Scripture Reflections

On Sunday evening, I was humming the tune to “No Place Better (Psalm 84)” as I sat down to read to Julian, our seven year old. As I was getting his story up on my kindle, he made the comment, “It would be really hard to want to be with God more than all the other things, more than silver and gold.” It’s true, isn’t it? One commentator says of Psalm 131, which speaks of this pursuit, that it is one of the shortest Psalms to read but the longest to live into:
 
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
    my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    like a weaned child is my soul within me.
 
O Israel, hope in the Lord
    from this time forth and forevermore.
 
Like a weaned child—a child who has received good things from his mother, and has grown to desire the presence of his mother more than anything he may receive from her. The phrase, “calmed and quieted,” echoes our Lord’s words to the wind and the waves, the storm on the sea that threatened the lives of his friends. He calmed the wind, he quieted the sea with just his word. But we’ve also recently read through the book of Jonah in evening prayers, and in that story the wind and the waves, the storm that threatens the lives of the sailors, is quieted and calmed only when Jonah has been thrown into the deep. When the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign in Matthew 12, presumably to prove his authority to cast out demons comes from God and not from Satan, Jesus replies, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Our Lord threw himself into the storm of God’s wrath to save us, and he desires to enter into our hearts—even throw himself into the places of death that reside in each of us in order to bring his resurrection life yet more fully in you and in me. He is able to calm and quiet the wind and the waves; he is able to calm and quiet our souls.
 
Hannah