psalm 72: not power but service - epiphany B 2018

Psalm 72 is a royal psalm.  It is a royal psalm because it was sung when the king assumed power, when a new king was anointed.  In this psalm the people pray for the king saying, “O God, with your judgment endow the king, and with your justice, the king's son; He shall govern your people with justice and your afflicted ones with judgment.”  There are two important words here, they are characteristics expected on a king and these characteristics are the very characteristics of God.  First, the king must have zedekah or judgement or righteousness, and the second, the king must have mishpat or justice.  To endow the king with judgement is to pray that the king will think and act like God, the king or leader should always be in sync with the ways of God.  And how can a leader be in sync with the ways of God?  By acting with justice, the second characteristic. In this psalm justice does not mean fairness, punishing the wrong and rewarding the good.  No.  Justice in the biblical sense means that the poorest among the people are cared for, the powerless are defended and persons are lifted up from their misery.

Imagine the people of Israel gathering on the mount in Jerusalem at the sound of the trumpet at every assumption of the king praying that they be given a king who can think and act like God, a leader who can dispense justice, a king who will do what he can to lift the poor from their conditions of poverty, a king who will come to the defense of the powerless, a king who will lift every person from their misery. 

Imagine the hope that this prayer would arouse in the people.  Imagine too the joy and the expectation.  But imagine also the frustration, the disappointment and the hope crushed.

Reign after reign, king after king, the pattern of expectation and frustration rolls on.  And so it happened that this royal psalm becomes now a hymn for the coming of the messiah-king.  And thus, this is sung today on Epiphany on the day when Jesus is manifested and revealed to the gentiles who inquired "Where is the newborn king of the Jews?  We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage."

For indeed this is what characterized the kingship of Jesus, not power but service, a kingship not defined by wealth and prosperity but a kingship defined by care – care for the widow, care for the boy with withered hands, care for lepers and the sick;  a kingship whose strength in not defined by the number of its armies and weapons but by its compassion to the hungry, to the sinner, to the sidelined; a kingship whose strength and prestige is not measured by its medals of honor and success but on the king’s personal capacity to sacrifice himself for the other, to die that others may live, to become poor that others may be enriched, to be humbled and insulted that others may attain their dignity and honor.  This is the king sung about by Psalm 72, and it points to Jesus.  This is psalm 72 fulfilled at last.

And so as we celebrate the Epiphany, the manifestation of our Lord to the gentiles, let us ask ourselves, as an institutions, as communities and as individuals - how do we as followers of this messiah-king reveal and manifest him to those who inquire?