Joel Baden and Abdul-Rehman Malik discuss faith, ritual performance, and divine blessing in Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16. The text is appointed for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21), in Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Grace and Transaction (Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost)
Voiceover Voice:
We are contingent reality; God is absolute, eternal reality.
Helena Martin:
This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study.
Join us each week as two Yale Divinity School professors look at an upcoming text from the Revised Common Lectionary.
This episode, we have Abdul-Rehman Malik back! He’s Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Islamic Studies. This week, he’s talking with Joel Baden, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Center for Continuing Education.
They’re discussing Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16, which is appointed for Track 1 of the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21, in Year C.
The text is read for you by student Aidan Stoddart.
Aidan Stoddart:
[Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16]
You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress;
my God, in whom I trust.”
For he will deliver you from the snare of the hunter
and from the deadly pestilence;
he will cover you with his pinions,
and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness is a shield and defense.
You will not fear the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.
Those who love me, I will deliver;
I will protect those who know my name.
When they call to me, I will answer them;
I will be with them in trouble;
I will rescue them and honor them.
With long life I will satisfy them
and show them my salvation.
Abdul-Rehman Malik:
Well, Joel, when I read these passages from Psalm 91, as a Muslim coming to this text, I immediately hear the words of the prophet Muhammad. And there’s a set of sayings of the prophet Muhammad, which are called the Hadith Qudsi, almost like “the sacred sayings.” They’re not Qur’an. They’re not revelation. But they’re God speaking through the prophet. And therefore, when the prophet says these words, he’s saying them as if God is saying them, and there’s this really powerful and profound Hadith Qudsi, which is often cited by the Sufis and the mystics and those who are committed to spiritual formation within the Islamic tradition, which says that “the believer draws close to me”–this is God speaking—“through the supererogatory acts of devotion and worship, and becomes so dedicated to them that God becomes the eyes with which they see, the feet with which they walk, the hand with which they strike,” and so on and so forth. And reading particularly verses 14 to 16 in Psalm 91, I was immediately reminded of that. I was immediately reminded of this relationship that God enters into with the creation, almost occupying and becoming and acting through creation. What’s interesting for me, Joel, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, is that in some way, I think, our belief tells us that God is acting through us all the time anyways, but there’s something here that makes that more explicit.
Joel Baden:
Part of what I think is giving you that sensation, perhaps, is that this text, I feel like, is explicit in a cause and effect, or the relational sort of sense here, of, “I will care for you, and you will trust that I’ll care for you.” The way that these last verses that you’re talking about are formulated: “Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name. When they call to me, I will answer them.” So, there are two sides are represented verbally in the poetry itself. But it’s God, open and willing to perform these acts of, as it says, of salvation and rescue and honor, and answer and deliverance and protection, it seems like, simply for people who ask for it. And to me, at least, and again this may be… you started off coming from your background; for me, this may be because I’m coming from a Jewish background. One of the things I find fascinating about this Psalm is that the deliverance that’s promised, and the bulk of the Psalm, the middle, the whole middle of the Psalm, is just a litany of ways that God will deliver the Psalmist or the faithful person. But it’s entirely predicated on simply saying, “I trust.” It’s a verbal expression of, “God is my refuge and my fortress, in whom I trust.” And you know, as long as you say that, God’s gonna be there for you, which again, from a from a Jewish perspective, I’m like, what about doing, like, truly, there’s doing stuff that is implied in faith, but here it feels very Christian, actually, in a sense, like, “Just say you believe and I’ll take of you.”
Abdul-Rehman Malik:
Yeah. A spiritual movement that doesn’t require anything else, other than an acknowledgement and an attestation of that thing. But I think that’s a really important question. How does your Jewish sensibility or my Muslim sensibility receive that? Because I do feel that, I don’t know, I feel like in the Islamic tradition, we hold both those things. We hold God’s grace, which is not transactional, because it is offered and given alongside God’s mercy and love and compassion and generosity to whom God pleases to give that to. And at the same time, we are called to do good works, to devotion, to supererogatory acts of worship, of being in the world in a particular way, which opens the doors of blessing. And I think both are entirely possible, but I do think that our religious sensibilities are that words are not enough.
Joel Baden:
Yeah. And from a Biblical perspective, and here I’ll speak as a Biblicist, one of the interesting ironies of the Biblical text is that, especially given its Christian appropriation, what is assumed in the Biblical text is the action, the ritual action in particular, right? There’s almost never a moment in the Bible when it says something like, “Remember to sacrifice.” What it says is, “Yeah. Okay, great. You’re sacrificing. Good for you. But what you’re missing is the stuff that comes with it. The non-tangible.” It’s the social justice. It’s the faithfulness. It’s the correct attitude. Those are the things that the prophets call on us to feel and be better people, and to have faith and to trust, over and above the assumed baseline of, “of course you’re sacrificing.” Of course you’re doing the things. So, when I read this, from my Biblicist perspective, I read it and I’m like, it’s not saying, “all you need to do is say that you trust.” It’s saying, “I assume that you’re going through all of the normal motions. And then on top of that, you need to come with something more,” something that gives a meaning, a deeper meaning, to those ritual, ritualized acts.
Abdul-Rehman Malik:
Does the transactional language sometimes contained in these kinds of verses ever bother you? Did you ever look at it and say, “Well, you know, God is Creator, we are creation.” In the Islamic tradition, we are contingent reality; God is absolute eternal reality. Our very being, our very breath, our very moment between breaths is contingent on God’s maintaining and sustaining us. Boy, any transaction is really one sided, and why does God require this transaction from us? I’ve often wondered about that because I think there is this transactional element of it. And I think in our mystical and spiritual traditions, we evolve a kind of landscape of love, affection, intimacy with God, which sort of transcends transaction into that other field that Rumi speaks about, you know, beyond transaction, beyond good and evil, to a place of devotion and love and intimacy with the Divine. And I can begin to conceptualize it there, but in the realm of human “I take, you give; you offer, you will receive in kind and greater”– I don’t know. It’s always felt… I’ve struggled with it.
Joel Baden:
[Laughs] I hear you! I hear you. And of course, there’s nothing static about this, right? This is a constantly shifting, changing notion of our understanding of God, of what God wants. So again, if I’m gonna talk about this from a Biblical perspective, I’m just saying, it’s entirely transaction. It’s openly transactional, in part because in going back to Biblical terms (and I would think probably Islam would belong in that category, too) these are coming out of a context where there are other gods, and what’s at stake here is that you are supposed to be worshiping this one. So when it says you should be trusting in, the most high, the almighty, the Lord, that’s saying: “if you trust in Israel’s God, Israel’s God will take care of you.” And that’s a really important thing to say when there are other deities that you could also potentially be going to. So, I think that accounts for some of some of this language.
Abdul-Rehman Malik:
No, that that actually gives it a very important and compelling context.
Joel Baden:
But what do you do with that? I mean, this is the interpretive question. What do you do with that? Once we’ve given up on the notion of other gods, now I’ve got this transactional language that you are seeing embedded in our scriptural texts. How do we understand it? In a sense, I think, what seems to be troubling you, and you can tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that what’s troubling you here is positive transaction. That is, “if you worship me correctly, I will bless and take care of you. I will sustain you.” Do you feel as bothered by negative transaction? “If you disobey, I will punish you.” Because it seems to me, if you’re cool with one, if you can conceive of, “disobedience results in punishment or curse,” or simply “the removal of blessing,” then the opposite should be just as acceptable, no?
Abdul-Rehman Malik:
No, I think you’re absolutely right. And I think at times, reflecting on my own sort of spiritual sensibilities, yes. I would agree with you. The negative transactional is also, at times, unnerving and unsettling because what we are offered really as a vision of the Divine is the merciful and the compassionate beyond compare. I think in the Qur’anic language, it would be God saying to us, “I am present. I have never been absent. Why do you despair of the mercy of God? Reach out and connect yourself to it.” And that’s where I find solace in that negative transactional, realizing that our actions in the world have consequence, and yet, and also, God’s mercy is ever present and it requires nothing but one’s attachment to it in order to access it. It requires an acknowledgement of the presence of the Divine, close and intimate with us. And I think that’s the way through my own sort of spiritual language and spiritual lexicon, that I get over that those concerns about transaction.
Helena Martin:
Thanks for listening. And thank you, Professors Baden and Malik, for taking us through some of Psalm 91.
For more Bible study resources, check out YaleBibleStudy.org. Some of the resources are about specific books of the Bible, or we also have themed studies like “Women in the Bible.” It’s all free. That’s YaleBibleStudy.org.
Chapter, Verse, and Season is a production of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. It’s produced by: Creator and Managing Editor, Joel Baden; Production Manager, Kelly Morrissey; Associate Producer, Aidan Stoddart; and I’m your Host and Executive Producer, Helena Martin. And our theme music is by Calvin Linderman.
We’ll be back with another conversation from Chapter, Verse, and Season.
Book of the Bible:
Psalms
Subjects:
Psalms
Guests
Text
New Revised Standard Version Bible
Copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Credits
Host and Executive Producer: Helena Martin
Production Manager: Kelly Morrissey
Creator and Managing Editor: Joel Baden
Assistant Producer: Aidan Stoddart
Music: Calvin Linderman
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