Canter Bridge

In the biblical milieu, love for God is far from sentimentalism. One attaches himself to YHWH, one adores him, one finds his own story as a subset of YHWH’s adventurous engagement with the world for reasons that are only remotely connected to feeling and what might in some circles be called religious ardor.

These things have their place. Memorably, the prototypical king David dances half-naked around YHWH’s primary piece of furniture as it is making its trek to the place in Zion that it would one day seem always to have belonged. When criticized for his lack of decorum, David responds that he ‘will become even more undignified than this’. Yet it is not the strength of one’s religious affections that matters in the biblical story. They are well and good when they respond accurately to YHWH’s activity in his world. But they are far from a cause.

On the contrary, Israel learned to love YHWH—in fact most reconstructions of her history would say she first loved YHWH—because he had liberated them from the immovable fixed point of imperial slavery. Israel’s faith is a pledge of allegiance to a deity who personally and repeatedly intervenes in affairs to create freedom out of servitude, to pry open narrow spaces and bring sons and daughters into wide ones.

YHWH, it turns out, is first and foremost a god who practices liberating justice, over and over again. Even YHWH-as-Creator—the brilliant theme that lies behind revered passages in Genesis, the Psalms, and the book of Isaiah—is usually seen as late reflection upon the cosmic extremities of YHWH’s prowess. A people innovative or clueless enough to challenge the lockhold of Canaanite cyclical nature myth by rerooting aspects of the worship that emerge from this in YHWH’s saving acts in time and space is not a people birthed in creation tales. Those came, probably and beautifully, at a later stage.

The credo, as it were, of biblical faith, begins with YHWH’s peculiar insistence upon doing just things. The ninety-ninth psalm goes so far as to name him ‘lover of justice’:

Mighty King, lover of justice,
you have established equity;
you have executed justice
and righteousness in Jacob. (Psalm 99:4 NRSV)

This is not loose religious imagery flowing in the path of least resistance, making up singable words with only a modicum of reflection holding them in place while the music plays on.

This is rooted, mature, bloody-minded insistence that YHWH is engaged in the world that makes, unmakes, destroys, or perfects us and that—in a matter of speaking—when he rolls up his sleeves in this place of ours he walks on the side of the angels.

The psalm makes two audacious claims. First of all, that YHWH loves justice. In spite of the undeniable covenantal realism of terms like love and hate, the psalm likely imagines a bit of unrestrained ardor here, too. One does not toss off lines like ‘lover of justice’ in a law court or in legalese.

Second, the psalm virtually summons us to count on YHWH acting this way into the future. This love is no passing fling. It is as central to the divine personality as one can probe.

To live in a world in which the ‘mighty king’ can be addressed as ‘lover of justice’, with all its past, present, and future implications, is a peculiar kind of adventure. Perhaps it does not, in the language of enthusiasm, change everything. Yet in such light everything begins to change.