Skip to main content

Out of the mouths of babes

Psalm 8
Psalm 8 is one of the psalms quoted by Jesus in the New Testament. In Matthew 21.16 he rebukes the Jewish priests and scribes, who’ve objected to children crying out ‘Hosanna to the Son of David.’ He quotes verse 2: ‘Have you never read, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself?”
In the Old Testament translation of the psalm the New Revised Standard Version renders this as ‘babes and infants’, prudishly omitting to make clear that these are ‘babes at the breast’. The odd thing about this is that babies can’t speak! Is it just the sheer joy and wonder that we experience when we’re with tiny children that confounds those who are unimpressed by God’s creation? This is something many of us have missed during lockdown.
Psalm 8 also revisits the astounding idea - first found in Genesis 1 - that we’re like God. Even though he’s created the universe, God still cares for each one of us. Have we been made ‘a little lower than God’ or ‘a little lower than the angels’? This depends on how we choose to translate the Hebrew word ‘gods’. If instead we opt for, ‘you have made us a little lower than the gods’ this implies that God is simply the chief, or sovereign, god in a pantheon of lesser heavenly beings. That might have been the original meaning but it’s not how Jewish people understood the psalm after the Exile in Babylon.
St Augustine was surely right when he said, partly on the strength of this psalm, ‘Blessed be God, who has promised humanity the gift of divinity.’ I suspect Augustine is also calculating that, if God can become human in Jesus, we can become divine by being adopted as sons and daughters of God through Jesus’ saving grace, an idea he would have got from St Paul. Perhaps it’s we, then, who are ‘the babes and sucklings’ (in spiritual terms) from whose mouths shall come the praise that destroys the arguments of naysayers who would argue there’s no meaning or purpose to existence and no Creator.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...

Sharing the Good News With People of Other Faiths

Together with other local Christians, clergy and lay people, I find myself – from time to time – giving thought to how we share our Christian faith with people from other religious backgrounds. It is a ticklish issue, because converting from one faith to another is a huge decision to make and it may not be appropriate for everyone. Becoming a Christian is always a life changing event, but for someone from another faith background it can sometimes cause immense dislocation and hardship, including estrangement from family members and friends who cannot accept their decision. It may even cut a person off from their entire cultural heritage, so it is not something that we can expect people to enter into lightly or thoughtlessly. Nor is it likely to be easy for them to make a gradual progression or pilgrimage to Christian faith. At some point they may have to choose whether or not to make a radical break with their past, unless they decide to be secret or closet believers. And they may deci...