Sunday, February 27, 2005
On Psalm 95, from Neil
Psalm 95 contains some beautiful images. God is the “rock of our salvation” (95:1), like one of the stony projections that shielded soldiers on the heights (94:22). And we are his “well-tended flock” (95:7), the “sheep of his hand,” as the King James Bible has it. But then we hear the prophet cry, “Oh, that today you would hear his voice” (95:7), as we are reminded of when the people at Massah and Meribah had questioned God (Ex 17:1-7; Num 20) and God responded in anger, "They shall never enter my rest" (95:11). What is going on?
Now, this is a liturgical psalm, beginning with a call to worship God as king and creator, and the late Carmelite exegete Roland Murphy suggests that the prophet’s call that we hear God’s voice on this very day “indicates that the ancient covenant is being renewed in a liturgical re-presentation.” What is the purpose of such a “re-presentation”? Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman says that “liturgy’s function, rabbinically speaking, is to make present a dramatic enactment of those things past and present to which God is expected to attend,” such as the events of the Exodus. And just like Eastern Eucharistic prayers remind us that God’s presence always involves judgment – the “glorious and dreadful second coming” in the Liturgy of St Basil – a commemoration of the Exodus involved reliving God’s anger. “They shall never enter my rest.”
To think about memory’s role in our own lives, I’m going to draw on the Jesuit liturgist Bruce Morrill’s interesting book Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue. Fr Morrill himself draws on two very different theologians: Fr Johann Baptist Metz and Fr Alexander Schmemann. According to Metz, we are caught in a late modern worldview that only envisions a continuous progress through more and more technical solutions. Christians are meant, however, to interrupt this secularized view of time with the memoria passionis, mortis et resurrectionis Jesu Christi – the “dangerous memory” of Jesus Christ – which draws us to identify with God’s solidarity with victims while we live in “imminent expectation” of the fulfillment of God’s promise to deliver the oppressed. The fatalism and apathy of modernity’s technological and economic processes are broken open by the “remembrancing” of the Eucharistic memorial which itself carries an “apocalyptic sting” – “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26).
For Fr Schmemann also, “the whole liturgy is a remembrance of Christ” that “bears witness to [time’s] finitude and limitedness,” as we are “lifted up” into the “age to come” to participate in the Messianic Banquet with the “bread of heaven.” “The Eucharist is the manifestation of the Church as the new aeon; it is participation in the Kingdom as the parousia, as the presence of the Resurrected and Resurrecting Lord. It is not the ‘repetition’ of His advent or coming into the world, but the lifting up of the Church into His parousia, the Church’s participation in His heavenly glory.” This “lifting up” in the liturgy is at once a commemoration of Christ and an anticipation of the world’s passing away when the same Christ will reign in glory. Just as for Metz, the memory of suffering interrupts time, for Schmemann, time is broken open by the liturgical experience of joy.
For us today, on the other hand, time is often flattened – memory becomes mere nostalgia and the future is reduced to speculation. It was quite different for our ancestors in the faith, for whom memory was liturgical. As Rabbi Hoffman says, “Now we understand better Hillel’s zeher lapesach and Jesus’ ‘Do this in memory of me.’ They are of a piece, each being a set of words that accompany a ritual act. In essence, they are pointers to pointers. The paschal sacrifice that Hillel eats – it had not yet ceased in his day – is a pointer to the original lamb of Egypt known as the pesach; his act is a pointer that draws God’s attention to the original pointer, the primary event of Egypt, which itself is a pointer drawing God’s attention further to salvation.” For them, remembering an event meant that God’s action in that event would once again be efficacious. The liturgical re-presentation, “Oh, that today you would hear his voice,” meant that the Exodus would become an actual and present reality once more for Israel to participate in. Likewise, for Christians, as Fr Morrill reminds us, “in the Eucharistic sacrifice the assembly experiences anew the grace which Christ’s definitive sacrifice on the cross wrought.” And we experience this Eucharistic sacrifice as “the action of the self-same God who will accomplish its fulfillment in Christ’s return.” But remembering isn’t easy. For Israel, “Oh, that today you would hear his voice,” meant remembering divine judgment and anger and wandering in the desert – “They shall never enter my rest.” This is echoed in the Letter to the Hebrews – “Therefore, let us strive to enter into that rest, so that no one may fall after the same example of disobedience” (4:11). For us, the memorial of Christ in the Eucharist also means remembering the divine judgment that will come with Christ’s return – a West Syrian anaphora describes the merciless vengeance that will be visited upon those “who did not know mercy” and the Apostle Paul himself warns us that “whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:27).
So, at church on Sunday, when you hear the cantor repeat, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts,” do not think that it refers to a merely private and psychological reality. God’s voice is Metz’s “dangerous memory,” Schmemann’s “lifting up,” that interrupts our secularized time. It brings the joy with which the disciples returned to Jerusalem (Lk 24:52), but it also demands that we show mercy, for “vengeance without mercy will follow those who did not know mercy” (Anaphora of Severus of Antioch). Indeed, “They shall never enter my rest.” But, God willing, we shall.
By the way, I welcome comments on my exegesis. Especially corrections.
