Psalm 23

This familiar text takes on new dimensions when read in tandem with this week’s epistle and gospel texts.

A dead shepherd isn’t helpful to anyone, least of all to the sheep left behind.

Two new books trace the history of a rich religious image.

The church in Acts 2 will follow Jesus, for they know his voice.

We are called to accompany the bodies we love from birth to death and beyond.

"I shall not want" has more than one meaning.

What does it do to the body and spirit to be preyed upon constantly?

It took me decades to realize Psalm 23 isn’t exactly about Jesus.

The "jobsworth" and the good shepherd.

The ailing young man wanted to be face to face with God. I opened my shoebox.

Sarah Ruden writes some of the most sumptuous words about Bible words I’ve ever read.

A shepherd’s staff has a crook for drawing the sheep away from danger, and a blunt end for prodding them toward places they would rather not go. This week’s texts embrace the tension between the two in the shepherd’s role.

It feels to me like evil is hovering over the prison in the form of a government ready to kill a woman who prayed with me when my father was dying of cancer. There isn't a thing I can do about it except pray this psalm and damn if we can't get it right. 

In his years as a pastor my husband read the 23rd Psalm at the bedsides of quite a few people who were dying. It was the most frequently requested passage among those who were facing their own going and still able to choose. When I began to volunteer for hospice, I found, as he had, that even for people who had wandered far from church, even for the skeptical and the uncertain, even for those who were unused to prayer and didn't want to be prayed over, the 23rd Psalm provided a place of return that was beautiful, familiar, inviting, and reassuring.

When I pray the words of Psalm 23, the “you” I address them to is God. But I hope others will overhear.

This Sunday of words and songs about sheep and shepherds has always challenged me. For most of my preaching life I’ve been in or near a city. Now I live in New York City, where as far as I know even the Sheep Meadow in Central Park has no sheep.

Yet here is an enduring image from Jesus, an image captured perhaps millions of times in our art, our songs, our stories.

It’s the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s choral work, Chichester Psalms. A boy soprano (or a countertenor), in the “role” of the shepherd boy, David, sings in Hebrew the opening verses of Psalm 23. He is accompanied–sparingly, fittingly–by the harp. The first several measures are tender but not tentative; filled with sentiment, but without sentimentality (this per Bernstein’s instructions). When the women’s voices take over the text at גַּם כִּי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת . . . (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .) there’s an ethereal echo-canon effect. This part of the movement, when executed well, is something sublime.