Meditation 242
Psalm 23
If we say the words “The Lord is my shepherd” and stopped there, most people would fill in “I shall not want.” This psalm of David’s, the shepherd’s psalm is one of the best known and best loved of all the 150 psalms in the Bible. Psalm 23 begins with a positive statement about God. God is our shepherd, the one who cares for us all and because God is our shepherd we will not want, or as the lyrics of “The New Twenty-third Psalm” say, because the Lord is my shepherd, I have everything that I need. The psalm makes it clear that we everything that we need and that we have peace in the midst of conflict.
The first statement, that we have everything we need, puts us in conflict with our economy. Most businesses spend time convincing us that we both want and need whatever item it is that they have to sell, and that our lives are empty without their particular service or good. There are few of us who are not influenced by this approach to some degree. We do need to buy things to get along, we need food and clothing which do need to be replaced. Even if we are not caught up in a desire to shop for the fun of it, there are other services that are for sale, from insurance to assistance with the activities of day to day life. It seems there is always something more that would make our lives complete. In the face of a consumer economy the psalmist says the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. There is a place under the shepherd’s care where we do not want. The desire for more ceases to be the motivating factor of our living. We thrive under the care of the shepherd.
The care of the Lord as our shepherd also means that peace is ours in the midst of conflict. The conflict of the psalm is described as being in the darkest valley. Such an image conjures up fear and danger, which are made apparent in many ways. In the case of David who wrote the psalm, there was fear for his life as King Saul persecuted him. Not all fears are as definable as David’s, but a fear does not have to be a threat from another, our fears may be of the future or of the change in a relationship. A fear simply has to be felt in order to be real. As much as we may become incapacitated because of the dark valley of our life, the good shepherd will lead us through.
This coming Sunday the gospel lesson will be about Jesus healing a man who had been blind from birth. The man was controlled by his blindness, it determined how he could spend his days. The dark valley in which he found himself was the valley of disability, and into this limited reality Jesus brought the care of healing. As much as Jesus, the good shepherd, was able to heal that man of his blindness, so Jesus is able to heal us of whatever hurt, sorrow or fear we carry.