Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology

Psalm 24 is one of the best known in the Psalter, thanks in part to Handel’s Messiah, which gives us a beautiful choral arrangement of the last few verses.  But the majesty of that oratorio can mask an important piece of the psalm, namely, its inquisitive nature and the longing it expresses to be part of something just out of reach.

Psalm 24 is a pilgrimage psalm.  It asks what qualities are required of those who would go up to the Temple to worship (“who can ascend the hill of Yhwh?”) and describes what sounds like a procession of the Ark or some other symbol of God (“lift your tops, o gates, and be elevated you ancient doors, so the glorious King may enter”).  For Protestants, the idea of making a pilgrimage to a holy site may seem alien, but of course it is all over the Bible.  The conviction behind pilgrimage is that, while God is everywhere and is approachable wherever the human heart genuinely longs for the approach, there are places on earth where, because of history and ritual and the special significations of the worshiping community’s experiences with God, the encounter is more profound or even easier.  Hence pilgrimage to those places.  Hence the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that figures in this psalm and in such a large collection of Psalms as 120-134 (The Psalms of Ascent).

But there is something still deeper here.  The pilgrim of the psalm must think about more than just a physical locale or a building or even the wondrous experiences of worship there.  She or he must also ask about the state of her or his own life.  There is simply no separation between the internal and the external, the private and the public, in the life of the worshiper.  What appears on the outside reflects closely what flourishes on the inside.  (“Out of the fulness of the heart, the mouth speaks,” somebody said!)  Imagining coming before God makes us better people.  And striving to be better people makes us want to come before God.  It’s all connected.

So the psalmist knows this.  Wholeness and peace come when we know this.

Finally, then, that brings us to the most interesting verse in the psalm, verse 6: “This is the generation of those seeking Him/of those seeking your face, o Jacob.”  There are several odd things about the line.  First of all, what is “this”?  The most obvious answer would be to look at verse 5, which talks about receiving a blessing and righteousness.  The parallelism of 5a and 5b would make us think that righteousness is the blessing, that the loyalty of the ethically and spiritually mature person to God matches God’s loyalty to that person.  Fair enough.  But then the line takes a truly surprising turn in 6b.  We expect it to read, “the one seeking your face o Lord.”  But it does not.  It says “Jacob.”  Scholars have, understandably, emended the text in various ways, and all the ancient versions try to alter the line to what we expect.  Maybe the change is in order.  Or maybe the Hebrew text’s shift is deliberate, not in order to turn the reader from seeking Yhwh, but in order to emphasize the fact that seeking the welfare of God’s people is the same as seeking the presence of God.  Again, everything connects together.

So who can ascend the hill of the Lord?  Anyone who truly wants to.  All we have to do is throw away the sins that easily beset us and be still enough to celebrate the triumph of the glorious king who enters the place where an expectant people long for that entry to happen.  May that happen during this season of Advent, and well beyond.