Canter Bridge

It is fitting that the book of Psalms should end with just this one hundred fiftieth and that the one hundred fiftieth should end with this totalitarian doxology:

Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD! (Psalm 150:6 ESV)

All the other exemplars of that kind of summons to praise in the psalms which scholars since Hermann Gunkel have labeled the hymn provide a reason for the doxology to which they call the assembled worshippers or the ready individual. That motive, that basis for praise is usually an act or a quality of YHWH himself. The psalms do not smile upon the shell of praise when there is no kernel. Not for them the constant whipping up of a congregation to praise more, praise more loudly, praise better. To the contrary, the psalms provoke dense praise. It knows its reasons.

Until the last psalm. The one hundred fiftieth, unique among the psalms, gives no reason for praise. It simply calls the concentric circles of creation to praise as loudly and as completely as they can. If the psalm provides no explicit reason for such doxology, this phenomenon has reason enough.

It seems that the final psalm gathers into its bosom the prior one hundred forty-nine expressions of weal and woe, of joy and lament, of hope and despair and offers them back to YHWH in exuberant praise. The psalm, which at first appears to be an unprecedented summons to empty praise is exactly the opposite. Its praise is more dense than any other. Its doxology gathers the full oxygen-rich air of the tehillim—this is after all a book of praises down to the detail of the title given to it—and bursts forth with wild abandon on the presumption that the reader will understand what it is up to.

From this viewpoint, it seems utterly, elegantly appropriate that the final verse of the last psalms should call all breath or everything that has breath to its noisy, self-forgetting praise. From praise as the one-hundred forty-nine psalms fill up the concept no one should be excluded. Indeed all creation discovers its true vocation in just such doxology.

There is no better thing—none at all, the psalmist suggests—than to praise in this way. Grief and exhilaration and everything in between, offered to YHWH from hearts laid bare before him, constitute the highest calling for everything and everyone that has breathed on God’s good earth. There is no denser, more appropriate, more complete calling in all the earth. Without exception.