“Pray for the peace of…” (Psalm 122:6)
There’s an old preaching saying that I always like to remind myself of: “A text, without a context, is a pretext.” So I’m going to devote a fair portion of today’s devotional to giving this Psalm context.
First of all, the book of Psalms is not a book of poems. It’s a song book. The Israelites would sing these verses. The early church would do the same. There’s something about singing that is different than simply reading. Because it engages your body as well as your mind it requires more concentration and, as a result, it evokes stronger emotions.
Secondly, Psalm 122 is part of a cycle of psalms (120 through 134) that are called the Songs of Ascent. When the people would travel to Jerusalem for one of the Holy Day Festivals they had to climb the road from Jericho (which is over 900 feet below sea level) up an 18 mile road to the Temple in Jerusalem (which is over 2,200 feet above sea level). That’s an incline of more than half a mile, with the first five miles being the steepest and most dangerous. That initial stretch was called “The Ascent of Adumim.” “Adumim” means “red places” and referred not just to the color of the rocks, but to the dangers that bandits posed to travelers in that section. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is set in that stretch of road.
The Israelite pilgrims would travel in groups and sing these fifteen Psalms over and over as they struggled up the road for an entire day. I hope that your imagination is able to see this as a metaphor for our modern Christian life as well. The Lone Ranger was a fictional character. The Lone Christian is also a fiction. As the Apostle Paul points out “we who are many are one body” (1 Corinthians 10:17). The body of Christ.
Psalm 122 makes several different points, all worth considering, but I want to focus particularly on verse 6: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!” The Psalm makes a distinction between the house of God and the city of Jerusalem in which that house resides. The Psalmist doesn’t just focus on the Temple, he directs the people to pray for the city. We’ve seen similar urgings from God in Jeremiah 29:7, where he directs the people in exile in the land of their Babylonian captors to “Pray for the peace of the city wherein I have placed you.”
We – the Body of Christ – are also living in cities that are not (yet) our home. We also must let our prayers go beyond “bless me, bless mine” to seek the peace of this occupied territory in which we presently live. “Peace” does not mean simply the absence of strife. It is the Hebrew word “shalom” which means the perfect state of being that God declared His creation to be in at the beginning of Genesis. Abundance, joy, beauty and right relationship for everything living thing.
So, staring in our own households, let our prayers go out to cover Harbor Church, your neighbors, all the other churches in Honolulu, the people of the City of Honolulu, the island of Oahu, the state of Hawaii, our country and go out into the whole world – “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”