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.
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