Vigils Reading

THE SECRET OF THE PSALTER

From the writing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer3 ◊◊◊

The Psalter occupies a unique place in the Holy Scriptures. It is God’s Word and, with a few exceptions, the prayer of men as well. How are we to understand this? How can God’s Word be at the same time prayer to God?…

A psalm that we cannot utter as a prayer, that makes us falter and horrifies us, is a hint to us that here Someone else is praying, not we; that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God’s judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. He it is who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter…

The Man Jesus Christ, to whom no affliction, no ill, no suffering is alien and who yet was the wholly innocent and righteous one, is praying in the Psalter through the mouth of his Church… He prayed the Psalter and now it has become his prayer for all time…

The Psalter is the vicarious prayer of Christ for his Church… This prayer belongs, not to the individual member, but to the whole Body of Christ. Only in the whole Christ does the whole Psalter become a reality, a whole which the individual can never fully comprehend and call his own. That is why the prayer of the psalms belongs in a peculiar way to the fellowship. Even if a verse or a psalm is not one’s own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the fellowship; so it is quite certainly the prayer of the true Man Jesus Christ and his Body on earth…

In so far as Christ is in us, the Christ who took all the vengeance of God upon himself, who met God’s vengeance in our stead, who thus – stricken by the wrath of God… could forgive his enemies, who himself suffered the wrath that his enemies might go free – we, too… can pray these psalms, through Jesus Christ, from the heart of Jesus Christ… In so far as “Christ’s blood and righteousness” has become “our beauty, our glorious dress,” we can… pray the psalms of innocence as Christ’s prayer for us and gift to us. These psalms, too, belong to us through him.

And how shall we pray those psalms of unspeakable misery and suffering, the meaning of which we have hardly begun to sense even remotely? We can and we should pray the psalms of suffering, the psalms of the passion, not in order to generate in ourselves what our hearts do not know of their own experience, not to make our own laments, but because all this suffering was real and actual in Jesus Christ, because the Man Jesus Christ suffered sickness, pain, shame, and death, because in his suffering and death all flesh suffered and died. What happened to us on the Cross of Christ, the death of our old man, and what actually does happen and should happen to us ever since our baptism in the dying of our flesh, this is what gives us the right to pray these prayers. Through the Cross of Christ these psalms have been bestowed upon his Body on earth as prayers that issue from his heart… The Body of Christ is praying, and as an individual one acknowledges that his prayer is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church. He learns to pray the prayer of the Body of Christ. And that lifts him above his personal concerns and allows him to pray selflessly…

In all our praying there remains only the prayer of Jesus Christ; this alone has the promise of fulfillment..