Last week we concluded discussing the difficulty of Scripture. The Scriptures are like the music of God and they are filled with strange, unexpected, and perplexingly intricate harmonies that bewilder and frustrate untrained readers. The unskilled reader will hear in the Scriptures only dissonances, only clashes. I suggested that the only way to start to hear the deep, complex, but beautiful harmony of Scripture is if you are trained to hear it.

The only way to do that is by putting yourself around master craftsmen. Men and women who know how to hear this deep music. Bonhoeffer was our guide last week. This week we turn to Origen, Athanasius, Basil, and Augustine, master craftsmen of the early church, to hear what they have to teach us on the psalms.

(St.) Origen of Alexandria (185—253)

Psalms as Therapy

Origen is perhaps the most important interpreter of Scripture in the church’s history. All our best thinkers, our best theologians, and our best readers of scripture don’t happen without Origen. 

Origen says that reading the Bible is like being a physician. In the ancient world, healers, or doctors, were pretty good at dealing with certain chronic illnesses. Say you had a skin rash. The ancient physicians knew knew how to mash up a couple different herbs from the garden in order to give you relief. Doctors in Origen’s day needed to know every plant and herb growing in the garden. And, Origen says, it’s the same with reading the Bible. You have to know it in order to offer healing to someone who has an ailment.

The psalms, according to Origen, were one of the primary “herbs” used for healing. For Origen, the psalms were a means of therapy for the sick soul. 

St. Athanasius of Alexandria (296—373)

Mirror and Medicine

Athanasius, another very central and key figure in the early church picks up on this notion of the healing properties of the psalms. 

Athansius writes a letter to a man named Marcellinus and he begins like this:

Your steadfastness in Christ fills me with admiration. Not only are you bearing well your present trial, with its attendant suffering; you are even living under rule and, so the bearer of your letter tells me, using the leisure necessitated by your recent illness to study the whole body of the Holy Scriptures and especially the Psalms. Of every one of those, he says, you are trying to grasp the inner force and sense. Splendid! I myself am devoted to the Psalms, as indeed to the whole Bible; and I once talked with a certain studious old man, who had bestowed much labor on the Psalter, and he spoke to me about it with great persuasiveness and charm, expressing himself clearly too, and holding a copy of it in his hand the while he spoke. So I am going to write down for you the things he said.

Athanasius, following Origen, sees himself as physician of the soul. He knows that you can’t truly read the psalms without making them your own. He continues:

[The book of Psalms] has this peculiar marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul. It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed, and seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given. Elsewhere in the Bible you read only that the Law commands this or that to be done, you listen to the Prophets to learn about the Savior’s coming, or you turn to the historical books to learn the doings of the kings and holy men; but in the Psalter, besides all these things, you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries. Moreover, whatever your particular need or trouble, from this same book you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you do not merely hear and then pass on, but learn the way to remedy your ill…

In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn…

The Psalms thus serve the one who sings them as a mirror.

For Athanasius, reading the psalms leads to deeper knowledge of oneself. The psalms are a mirror that allow you to see yourself more truly. The psalms, as a mirror to the self, have a diagnostic quality to them.  

Like Origen, Athanasius thinks the psalms are therapeutic.

St. Basil the Great (330—379)

A Spoonful of Sugar

Basil, building on Origen and Athanasius, says this in his sermon on Psalm 1:

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful, composed by the Spirit for this reason, namely, that we men, each and all of us, as if in a general hospital for souls, may select the remedy for his own condition…Now, the prophets teach one thing, historians another, the law something else, and the form of advice found in the proverbs something different still. But, the Book of Psalms has taken over what is profitable from all. It foretells coming events; it recalls history; it frames laws for life; it suggests what must be done; and, in general, it is the common treasury of good doctrine, carefully finding what is suitable for each one. The old wounds of souls it cures completely, and to the recently wounded it brings speedy improvement; the diseased it treats, and the unharmed it preserves. On the whole, it effaces, as far as is possible, the passions, which subtly exercise dominion over souls during the lifetime of man, and it does this with a certain orderly persuasion and sweetness which produces sound thoughts.

Basil goes on to say that the brilliance of the Spirit’s work in the psalms is that it combines good doctrine with song. The medicine that comes from the psalms can be hard to swallow, so the Spirit mingled them with the sweetness of a song. 

I think Basil, Athanasius, and Origen are all exactly right. The psalms are therapeutic. They bring us healing. They are like a mirror for our souls to diagnose our ailments. They are like medicine mixed with honey in order that they go done easier.

But why do the psalms do this for us? Why does the medicine work? How do the psalms mirror us?

St. Augustine of Hippo (354—430)

The Whole Christ: Head and Body

Augustine picks all this up. He sees the psalms as both a mirror and medicine for the soul. In his sermon on Ps. 94 (which begins, “The Lord is a God who avenges…Rise up, Judge of the earth; pay back to the proud what they deserve”) Augustine says:

Meanwhile the wicked triumph, the wicked exult, the wicked blaspheme and commit all manner of crimes…Does this upset you? The psalm grieves with you, and asks questions with you, but not because it does not know. Rather does it ask you with the question to which it knows the answer, so that in it you may find what you did not know. Anyone who wants to console someone else acts like this: unless he grieves with the other, he cannot lift him up. First of all he grieves with him, and then he strengthens him with a consoling word…So too the psalm, and indeed the Spirit of God, though knowing everything, asks questions with you, as though giving expression to your own words…

But then he notes how the psalm shifts in verse 22: “The Lord is has become my fortress, and my God the rock in whom I take refuge.” What happened in the shift? Clearly some sort of healing. But how does the medicine work? Augustine puts his finger right on the answer:

Look how the psalm corrects itself: allow yourself to be corrected along with it. It was to that end that the psalm adopted your complaint. What did you say? How long will sinners gloat, O Lord, How long? The psalm took on your words, so now you take on the words of the psalm. And what does the psalm say? The Lord has become a refuge for me.

The psalm grieves with you and asks questions of you, but then he says the psalm corrects itself, and we have to be corrected with it. This is the key line: “The psalm took on your words, so now you take on the words of the psalm.”

What does that sound like? Or who does that sound like?

Augustine’s great insight into the psalms can be put into this question: Who is the ‘I’ that is praying here? Is it always and only just the psalmist? Is it me? Whose voice is speaking what and to whom are they speaking?

The psalms contain many voices, and the key to understanding them is seeing who is speaking in each case. This is a difficult question because it isn’t always easy to identify the voice in the psalms. Sometimes the psalmist speaks for himself and sometimes for God. Other times the psalmist will speak as though he is identified with the whole people of Israel.  Sometimes he speaks as the king of Israel. And many times he speaks as though he is the poor and the downtrodden. All these voices come through the psalmist.

So, Augustine puts this question to us: What person do you know who is simultaneously a human and God himself, the king of Israel and all of Israel, and the poor and the downtrodden? What person can include all these voices as his very own? Only Jesus of Nazareth.

The one who speaks in the psalms is Jesus Christ as “the whole Christ” (what in Latin Augustine calls the totus Christus). The whole Christ for Augustine is both the head (Jesus Christ himself) and his body (the church with all its members). This is Augustine’s greatest insight: Jesus is both simultaneously the head of the body and the body itself. He is all and in all! In the psalms you can hear him speaking as the head and at other times you can hear him speaking as the body.

Let’s take a few examples of how Augustine does this when he preaches. Here is a bit of Augustine’s sermon on Ps. 40 (on the line: “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God”):

Someone may perhaps ask who the speaker is in this psalm. Briefly, it is Christ. But as you know, brothers and sisters—and it can never be said too often—Christ sometimes speaks in his own person, as our Head. He is the Savior of the body and its Head, the Son of God who was born of a virgin, suffered for us, rose for our justification and sits at God's right hand to intercede for us… Accordingly he sometimes speaks as our Head, and at other times as from ourselves, his members, just as he spoke in the name of his members and not from himself when he said, I was hungry and you fed me (Mt 25:35). Again, when he said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4) it was the Head crying out in the person of his members, yet he did not say, "Why are you persecuting my members?" but, Why are you persecuting me? If he suffers in us, we shall also be crowned in him. This is the love of Christ. Can anything else compare with it? He put a hymn about this matter into our mouths, and sings it with the voice of his members.”

And here’s Augustine again on Ps. 60:

Christ willed to prefigure us, who are his body, in that body of his in which he died and rose again, and ascended into heaven, so that where the head has gone in advance, the members may confidently expect to follow. He transfigured us into himself…

The psalm takes your words of complaint and despair and sorrow to itself, and then gives you its words to have as your own. This is the beautiful exchange of Jesus. He takes on what is deathly in us and then communicates his own life to us.

The psalms are medicine. We’ve always known that. They heal. But why does the medicine work? Because the one who prays them is Jesus of Nazareth, and he’s always been the head of his body praying these prayers. When the ancient Israelites gathered in the temple with these hymns and lamentations, they prayed them with their head: Jesus Christ. That’s the reason that this psalm is medicine for your soul. 

It’s like the psalms are an IV drip through which you receive the healing medicine—which is the very life of Christ!

In other words, in the book of Psalms we are getting to overhear Jesus’ prayers to his Father. And we find that he prays for us—his body—as our representative. He gives voice to our cries.

Famously the Gospel of John allows the reader to overhear many of Jesus’ prayers to his Father. I think we can learn something of what the psalms are meant to be by looking closer at John.

In John 11 Jesus is standing at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. He has already discussed the resurrection with Martha and wept with Mary. But then we get these revealing lines:

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me. When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out…” (John 11:41–44)

Why is he praying? For the benefit of the people who can hear him. So that they can believe! Now, if the psalms are also Jesus’ prayers what does this tell us about the psalms? They are Jesus’ prayers that are given to us for our sake! So that we may believe, so that we may be healed.

Jesus’ prayers in John’s Gospel and in the psalms are given as medicine for the sake of our healing. Jesus lets us overhear his words to the Father so that the confidence he has in God can become our confidence.

When Jesus prays so that we can hear him, he is saying: “I’m doing this so that what is always true for me, the head, can now become true for them, my body.”

This is the IV drip connected to our sin-sick souls. The connection is the head to the body. The life flows from the head into the body. This is why when a body is out of alignment with its head we say the patient is dis-eased. There is no ease between the head and body. Medicine, when working properly, restores the ease, the rest, the alignment between a head and body.

The words of the psalms are nothing less than this: they are the words of the head, Jesus Christ, prayed for the sake of his body in order to make the body sing his song again.

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