by Inge Williams (LMLC 2012-2013 Intern)
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free;
the LORD opens the eyes of the blind. The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The LORD will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the LORD!
(Psalm 146:5-10, NRSV)
I have a class this fall at seminary on the book of Revelation, and one of the reasons scholars think it was written is to address the question, “how can Christ have inaugurated the kingdom of God, if there is still so much blatant evil, so much suffering and injustice, in the world?” This is a question I know I still ask myself, when I worry about the direction the world is headed in, and when bad things happen to good people – how can you let this happen, God?
When I took Hebrew class, we spent a good bit of time looking for action words in the passages we translated. I looked, and in the five short lines of this Psalm, God is the subject of twelve verbs. Read them aloud! God may be eternal, but God is certainly not static. God is busy, in fact, lifting up the good in the world and tripping up wickedness- the exact thing promised in the book of Revelation. Though evil is still thrashing around with abandon, we can trust that God’s goodness will, and somehow already has, overcome. Happy are we who have such hope in Christ. Amen!