Psalm 122 — House of the Lord

FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm one twenty-two today, the third of those pilgrim songs we've been climbing through, and I want you to hear it before we say anything about it. [short pause] David's song of ascent. I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD." Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is built up as a city united together, where the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, as a testimony for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the LORD. For there the thrones of judgment stand, the thrones of the house of David. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: "May those who love you prosper. May there be peace within your walls, and prosperity inside your fortresses." For the sake of my brothers and friends, I will say, "Peace be within you." For the sake of the house of the LORD our God, I will seek your prosperity.

LINDA BROWN: Glad. That is the word I want to hold, because he's glad at the wrong moment. He isn't standing in the city yet when he says it, he's glad when somebody just... says the sentence. "Let us go." And I'm trying to think of anybody, anywhere, who lights up when a friend says "let's go" to anything, let alone a week-long walk with a lamb. Welcome to Dig Deeper, by the way, we're in Psalm one twenty-two, and I think that first line is the strangest thing in it.

FRANK EDWARDS: Glad at the summons, before the arrival. Good to have you with us. The psalm has a shape I want to walk today, because it opens on a feeling and then it spends the rest of its lines telling you why the feeling is justified, and by the end it's turned into a prayer with a price attached to it. But you're right that the door is that one word. The Hebrew here is simple, sameach, the ordinary word for rejoicing, nothing exotic, and what makes it strange is exactly what you said, the timing. David isn't describing the view from the gates. He's describing the moment the invitation reached him, when somebody on his road turned and said, come on, we're going up. And he says, that made me glad. Which tells you the joy was never going to be about the road, or even the walls. The joy was already in him because of where the road went.

LINDA BROWN: That still sounds like being glad when someone says "let's go renew your license." Being glad about a destination in the abstract is not the same as being glad when the summons comes and you have to actually put your shoes on. Why is he glad when they say it?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of who's at the end of it, and I mean that literally, not as a devotional flourish. The house of the LORD wasn't a venue. It was the one spot on the map where God had promised to put his name and meet his people, and we'll get to why that spot mattered so much in a minute. So when the neighbour says "let us go to the house of the LORD," what David hears is, we are going to where God is. Psalm eighty-four, a few pages back, says it more nakedly: "My soul longs, even faints, for the courts of the LORD." Faints. That's a man whose appetite is fixed on one place. Spurgeon put the same instinct in a single sentence about the Christian's week, and I'll read it straight: "In prospect of the Lord's day, and all its hallowed associations, our soul rejoices." In prospect. Before it arrives. So let me turn it round on you. When the reminder pops up on a Saturday night, the alarm set for Sunday morning, what does the honest gut reaction usually sound like?

LINDA BROWN: Obligation, most weeks. A thing on the calendar between two other things. And what you're saying is that David's gladness isn't about how much he enjoys the trip, it's that the trip ends at God, so the invitation itself is already good news. The joy is in the address, and the address is a Person.

FRANK EDWARDS: The address is a Person. Hold onto that, because the psalm is going to press hard on why this particular address. Verse three and four: "Jerusalem is built up as a city united together, where the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD." Here's the piece I want to build properly today, because we'll lean on it all the way through this collection. Israel was not one thing. It was twelve tribes with twelve territories, their own elders, their own grudges, Ephraim looking sideways at Judah, Benjamin remembering old wars. Left alone they drift. And God knew that, so back in Deuteronomy twelve, long before there was a Jerusalem in Israelite hands, Moses said God would choose "a place from among all your tribes to put His Name." Not a place in each tribe. One place. Three times a year, at the feasts, every tribe was commanded to leave its own hills and converge on that single spot. Picture the roads in the week before a feast: families from Galilee, from Dan, from the far south, all funnelling toward one gate. And in that funnelling they were reminded, physically, with their feet, that they were one people under one God. Jerusalem was the gathering place of the tribes. That's what the city was for.

FRANK EDWARDS: And the poet gives you the city's own shape to match. "Built up as a city united together." The word is chabar, and it's a craftsman's word. It's what you say about timbers fitted into a frame, or the curtains of the tabernacle coupled together so they hang as one sheet. Joined so tightly the seam disappears. Jerusalem sat on a ridge, compact, walled, houses shoulder to shoulder, and David looks at that tight-packed city and hears a sermon in the stonework. The place is knit together. And the people who come up to it are knit together by coming.

LINDA BROWN: Isn't that just semantics though? A city built close on a hill, tightly packed, fine. Lots of ancient cities were tight. You're reading the unity of a whole nation out of a word that could just mean "well-constructed."

FRANK EDWARDS: It could, if the very next line didn't tell you what the compactness was for. "United together, where the tribes go up." The poet sets the joined stones and the gathered tribes side by side on purpose, so that the one pictures the other. The church has an old name for this, the communion of saints, the conviction that God's people are one body and not a loose crowd who happen to like the same songs. And the Old Testament version of that doctrine had an address. You knew you were one people because three times a year you stood in the same gate as tribes you'd otherwise never see. But here is what I don't want to skip. The city of stone kept breaking. Within a generation of David's grandson the tribes split, north from south, and later the walls came down. The joining David praised could not hold itself together. Which is why, when Paul reaches for a picture of the church, he reaches for exactly this vocabulary. Ephesians two: believers "fitted together," rising "to become a holy temple in the Lord," "built together into a dwelling place for God." He took chabar's image and put Christ at the joint. What the stones on that ridge could only picture, Christ does.

LINDA BROWN: Living stones, mortared together by him, not by the fact that we all showed up at the same building. The building on the hill was the diagram, and the finished thing is people held in Christ. Now the harder question, because verse five stops me every time: "there the thrones of judgment stand." Why is there a courthouse in the middle of a worship song?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because worship and justice sat in the same city, and Israel would have found it odd to separate them. Second Samuel five is the concrete history: David takes the fortress of Zion, makes it his royal seat, and from that moment the king's justice is administered from Jerusalem. So a pilgrim walking through the gate is entering two things at once. The house of the LORD, where sacrifice is offered and sin is covered. And the thrones of David's house, where wrongs are put right and the widow gets a hearing. Sins forgiven and wrongs judged, one city, one climb. Take either away and you've lost something essential. A temple with no justice is religion that lets the powerful off. A throne with no temple is law with no mercy in it. David's gladness rests on both standing together. And that pairing is why the psalm can turn, in verse six, from thanksgiving to something more urgent. If this is where forgiveness and justice both live, then the survival of this city is not a local concern.

LINDA BROWN: "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem." I want to refuse this one honestly. I don't live there. I've never stood in those gates. Half the people listening will hear that line and think of a headline, not a prayer. Why is the peace of one city in the Middle East supposed to be my business?

FRANK EDWARDS: Say the two words in Hebrew and you'll hear part of the answer before I explain it. Shalom. Yerushalayim. The name of the city has the word for peace folded into it, and a singer on the road would have caught that instantly, the way you'd catch it if someone named Grace prayed for grace. So when David sings "pray for the shalom of Yerushalayim," and then, "may there be shalom within your walls," the sound is bouncing back and forth. Peace, city of peace, peace within you. He is asking the city named for peace to actually be peaceful. To live up to its own name. And that's not a cute pun, that's the ache of the psalm, because the streets did not deliver what the name promised. Armies at the gates, kings who failed, a temple that would eventually burn. The name kept making a promise the city kept breaking.

FRANK EDWARDS: And shalom itself is bigger than a ceasefire. It's wholeness. Everything set right and working the way God intended, the walls sound, the worship pure, the courts honest, the neighbour fed. So David's prayer is really: let the place where God meets his people, and where his justice is administered, be whole. That's why it's your business. Not because of a border. Because every person who loves the LORD has a stake in the one place where forgiveness and justice both stand. And then look at who walks up to that same city, centuries later, and looks at it and weeps. Luke nineteen. Jesus, the son of David, on the slope coming down toward the gate: "If only you had known on this day what would bring you peace." The city of peace did not know its own peace when he walked through the gate. The prayer David hid inside the name was being answered by the man crying over it.

LINDA BROWN: "For the sake of my brothers and friends, I will say, peace be within you." That's the line with the price in it. For the sake of. And I'll be honest about where this puts me. I have a name I can't stop thinking about, someone in my own church, and I would rather pray for a city I'll never visit than walk across a room to that person. Praying for Jerusalem costs me nothing. Saying "peace be within you" to that face costs me the version of the story where I was right.

FRANK EDWARDS: The version where you were right is precisely what shalom asks you to spend, and David names the currency: for the sake of. He spends himself on his brothers. And the reason you can afford it is the thing the psalm was always pointing at. John two, Jesus standing in that very temple: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up," and John adds, he was speaking of the temple of his body. The place where God put his name is no longer walls on a ridge. It's him. Hebrews twelve says it in the psalm's own language: "you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem." Have come. Past tense. Your feet are already standing in the gates. And Christ made that true at the cost of his own blood, toward people who were still turned against him. He walked over instead of walking past. So the peace you're asked to speak to that face is not something you generate. It's something you've already received, and you're passing it down the line.

LINDA BROWN: Passing it down the line, in a foyer, with coffee in the other hand. What does that actually sound like, out loud, when the person is standing right there? Because "peace be within you" is not a sentence anyone says on a Sunday morning without it getting weird.

FRANK EDWARDS: [laughs] Probably not in those words, no. It sounds like the first move, and the first move is usually small and awful to make. "Can we talk for a minute? I think things have been off between us, and I don't want them to stay that way." No case prepared. No score to settle. Just the door opened. And I'd put the gentler version beside it too, because the psalm has both: David says peace to the city, and he also just says, out loud, that he's glad to be there with his brothers. So it also sounds like turning to someone you've quietly lost track of and saying, plainly, I'm glad you're part of this, I've been praying for you. Which brings us round to where we started. Why was David glad when they merely said "let us go"? Because the destination was already certain and already good. And that's more true for you than it was for him. Christ, your peace, has already gone up ahead of you, into the city that cannot be shaken. So the gladness can start now, before the alarm goes off, before you find your shoes, before you've worked up the courage to cross the room.

LINDA BROWN: So the question I'm walking out with is his, not mine. Who is the brother or friend you'd rather pray around than speak to, and what would it cost you to say "peace be within you" to them before Sunday? Do something with that today. Not next week. Today, while the name is still in your head.

FRANK EDWARDS: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you'd like the rest of the series alongside it, you'll find Dig Deeper in your app store.