Christians and Jews have acquired unusual views of what constitutes beauty. We tend to start with the idea that God is, by definition, beautiful. I’m sure that’s true, as far as it goes. But even that’s a difficult concept, since the God of the Bible seems at times difficult to call attractive (mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the mystery both attracts and repels, remember). Perhaps we could argue that our language about God is beautiful, and it certainly can be, though even there the beauty can be a painful one. So it would be an interesting challenge to work out an entire Christian aesthetic. And some have done so in various ways: maybe I’d point you to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar as a fine recent example.
Sometimes, however, things are more straightforward, and religious sensibilities do lead one to beauty. Think of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or da Vinci’s “Last Supper” or, in literature, Dante’s Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso or Milton’s Paradise Lost, just to name the most obvious examples. Or in more recent times, Bernstein’s painfully powerful Kaddish or the hymns of Ralph Vaughn Williams. The quest for God, and thus for a true appreciation of ourselves, produces a desire for beauty.
The author of Psalm 48 certainly shared such a quest. The elegant little celebration of the beauties of Jerusalem opens and closes with praises of the incomparable God who is known through the blessings falling to Israel. In the middle come a complex description of what sounds like an imagined appearance of foreign tributaries in Jerusalem. (I say imagined, because such kings, as far as we know, never did this in real life.) Instead of being a place under threat, Jerusalem is a place of security, justice, hopefulness, and joy.
Note the various ways in which the psalm refers to Jerusalem:
- City of our God
- His holy mountain
- Beautiful
- The praise of all the land/earth
- Mount Zion at the ends of the North (a reference to the old Canaanite idea in which the mountain of the deity was in the far north; hence another way of saying “city of our God”)
- Town of the great king (God? the human king?)
Verse 4 (Hebrew 5) introduces a new section, according to which the rulers of the world gaze upon the splendors of Jerusalem and are overawed at the majesty of Elohim. This idea of the attraction of the nations to God takes many forms in the Old Testament, beginning with Exodus 15’s certainty that the neighbors of Israel will fear their God to Isaiah 40-55’s belief that the Gentiles will come to seek peace with Israel and its god to the later New Testament view that the nations should enter the path of salvation alongside Israel. Psalm 48 has a place along the path of the history of this idea, and a very pleasant place it is! Jerusalem, the psalmist believes, will become a symbol for every virtuous person in the world.
Why? Note verse 10’s words of praise: “Your praise, Elohim, befits your name until the ends of the earth. Your hand is full of righteousness.” In other words, God is praiseworthy precisely because God is righteous. Worship does not emerge out of fear, but out of the sensible recognition of God’s superlative qualities. Jerusalem helps people come to that recognition, and so it becomes a symbol of God’s presence among human beings.
How can interest in a place point us to God? That’s a topic for further discussion. Stay tuned!