David Prital tells the story of the Baptist Ukrainians who rescued him, a Jew from the Nazis. The poor farmer brought him into their hut and said to his wife, “’God brought an important guest to our house’,” he said to his wife. ‘We should thank God for this blessing.’ They kneeled down and I heard a wonderful prayer coming out of their pure and simple hearts, not written in a single prayer book. I heard a song addressed to God, thanking God for the opportunity to meet a son of Israel in these crazy days….”
Crazy days. I guess that label has been appropriate in almost all times and places. Since Adam and Eve first said to each other, “Things aren’t what they used to be,” we have been in a steady state of dismay at our world and the other humans sharing it with us. And with ourselves, for that matter. Particularly dismaying has been the persistence of evil, not so much as the result of concerted plans (the Holocaust is exceptional, after all), but as the inevitable product of inattention to goodness. Carelessness is the root of all evil, we might say. Or at least of evil enough.
Psalm 52 expresses fitting indignation at the persistence of indifference. Some people, it says, “love evil more than good, stupid nonsense (Hebrew: sheqer) more than speaking justly.” That sounds about right. In a world awash with words, no one could plausibly argue that our choices of ideas, practices, norms, or beliefs always avoided being sheqer! Our common human indifference to wisdom shows itself in many forms, and in all our lives. Psalm 52 diagnoses the cause of our problems in a simple way: “Behold, no person puts God in his reflections. He trusts in the abundance of his riches….” By miscalculating the true source of meaning and security, human beings lose a vigorous sense of meaningful distinctions between justice and injustice, between good and evil.
Still, this is not the psalm’s last word. Verse 8’s (verse 10 in Hebrew) “But as for me, I am like a verdant olive tree in God’s temple. I trust in God’s loyalty forever and ever. I will praise you forever for you have acted. And I will trust your name, for it is good….” In contrast to false trusts, the psalmist finds life, permanence, beauty, productivity (all symbolized by the olive grove in the temple courtyards) through the simple expedient of trusting in God. He or she does not explain what that means in detail, but this very lack of specificity underscores the radical nature of the commitment. To trust God in an uncompromising way requires every bit of our moral commitment, our clarity about ourselves and others, and our resolve not to take shortcuts in the life of faith. Most of all, it requires God’s grace, not just our activity.
Trust is thus itself a gift from God, a gift rooted in relationship, and it returns to strengthen the very relationship that gives it life. This simple psalm, which lacks all pretense of sophisticated artistry or theological profundity, calls us to the most difficult thing of all. In our crazy times, such a call may be our only hope — and our best option.