Psalm 23 and the love of Jesus

The 23rd Psalm is probably the most well-known chapter in the Bible. The words haveprobably become as famous as any other literary quote in history. Countless people have memorized it... 

It is a wonderful meditation about faith and trust, and being sure of God in all situations. Probably when we were younger, many of us will have seen words from this favouritepsalm superimposed on beautiful painted pictures of Jesus on a grassy hillside, with a lamb over his shoulders, rescuing it from danger. 

Many children and adults still get great comfort from the image of the kind and gentle Jesus who cares for all God’s creatures. This is the Jesus who will stay with a child through a dark night filled with terrors: alligators under the bed and monsters in the closet. This is the Jesus who stays with adults too, through nights of pain and crying, and loneliness, and worry, and despair.

In those times of danger and grief, many people turn to the 23rd Psalm for comfort. At the bedside of people who are ill, reciting the psalm brings peace and hopefulness. At funerals or memorial services, it evokes the kind and loving presence of the God who promises an eternal dwelling place in the house of the Lord.

But then, there are the times when events in our lives or in our world throw our peace, our hopefulness, our comfort into doubt – times when the Jesus we remember from our childhood, smiling on that grassy hillside, seems almost irrelevant to the darkness of the world.

Perhaps when terrorism strikes holidaymakers on a Tunisian beach, or when a gunman enters a prayer meeting to kill, or when nations talk about bailouts for governments involving billions of pounds when some people struggle day by day to live... 

How do we make sense of a world in which people can be so troubled, so destructive, and so unable to find any kind of peace in their lives? How do we begin to understand a world where people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and many other places die regularly and senselessly?

Perhaps those who followed Jesus as he went for some rest as we heard in our gospel reading (Mark 6:30-34) wanted answers to questions about the problems of life too. 

This was a busy chapter in Mark’s gospel – already Jesus had been rejected in his home town of Nazareth, where people dismissed him as the carpenter’s son. In this chapter he had sent out the disciples working in his name to heal the sick and cast out demons of all kinds. The chapter also tells of the killing of John the Baptist.... It was a busy time and Jesus was tired and on the advice of his disciples he went to rest, but he wasn’t left alone, and he responded with huge compassion. 

This is no gentle Jesus on a pretty, green hillside; this is a Jesus committed to caring for his people whoever they are, committed to helping and guide them, filled with love for them. 

Jesus was willing to be disturbed, to be interrupted by the needs of others – and what a lesson that is for us as a church – not to be so constrained and restricted in our plans and our vision that we fail to see where real need is... 

This was also the Jesus who Paul writes about in his letter to the Ephesians (2:11-22) – the Saviour who has brought us closer to God through his death and resurrection... 

Jesus never once avoided the reality of life – in his selection of such a diverse group of followers, in his discussions with people like Lazarus and the woman at the well, in his dealings with lepers and those seemingly without hope or status, which was desperately important at the time, he brought hope... 

In his dealings with the authorities he often condemned their corruption and appeared nothing like the gentle Jesus we sometimes see in pictures. 

So how do we reconcile the gentle, kind shepherd-like Jesus, the one who would go anywhere and risk anything to save even the smallest lamb, with the Jesus who provoked his enemies to violence? To hunt him down kill him. And how does this Jesus have anything at all to do with the worries and dangers of our lives? How can our faith in Jesus help us find hope even in the darkest of situations? What can the gentle shepherd do to help?

The wonderful thing about Psalm 23 is just how realistic it is about the darkness of life. Perhaps the picture we get of the Good Shepherd from art and music and childhood memories is an image of pure light and pure sweetness. But the psalm itself knows darkness and fear. 

Like the writer of the psalm, many Christians have travelled through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. They too have known the threat of the unknown. And yet many have also known the comfort of God’s presence, walking alongside them through that dark valley.

Many people have felt the sweetness of Jesus’ love surrounding and enfolding them in the most difficult moments of their lives. Many have experienced holiness and light in the darkest of times.

People who spend a lot of time with those who are ill or bereaved begin to know what kind of help brings true comfort. Comfort doesn’t come from assurances that everything will be all right or from sayings that try to explain why everything that happens is God’s will. 

Comfort often comes from the simple presence of friends who are willing to sit alongside us in our darkest hours, to walk through the darkness with us, to help us make the darkness holy, and to rejoice with us when small glimmers of light finally begin to shine.

And at the heart of it, that is what our Christian faith can tell us. It tells us that our Lord and Saviour is not the God of light alone. Jesus is Lord over the darkness, because he too has been there. Like us, he has grieved over the senseless waste and tragedy of life. Like us, he has agonized over those who suffer.

He has entered into the darkness of death, and with all of us, he promises to walk that road so that we do not have to walk it alone. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

The ultimate truth and triumph of our Christian faith, the truth we remember every time we celebrate the Lord’s Resurrection, is that our Shepherd leads us out of death into life. The Lord who was crucified and who rose again is the same Lord who promises to redeem the world, to relieve its suffering, to restore it to wholeness, to inaugurate a new creation.

The risen Lord is the sign of the life that God promises to all of us: life transformed, life redeemed, life restored, life abundant, life filled with peace and eternal and blessed. 

This psalm is one for the dark moments when we need reassurance, when we need comfort, but it isn’t just for those times. This psalm is for all time – it is a reminder of God’s promise to walk alongside us every moment of every day of our lives. Earlier I said that this is a psalm that many people know, but only some of those people choose to live by it… we all have our choices to make...

Are we going to trust the world, material things and values, technology, computers, machines, even other people, or are we going to put our trust, our faith and our hopes in God… The God who promises that he will be with us all the days of our life, the God who has prepared a wonderful table of treasures before us.... 

God prepares a table for all of us: a table full with overflowing cups and overabundant blessings. And Jesus, our Great Shepherd, invites us to come and share this with him at the table of blessing. AMEN