Many of the psalms seem to have pithy sayings or random or widely varying ideas. Such statements and logic twists can, at first sight, be rather confusing. Sometimes they meld into a tasty, herbal mix: others just coexist, leaving the reader to ponder.
Psalm 107, the first of Book V of the Psalter, has sections that depict different scenes in life — wanderers in desert wastes, people gathering from all points of the compass, people in darkness or sick, those at sea like ‘boat people’, others settling new land, planting, thriving. Here, a unifying thread is reinforced by a repeated antiphonal refrain; each group described in successive sections of the song suffer hardships but can find solace in divine love and values.
This week’s reading includes the first few verses celebrating not only divine mercy, but also this veritable melting pot of humanity — “God gathered them from the east and the west”. (v.3)The unifying thread through this mix is the various experiences of exiles and refugees, blown to the shores as by variable winds of life. The song recalls with thanks the end of the era of exile in Babylon. It describes the experience of various groups in distress, a theme sharply relevant to today’s disaster areas such as Syria, Burma, Sudan — the full effects of global warming are yet to be seen — and dreams of safer havens.
Then follow 17 to 22 about people afflicted by sickness due to poor choices, or perhaps in tough times like the Israelites enduring privation after escaping from Egypt.
For more commentary on this psalm, see several earlier posts such as that of Nov 2017>.
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Earlier posts also canvassed various music associated with this long (43 verse) song. At South Woden, we again schedule Isaac Everett’s three-part refrain from The Emergent Psalter. We sang it back in 2013 and enjoyed the bluesy feel, as well as the admixture, as indicated at the outset, of various ideas that reflect the multiple voices, demands and pressures impinging on our consciousness from all angles. Everett has taken the psalm’s two internal antiphons, then added a tag:
- Let them give thanks to God for mercy and love, for wondrous deeds for humanity (verses 1, 15 and 31); and secondly
- Then they cried to their God in their trouble, delivered from their distress (found no less than four times, in verses 6, 13, 19 and 28); and
- May those who are wise give heed to these things; consider the love of God (the final verse 43)
These three voices reflect thanksgiving for relief and divine love, the cry of people in distress, and finally the moral of the story — consider. Everett has woven them together to good effect.
Psalms in the South 