A Psalm of Peace and Justice
Friday, March 27, 2026
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside still waters;
He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
—Psalm 23:1–3 (NRSV)
While Psalm 23 is beloved for its message of consolation, Diana Butler Bass recounts how she was challenged to read it through the eyes of those who face poverty, food insecurity, injustice, and marginalization.
Psalm 23 a political tract?
I confess: I’ve never considered that possibility. But I took up … [the] challenge to read the psalm politically, with empathy toward a non-Western view. [1] The psalm’s central pivot is the line about paths and “for God’s sake.” The lines before lead up to that couplet—and the lines after flow from it….
In the Book of Common Prayer (the version I’ve read in worship and private prayer for forty years), the pivot reads: He revives my soul and guides me along right pathways for his name’s sake. In the King James version … that phrase reads: He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
I’ve heard scores of sermons about the “right pathways,” meaning that God guides us when lost and leads us on life’s journey. We can’t ultimately go astray. That’s pretty comforting….
And, of course, that is true. But it isn’t all.
Read Robert Alter’s version—a modern translation noted by scholars for its precision—and the pivot sentence contrasts sharply: My life He brings back. He leads me on pathways of justice for His name’s sake.” [2]
In the scriptures, right and righteousness are interchangeable with justice. But in North America? Well, not so much…. Very few middle-class church people would ever think of substituting justice for either word. Alter’s version, however, thunders justice as the pivotal word in the psalm.
Alter’s translation of Psalm 23:1–3 reads:
The LORD is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
In grass meadows
He makes me lie down,
by quiet waters guides me.
My life He brings back.
He leads me on pathways of justice
for His name’s sake.
Butler Bass emphasizes the call to share our restored lives with others for the sake of justice:
The psalmist proclaims, This is the reality of the Lord’s government, the beloved community, over and against all oppression and exploitation. Through it, we humans are restored to what was always intended: My life He brings back; Our lives He brings back.
The renewed life, however, does not remain content in grass meadows or by quiet waters…. Instead, those who are citizens of this sacred realm are called forth on pathways of justice to make God’s name—God’s sabbath reign—known throughout the world.
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“Meanwhile, for myself, I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in his peace, to be lost in the secret of His face.”
– Thomas Merton in The Sign of Jonas
This is one of the early lines in The Sign of Jonas, Merton’s spiritual autobiography at the start of his monastic career.
It reads completely poetic. I have no idea exactly what it means, but it feels true to me at the same time.
2.
“Our Lord needs neither our brilliant deeds nor our beautiful thoughts.”
As an Enneagram 5, I am prone to living too often in my head.
I am also prone to believing my thoughts are more interesting than they really are.
Don’t get me wrong, some ideas are interesting and potentially worth sharing with people. (Or, at least, I think so!)
But it is important for me to remember that even if I do not have “brilliant deeds nor beautiful thoughts,” God still loves me infinitely and unconditionally. I do not have to earn one ounce of God’s love by any unique insights or shiny wisdom I might have stumbled across.
God can always do whatever God wants, and in one sense does not need our participation in the restoration of all things, but he chooses to include us in that project.
3.
“Thus, listening to sermons failed to give me what I wanted, and having had my fill of them without gaining understanding, I gave up going to hear public sermons. I settled on another plan-by God’s help to look for some experienced and skilled person who would give me in conversation that teaching about unceasing prayer which drew me so urgently.”
What I find interesting about this quote from the Russian spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim is that the Pilgrim says he is giving up on sermons. You wouldn’t think that, would you?
But I will admit I went through a similar season in my life as well.
There was a point when sermons did very little for me. Honestly, I am not embarrassed to say it. Sometimes sermons feel the need to overexplain a mystery to death, when it would be better to leave certain aspects of the faith wrapped in nuance. They also feel as though they rely on platitudes rather than inviting me into some deeper teaching.
So, in that season, I decided to start reading the old Christian mystics as if they were living mentors that I could sit down and talk with.
These included Bonaventure, Francis of Assisi, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Hildegaard of Bingen, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, George Herbert, Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, and so many others.
I don’t think anything else has had such a profound impact on my faith as to treat the old Christian tradition, regardless of denominational affiliation, as my personal mentors.
4.
“I’m not sure I have made this clear: self-knowledge is so important that even if you were drawn directly into heaven in prayer, I wouldn’t want you to relax your practices of humble and honest self-reflection.”
– Teresa of Avila in Interior Castle
“Honest self-reflection.”
I think about that often.
Yes, I am prone to overthinking and therefore will think about myself in more negative ways than positive, but I agree with Teresa that the world would be better if we could do that “honest self-reflection” more often.
5.
“There is indeed one great high priest, our Lord Jesus Christ. But he is not the high priest of priests, but the high priest of high priests…”
I have a volume of Origen’s writings that was compiled by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Although Origen was posthumously deemed a “heretic” for raising particular questions (not even for taking a final stance), everything I have read makes a lot of sense…
And I would argue that Origen seems more orthodox than many internet preachers.
That said, there is a certain poeticism to his saying that Jesus is not simply a high priest among the priests, but that Jesus is the High Priest of the high priests.
