Lone Rangers or Team Players

Who could win the World Cup in soccer as a single player? “Impossible!” any child can answer. It takes a team! But maybe, as believers, we consider ourselves tennis players, and only singles at that! Yet no Djokovic, no Nadal, no Sinner, nor Alcaraz wins Wimbledon single-handedly. They each have an elaborate coaching and support team behind them, just as an Indy 500 driver does!

One of our big challenges in understanding the Sacred Scriptures is that we approach them with the 21st-century individualistic mindset of self-centered people who live from one sensational moment to the next, absorbed by the fleeting anticipation of the upcoming experience. In last month’s article, Exploring Oneness in Sacred Scripture, we pondered how we are made in the Image and Likeness of God and are also called into the family of Abraham, our Father in the Faith. God’s people are not isolated individuals who gather in a room, but deeply bonded family members. Let’s explore this mindset behind the Psalms and capture the sense of corporate oneness imbuing the biblical mentality.

The Psalms are precisely the prayer of God’s people from ancient times. There is an ancient proverbial expression, lex orandi, lex credendi, that the principles of our prayer life express our faith and, vice versa, the principles of our faith form and guide our prayer. While pondering these prayers and being conscious of our mutual oneness, it is wonderful to discover that the person praying is not only an individual human being but is also deeply bonded with the entire people of God.

We love to pray the Psalms in intense personal moments; they can feel like personal prayer journals. Let’s begin with Ps 3: “O Lord, how many are my foes!”, which allows us to strongly sense personal distress. “I am weary with my moaning” in Ps 6 similarly expresses intense individual suffering. Is there a more personal lament than Ps 13: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” Probably the most famous individual psalm is Ps 23: “The Lord is my shepherd,” so entirely singular and intimate. “O God, you are my God” in Ps 63 expresses mystical individual longing.

The personal guilt and illness of Ps 38 climax in David’s psalm of repentance, Ps 51. This classic individual repentance psalm, “Have mercy on me, O God, in your kindness...,” broadens toward Zion and Israel as it reaches its conclusion: rebuild the walls of Jerusalem so your people can offer necessary and valid worship. Even in the most individual and deeply personal core, the praying person knows he or she is part of a much greater corporate reality, the entire people of God. Similarly, while Ps 22 opens so personally, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, words also recorded on Jesus’ lips as he hangs crucified, the communal dimensions emerge toward the end in total harmony with his messianic mission for all God’s people.

Ps 80 offers one of the strongest corporate metaphors, the vine: “You brought a vine out of Egypt.” Israel is:

• One vine
• One planted reality
• One organism

Recall how this resonates later in Johannine theology: “I am the vine,” Jn 15.

It seems most natural for us 21st-century folks to empathize with the individual praying, whereby his own person is almost the entire horizon of his prayer. The individual certainly matters personally to God, but God’s people are one covenant reality. Let’s continue looking and realize that the whole people are praying in the Psalms much of the time, with a clear consciousness of being one people.

In Ps 44, one voice is speaking, but it is the voice of the entire people: “You are my King, O God! Ordain salvation for Jacob!” “You have made us like sheep for slaughter.” The whole nation speaks as a single “we/us” in their:

• collective suffering
• covenant identity
• national memory
• shared destiny

This psalm barely distinguishes individual persons from the people as a whole.

In Ps 74, the people of God and the Temple are one reality:

“Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old.”

“They set your sanctuary on fire.”

Israel, worship, Temple, land, and covenant are all treated corporately.

After devastation, the psalmist prays:

“O God, the nations have come into your inheritance.”

“Help us, O God of our salvation.”

The “I” disappears in Ps 79 into communal catastrophe. It’s national trauma.

“Jerusalem built as a city that is bound firmly together.” “There the tribes go up.” Ps 122 expresses the profound unity of tribes, national identity, and worship, a theme carried just as strongly through joy as it is through sorrow.

The collective exilic memory of Ps 137, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,” is deeply shared consciousness, not private grief. It rises from the exiles’ national identity.

Look at how the many royal psalms assume: king + people = one destiny

Examples:

• Psalm 2
• Psalm 72
• Psalm 89
• Psalm 110

Please don’t treat this exercise as something academic. It’s just a starter to begin praying! Go beyond the references here. Let these notes guide you to slowly read some psalms on a regular basis over the coming weeks and let this shared corporate spirit penetrate our thinking. We need transformation into the biblical understanding that we all belong together and share the same gift of salvation for the entire human family. Particularly, as baptized members, we belong intimately to each other as members of Christ’s Body, his Spouse, the Church.

The Psalms are fascinating precisely because they hold together both realities: Israel as one corporate people before God and the individual soul standing personally before God. Modern readers often assume biblical religion is mainly individual, but the Psalms reveal how deeply collective Israel’s spirituality actually was. Jesus was certainly more than familiar with the Psalms and prayed them. This seems particularly evident in Passion, when his heart is palpable in his words. No wonder the basic prayer he taught us is structured in the first-person plural “we” and “us” where “I” and “me” are noticeably absent.

For today, let’s finish with a quote from a Christian who saw the Psalms’ prayer in a very powerful way:

“God could give men no greater gift than to make his Word, through whom he created all things, their head, that they in turn should become his members. The Son of God has become the Son of Man, one God with the Father, one man with men; so that when we speak to God in prayer, the Son is not separated from the Father; when the Body of the Son prays, the head is not separated from the body. It is the one Savior of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, who prays for us, prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest. He prays in us as our head. He is prayed to by us as our God. Let us recognize, therefore, our voices in him and his voice in us.”

Augustine, Enarrat. in Psalm. 85:1: CCL 39, 1176.

This commentary powerfully resonates with John 17, especially vv. 23 and 26, favorite One Step Closer Scripture verses.

…to be continued, because Sacred Scripture’s treatment of oneness is so broad and deep. Let’s continue exploring this immense biblical treasure together as we develop www.onestepcloser.org.

Feel free to send me your observations, comments, suggestions, etc. at ekelly@magdala.org.

What God has joined, let no one put asunder (Mt 19:6; Mk 10:9).

‍