Psalm 23

The 23^rd Psalm is probably the most well-known chapter in the Bible. The words in fact have become as famous as any other literary quote in history. Countless people have memorized it, and some live by 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 posters of this favourite psalm superimposed on beautiful painted pictures of Jesus on a grassy hillside, with a lamb over his shoulders, rescuing it from danger. Many children 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 weeping, and loneliness, and worry, and despair.

And in those times of danger and grief, many people turn to the 23^rd 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 a young man shot thirty-two other people and then himself on the campus of Virginia Tech University, this was one such occasion. How do we make sense of a world in which a young person can be so troubled, so destructive, and so unable to receive the help that others offered him? How do we make sense of a world in which such bright, innocent, promising young lives are tragically and suddenly lost? How do we begin to understand a world where people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and many other places die regularly and senselessly?

Perhaps the people crowding around Jesus in the Portico of Solomon that we heard about in the gospel (John 10:22-30) were asking similar questions. At the Feast of the Dedication, the people remembered how the nation rededicated the temple after a great leader, Judas Maccabeus, defeated the Greek conquerors in 164 BC. The festival remembered the suffering of the Jewish people under the Greek Empire, and rejoiced at their great victory. Against this background, with Roman soldiers hovering, people asked Jesus, “Are you the Messiah?” Would Jesus be the new hero who would drive out the Roman invader? Would the nation be free and independent once more?

The people crowding around Jesus wanted a clear and decisive answer. Instead, he is cryptic. The people want him to speak with authority about weapons and strategies; instead, he talks about sheep. To their demand that he assume the leadership for which they have been hoping, he answers with a claim of leadership so astounding that many of them pick up stones to kill him on the spot: he claims to be one with God the Father.

This is no gentle Jesus on a pretty, green hillside; this is a fierce, uncompromising Jesus, a Jesus who refuses to meet any earthly expectations, a Jesus who is so far removed from the people around him that it is a wonder he escapes with his life. And indeed, John tells us that the next time Jesus dares to show his face in Jerusalem, the chief priests are all ready to work out a scheme to have him crucified.

How do we reconcile the gentle, kind shepherd 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? 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 through tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech or tragedies and worries much closer to home? 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 much 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 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 sovereign over the darkness too, 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 this Easter season and every Sunday as 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 joyous 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 invitation 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 some live by… we 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…

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