Canter Bridge

It is difficult to know what pleases God.

Religions the world over have diverse opinions about how to achieve divine felicity. Often the prescription involves some measure of intentional human suffering, as though celestial happiness were a zero-sum game that demands the shrewd balancing of joy and misery in order that everyone should have his barely adequate share. As with most negotiated settlements, everybody ends up grumpy. But at least the worst extremes of heavenly ire can be stopped by this means.

The Economist, dateline 14th July 2007, reported that riches really can buy happiness, to a certain degree. New evidence contradicts earlier reports that poorer lumps of humanity—the Nigerians for example—smile more than their wealthy cousins. Now it seems this is not so.

The fiftieth psalm has YHWH claiming the ineffectiveness of presenting God with dead, valuable property. Animal sacrifice, as in so much of prophetic rhetoric, is useless for pleasing God. It is readerly skillfulness rather than a falling back upon evasive dogmatism that leads careful Bible readers to the understanding that relativity pervades this statement. That is, such claims in broader context do not empty cultic ritual of its meaning and power, only locate that potent duty within a context that privileges other virtues over it.

YHWH, we are told, sees things this way:

I will not accept a bull from your house,
or goats from your folds.
For every wild animal of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know all the birds of the air,
and all that moves in the field is mine.
If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world and all that is in it is mine.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls,
or drink the blood of goats? (Psalm 50:9-13 NRSV)

Not unlike the husband or boyfriend who has everything and just wants to romp, or the guy who barely conceals his disappointment at the most painfully selected birthday gift, YHWH’s words might provoke exasperation before they even begin to evoke finer sentiments.

Yet this devaluation of costly religion is not rejectionist, for these lines are merely the preface to a positive statement of what YHWH actually desires to receive from his worshipers hands:

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and pay your vows to the Most High.
Call on me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

Indeed, the psalm underscores this preference by employing the thought as its conclusive verdict upon human approach to the divine. After an excursion through the textures of hypocrisy, the psalmist has the Lord deliver himself of this rather fierce prescription:

Mark this, then, you who forget God,
or I will tear you apart, and there will be no one to deliver.
Those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me;
to those who go the right way
I will show the salvation of God.

In addition to a conventional desire to privilege ethics above cult, the fiftieth psalm considers thanksgiving to be the noblest sacrifice. ‘A sacrifice of thanksgiving’ here does not suggest a conventional bloodied offering presented in gratitude. Rather it deconstructs the physicality of Hebrew sacrificial habits and places in its stead a profound spiritualization of the sacrificial act.

It would be easy to consider this an escape, an evasion of duty, even religion lite. As though to fend off such facile and unsympathetic reading of YHWH’s intention, the psalmist has the Lord declare that ‘those who bring thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me’. To honor God—as is the case with the same act directed to ones elders—is in the biblical vocabulary a recognition of his existential heaviness, his centrality, his cruciality to all that is and all that goes down.

One honors God by enacting a costly approach that involves no bleating of sheep, no death-writhe of rams, no passive animal resignation to the priestly knife.

Instead, it seems, one recognizes creation’s true architecture and bows before the throne room at its core by aligning the heart in a certain way. This is not recommended as some easy task, a kind of Torah lite, a place where the happy and the clappy displace sobriety’s wealth.

Rather the psalmist asks his reader to understand a more fundamental aspect of creation’s design: true worship and true worshippers face in a most determined direction. Towards thanksgiving.