Psalm 121: an unfinished journey to safety (part 1)

Looking back over Edale to Mam Tor and the Great Ridge

 

I will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From whence comes my help?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.

He will not allow your foot to be moved;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Shall neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
Nor the moon by night.

The Lord shall preserve you from all evil;
He shall preserve your soul.
The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in
From this time forth, and even forevermore.

Psalm 121 seems to be coming from a very different place than Psalm 120.  Whilst it begins with a question about where to find help, it seems much less raw, much less in-the-moment.  It doesn't sound like this Psalm is uttered "in my distress..." rather, after some time and reflection has passed.

Back in 2010, when Twitter was still a fairly new phenomenon, Chris Juby summarised all 1,189 chapters of the Bible on Twitter - one chapter per day, one tweet per chapter.  His initial goal was to focus his own Bible reading. He looked for the key idea in each chapter, adding as little of his own interpretation as possible. And he thought it would be interesting to share what he'd come up with friends on Twitter.  To his great surprise, the @biblesummary account gained nearly twelve thousand followers in its first two weeks and was featured in news stories all over the world. The project quickly took on a secondary purpose as an introduction to Scripture for people who hadn't read it before.

Anyway, based on the number of retweets, he assessed the relative popularity of the psalms.  It's no surprise that Psalm 23 had the most retweets and is top of the league table, but Psalm 121 was only a single retweet behind and sits in second place.

Its opening lines are very familiar, even to those who never read psalms, maybe people know it from funerals or mistake it for a piece of school poetry that they learned... "I wandered lonely as a cloud"... "I lift mine eyes unto the hills..." (it doesn't sound unlike Wordsworth!)

The psalm has a sense of surety.  It isn't filled with doubt and anxiety.  It says unequivocally, "yes - you are safe."  Unsurprisingly - this is something people want to hear!

It starts in the first person..

I will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From whence comes my help?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.

I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that as this is reckoned to have been a pilgrimage psalm, and people sang it as they journeyed to Jersusalem for a religious festival, and the "hills" are the hills around Jerusalem - the Judean Hills - which they can see for pretty much the whole journey. The Psalmist, as he walks, raises his head and looks to the distant hills - his help is in that direction - at the festival he is going to.  "Will I find the help I need?" he asks. "Surely the God who made those hills, our God, the One God, can help me?"

Maybe looking up is the first important thing.  Travelling to a festival might have been one of the few times that ordinary people got to look or see much beyond the daily grind of life - keeping the wolf from the door.  Having the space and opportunity to step back from it for a moment is a gift, such an important gift.

Even here in Cambridgeshire, one of the tediously flat places in the UK, were you to ask any congregation where they feel closest to God, the top answer (possibly given a close run by "in my garden") will probably be "up a mountain" - even if none of them have been up a mountain in twenty years.  I always find that kinda sad.  I'd LOVE people to say things like "last week it was Tesco's carpark" or "in the lab where I work", but they never do.

But maybe I should just get over myself - people do seem to have an inbuilt sense of God being in the high places.

To stop, to look up and to acknowledge you need help has to be the first step.

Asking where to go for that help is the second.

I am notoriously bad at stopping and asking for help.  I am sure it has prevented me from succeeding at many things in my life.  It's just sheer stubborn-ness.  Jesus was always ready to accept help.  He needed help getting water from the well (he had no bucket!) - and asks a woman... he needed help to carry his cross, and Joseph stepped up...

To ask for help means accepting your own weakness, accepting your need of others, accepting that you are not omnipotent, accepting that you are part of something bigger...

The Message version of the opening of Psalm 121 goes like this:

I look up to the mountains;

does my strength come from mountains?

No, my strength comes from God,

who made heaven, and earth, and mountains.

The Psalmist knows where his help comes from.  It's not Dr Google, it's not MumsNet, it's not GBNews - it's the Lord who made heaven and earth, and those mountains!  And he's heading for an encounter with the Lord - near those distant hills - just a few more days of walking...

And then the voice changes...  (which I will explore in part two!)