Saturday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
I love the Psalms for two reasons in particular. First, they manage to capture the whole gamut of human emotion. Second, the Psalmist will just casually drop paradoxes into the Psalms without any hesitation. This is the situation with today’s Psalm. In particular the opening section of the Psalm seems to present a cause and effect that runs contrary to what we might suppose.
The Psalm reads, “Blessed the man who fears the LORD, / who greatly delights in his commands.” This can at first seem paradoxical because we might wonder, since when did fear and delight go together? Believe me, my wife fears spiders and the only delight she takes in them is when they are gone! The paradox finds clarity though as we address two misunderstandings.
The first is a misunderstanding of fear and the other of freedom. Fear here is the healthy fear that you experience when you recognize that God is God and you are not. I think a limited analogy might be a submariner. A submariner has a very healthy and real fear of the pressure around him or her at great depths. For the pressure is far greater than the submariner. As long as he or she is protected by the hull of the submarine, the submariner certainly delights in the pressure. It actually allows the submarine to operate underwater, remain on course, and maintain its depth. Not only that, but current submariners electrolyze the oxygen they breathe out of the very water which applies the great pressure to their craft. The very thing they fear is sustaining their existence. So too, we delight in God’s commands when we recognize that God is so much greater than we are. In His wisdom He gives us His commands and they allow us to operate under pressure, remain on course, and reach new depths.
This is where freedom comes into the picture. This delight requires that we understand freedom not as the ability to chase my every whim and desire. Rather we understand freedom as the ability to choose the greatest good out of the multiple goods available to me. I discern this through God’s commands. To return to our analogy, if the pressure acting on the submarine was as fickle as our wants and desires it would be inoperable. Buoyancy and course would be in constant fluctuation and the submarine crew would likely spend so much time responding to immediate impulses that they’d lose sight of their true goal, vision, and destination.
This is why a disciple delights in the commands of the Lord. Freed from the tumultuous and erratic chasing of our desires we can set our eyes on the Lord and follow him to unprecedented depths.
-Spencer Hargadon