Becoming Like Christ: Your Setting in Life
Tuesday, March 9
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Becoming Like Christ: Your Setting in Life
Psalm 84
Rev. Eric McDonnell
Biblical scholars, in their love of obscure neologisms and hard-to-pronounce phrases, often speak of a text’s Sitz im Leben, a German phrase that means “setting in life.” What was the original context in which a text was written, and what was the original occasion in which a text was used by the community?
These are the questions Old Testament professors have in mind when they write about a Sitz im Leben, and perhaps nowhere does this German phrase come up more than in the study of the Psalms, the prayerbook of the church.
Despite the popular image of King David reclining under a fig tree next to his lyre, writing lyrics on spare parchment, we know that the 150 psalms preserved in our prayerbook were composed in a number of various Sitz im Lebens, ranging from the early days of the Israelite monarchy down through the centuries to as late as the Second Temple Period.
What is the Sitz im Leben of the psalm we read today, Psalm 84?
The poem has been called a “Zion hymn” – a hymn of praise, rejoicing over God’s presence among God’s people in the Temple. How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!, the psalmist famously begins (84:1). This has led some historians to suggest the psalm originates in the pre-exilic period, before the destruction of the Temple, as a pilgrim song travelers might sing as they approached the temple mount.
The psalmist describes how their soul longs, indeed faints, for the presence of the living God (84:2). A single day in the courts of God is better than a thousand anywhere else (84:10).
Three beatitudes are peppered throughout: blessed are those who live in God’s house (84:4); blessed are those whose strength is in God (84:5); and blessed is everyone who trusts in God (84:12). (If you’ve ever wondered where Jesus learned to speak the way he does in his Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:3-12, the Psalms is the answer).
There is another theory of Psalm 84’s Sitz im Leben. Psalms continued to be composed, read, and used by the community even after the exile, when the Temple had been destroyed and the people were forced out of their land by a hostile nation.
Consider the way Psalm 137 begins: “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion” (137:1). Could Psalm 84 have been written and used in the same post-exilic period? Those famous opening words, which we first read as praise – How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! – could we also read them as petition? My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the LORD.
Midway through the poem, the psalmist speaks of God’s people traveling “through the valley of Baca,” an apparently dry place that they make into “a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools” (84:6).
Interpreters have struggled to make sense of the reference to a valley of Baca, a location otherwise unknown to us. When we consider the post-exilic context, though, and acknowledge the poetic sensibilities of the psalmist, we might also consider the homonym for this Hebrew word “Baca” – another Hebrew word, bakah, which means “weeping.”
The 4th century Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, takes notice of this wordplay, rendering the phrase in Latin as vallis lacrimarum, a phrase later picked up in the 12th century hymn, Salve Regina, making its way into our vernacular today as “vale of tears.”
The psalmist is acknowledging the mourning of God’s people, their travails through a valley of weeping, a vale of tears, vallis lacrimarum, while simultaneously declaring God’s praise: even in a dry place, O God, you can usher in the rain.
And for us, today, in our own unique Sitz im Leben, Psalm 84 continues to speak: How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts! How our souls long, indeed, faint, to gather together with the people of God. How our hearts and flesh sing for joy to God.
Even as we move through this vale of tears, this season of distance and difficulty, we hold faith that God can bring springs to a dry place, rain to a parched land. “O LORD God of hosts, hear my prayer; give ear, O God of Jacob!” (84:8).
In this Lenten season like no other, may we find solace in the words of Psalm 84. The scriptures give voice to the experience of grief, sorrow, and yearning and praise, hope, and thanksgiving.
The Psalms, the church’s prayerbook, teach us how to hold all of our authentic experience together in true communion with each other before God. And with the psalmist, we affirm and confront this vallis lacrimarum, and we affirm and hold fast to the God who insists even Good Fridays make way for Easter Sundays: “O LORD of hosts, happy is everyone who trusts in you” (84:12).
About “Becoming Like Christ” (Weekly Lenten Reflections)
In 2019, we developed a 7-week long series packed full of devotions called “Exploring Humanity and Divinity.” It was about wrestling with our humanity as we seek to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
After a tumultuous last year, and with tensions high on political, cultural, and social levels, it seems that “wrestling” is just as relevant today as it was two years ago.
In that spirit, we believed it would be healthy to resurrect a similar theme to this year’s Lenten devotional series: Becoming Like Christ.