March 1: Introduction to the 2022 Lent Project
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2022 LENT PROJECT
ENCOUNTERING CHRIST IN THE PSALMS: A LENTEN JOURNEY
At one point in Christian church history, congregations were fortunate if they owned a New Testament and the book of Psalms, which were always bound together. The Psalter was seen as an essential companion to the New Testament, because it contained everything one needed for a full life of prayer. As it had in Judaism—by which the church was naturally influenced—the Psalter became the church's prayer book and hymnal. It was the custom and habit of the early church to pray through the entire Psalter every week. This practice has been maintained in various parts of the Christian church to this day.
Christ is at the very heart of the Psalms. Many Christian scholars believe that all of the Psalms have Christological meaning. Indeed the entire Old Testament can be interpreted as messianic. Like all faithful Israelites, Christ, no doubt, was taught to pray the Psalms by his parents. For example, Christ cried out words from the Psalms while he hung on the cross. Tradition suggests that Christ prayed Psalms 22–31 during his crucifixion, with outstretched hands raised to God. Throughout his public ministry, while he taught his disciples, Christ continually quoted from the Psalms. Jesus frequently employed the Psalter in his ongoing communication with the Father. Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, enables all Christians to engage these same profound words in both corporate and private prayer for every situation of life.
John Calvin called the Psalms “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.” The Psalms powerfully express every emotion a human is capable of feeling with brutal honesty. Theologian and arts pastor David O. Taylor says it like this, “The glory of the Psalms is that they are comprehensive. They invite us to approach God without fear, without any shame, without anything to hide. God wants to hear everything including our unedited emotions. We are invited to stand naked before Him, fully vulnerable and open.” It’s intriguing to understand that the Psalter, our corporate hymnal, is essentially lyric poetry—poetry full of musical rhythms and strong sentiments. Like most art forms, the Psalms are steeped in metaphor and symbolism. Author Eugene Peterson says, “The Psalms show us that imagination is a way to get inside the truth.”
It is so important to immerse ourselves in the Psalms, to love the Psalms, to internalize the Psalms, and to make them part of the very fabric of our lives. I know a pastor who has the entire Psalter memorized. He did not set out to memorize it, but rather, through repeated use over time, these prayers and hymns have been permanently inscribed on his heart. It has created in him an ever-greater desire to know and be known by Christ. He prays the Psalms throughout the day. He quotes them slowly, carefully, and out loud whenever possible. He does not rush through them, but as he meditates on the words of Scripture he asks the Holy Spirit to speak in fresh ways to him. He suggests praying small portions of the psalms to start. He is also an advocate of singing or chanting the psalms. There are composers at work today writing new psalm tunes with the God-ordained purpose of getting these ancient Scripture texts deep inside us. My pastor friend insists that singing the psalms is perhaps the best way to make them our very own.
As we journey together over the next eight weeks we will encounter wisdom psalms, the penitential psalms, psalms of mercy and salvation, some of the messianic psalms, imprecatory psalms, psalms of the passion, and finally resurrection and ascension psalms. Pay special attention to the musical styles and expressions composers and performers use to convey the essence of each particular psalm. U2’s Bono says, “What's so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as being gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues.” The Psalms have been favorite texts for melodists of all musical genres for thousands of years. In our own time, numerous artists have been challenged in bringing new settings of these ancient holy texts to the table. What a musical feast awaits us! In Ephesians 5, St. Paul exhorts, “Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” May this indeed be true as we encounter Christ in the prayer book of the church over the next few weeks and may our hearts and lives be transformed in that meeting.
––Barry Krammes, Lent Scripture Curator
Image: David and His Harp by Marc Chagall,1956, lithograph
We are most grateful for all of the illustrators, artisans, fine artists, poets, authors, composers, and musicians who have contributed to this year’s Lent Project. We hope that the variety of styles and cultures, and the wide range of denominations represented, creates a full-bodied expression of the marvelous things that God has done and is doing in the hearts and lives of those who seek him. We are also most grateful to those readers who have contributed financially to this unusual endeavor. It is your support that continues to make these projects possible. Our team has spent dozens of hours culling through hundreds of musical compositions and works of art and poetry in an attempt to bring a heartfelt worship experience to our readers. A special thank-you to our curators. In addition, thank you to Dean Todd Guy, Luke Aleckson, Tim Beardshear, David Baxter, and Jessica Snell.
—CCCA, 2022
Lent Project Video Introduction
by Joe Henderson
The season of Lent encourages us to pause from our distractions and busyness and attend to the truth of our situation. Often we obscure the truth about ourselves with our words. We use words to create an impression of ourselves we think will secure respect or sympathy from others. We can even use the words of prayer to try to create a good impression, as Jesus pointed out.
This year’s Biola Lent project takes us on a journey through the psalms. When we pray the psalms, we learn to use words in a new way. These words address God, who can’t be fooled by the impression of ourselves we try to project. These words ask for help from the one who already loves us with a steadfast love that endures forever, and they direct our praise to the one who is worthy of all praise.
Throughout history, God’s people have found that the psalms help them both to understand themselves and to give voice to what is deep in their hearts. In the third century, Athanasius wrote a letter to his friend Marcellinus urging him to pray and sing the psalms. He wrote, “In the Psalms… 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. …The marvel of the Psalms is that…the reader takes all its words upon his lips as though they were his own, written for his special benefit, and takes them and recites them, not as though someone else were speaking or another person’s feelings being described, but as himself speaking of himself, offering the words to God as his own heart’s utterance, just as though he himself had made them up.”
Although the psalms have the wonderful ability help us find our own true voice, there is another voice we can find in the psalms: the voice of Jesus. We not only hear the expression of what is deepest in our hearts; we learn what is deepest in his. We not only learn about our lives, we learn about his life, and this is especially appropriate during Lent which is intended to direct our eyes to the life of our savior, and what he suffered to bring us salvation.
This way of reading the psalms as spoken by Jesus appears throughout the New Testament. For example, on the day of Pentecost Peter quotes from Psalm 16: “You have not abandoned my soul to Hades or let your holy one see corruption.” Then he goes on to argue that the speaker could not be David, whose body is decomposing in its grave, but must be Jesus who rose from the dead. Jesus himself spoke the psalms as his own words, culminating in his final words on the cross: “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” and “Into your hands I commit my spirit” the words of Psalms 22 and 31.
Reading the psalms as spoken by Christ is not something that Jesus and his followers simply read into the psalms. The psalms themselves encourage this understanding. The reason is that the psalms are not merely the words of any humans suffering or rejoicing; they are the words of God’s chosen people Israel, and particularly God’s chosen king, David (who is directly named as the speaker of almost half the psalms). Thus when the psalms complain about enemies and ask God to deal with them, these enemies should be understood as those who oppose the very agents God chose to bring his salvation and good rule, his kingdom, to the world. When the psalms celebrate God’s deliverance from those enemies, they are celebrating that God’s plan of salvation is continuing and his kingdom is advancing.
Those who gave us the book of Psalms read them this way. The anonymous Jews who collected and organized the psalms into a book, were living in the time after the Babylonians had brought the nation of Israel to an end and taken its last kings into exile. The editors included so many Psalms by and about David in the belief that God would be true to his promises to David’s family and send a new king from his line, the Messiah. When they read the psalms of David, they heard the voice of the coming Messiah.
Jesus is the Messiah, the ultimate representative of God’s chosen people and his chosen king. The mission of Israel to bring God’s blessing and salvation to world and the mission of David’s dynasty establish and spread his kingdom is all concentrated in Jesus. For this reason, we can identify the enemies in the psalms with enemies of Jesus we read about in the gospels, both human and spiritual. We can identify the sufferings the psalms lament with the suffering of Jesus culminating on the cross. And we can identify the deliverance they celebrate with the resurrection, exaltation, and future triumph of Jesus.
Reading the psalms as the words of Jesus does not keep us from praying them as our own words. Instead it allows to own them in deeper way. The reason is that to be a Christian means to be incorporated into God’s chose Messiah as his body and grafted into God’s chosen people. In Paul’s short phrase, we are “in Christ.” Jesus speaks for us as our head, and through us by his indwelling spirit. Our sufferings, our enemies, our longings—and those of our brothers and sisters around the world—are his. His suffering, death, and resurrection are ours. And his mission to bring God’s salvation and good rule to the world are ours as well. This is this what is most true about us and our situation.
It’s our prayer that this Lenten journey will help us use our words to speak about and from this truth as we pray the psalms with each other and with Christ.