travelling to worship.

The final clause of v.3 is interesting. It describes the nature of the blessing as ‘life for evermore’. It is highly unlikely that this would have been understood as what Christians now call ‘eternal life’, or as an early belief in the continuation of life after death. More likely is that it referred either to the continuation of the family line, or continued peace and prosperity. Many OT texts describe one’s offspring as blessings from the Lord, and the result of a curse might be the discontinuation of one’s family line. And prosperity, in spite of our reluctance to swallow any kind of a ‘prosperity gospel’ in which God promises health wealth and happiness to  Christians, usually those who give financially to the particular televangelist in question, is nevertheless promised as a blessing throughout the OT. My take on this is that the promises by God of prospering are meant to be read corporately, but in our post-enlightenment world we hear them individually. I think God promises blessings to nations or groups who live in obedience to him, but we have turned that into an individualistic desire to get rich personally, which other materialists are keen to promote and ‘sell’.

But of course as Christians, and as Christians caught up in the celebration of Easter, we can perhaps see this as an example of Scripture speaking more than it knew at the time. We do believe that because of last week’s events, there can be ‘life for evermore’. That blessing is commanded or bestowed by God on those who live in unity, those who are on the journey together to worship, learn and finally break free from this life into eternity.