“The Lord is My Shepherd”: The Moral Life Begins with the God Who Is
first in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
The 23rd Psalm opens up with a curious equivocation, a “this is that” movement, introducing THE LORD as the shepherd. We’ll return to what this equation of the creator of all things with a sheepherder, but we first begin by asking about the verb that holds the equation together: the “is”.
The pursuit of the moral life is not one which begins, I think, with a command for its own sake, or with a rule without rationale. There is a place for rules and commands in the moral life, but that place is not in the beginning, for in the beginning, there is only God. There are no rules yet, no articulations of goodness, nor are there metaphors or analogies: there is only God.
And so, the “is” here stands as the gateway which precedes any future speech about God: without the being of God, prior to commands, directions, or dictates, the moral life becomes only discussion of the conditions of rules, flickers of light without any indication of where light directs us toward. In Thomas Aquinas’ Summa, it is with good reason that he begins with the eternality and essence of God before talking about any other topic, much less the moral life of the later questions.
That God “is”, prior to the analogies, prior to any comfort or counsel God provides, is the word of the burning bush: I AM THAT I AM is the question within our journey through the world. For the moral life takes us through the earth and all that is in it, not by constructing towers to heaven, but by all our ways being inhabited by the One who has come among us by always being. The eternality of God, before all starting points, frames the nature of our moral search in the most simple way: toward God.
In that singularity of the “is”, the eternality of God before all articulation of right or rule, is likewise the unity of God: that the God who gives us the way home is the simple God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, who works in unified fashion in creation. The One who leads us through the world is the One who has always led through the world; any sense of division between the Decalogue and the Sermon, of the prophets and the Gospels, or of Law and grace, is put away here—the self-same God who always is speaks with a single word to draw that creation across time, through valleys and into the halls of enemies, that we might live in the house of the Lord forever.
And so, the Psalm’s start orients us by beginning with the God who is before creation, before time, that in our moral lives, there is a great deal at stake in the grandest of ways: we are being drawn by the God who is, present. Absent this, all speaking of ethics becomes hypotheticals, and all commands become vacant and abstract tyrannies. The moral life orients us toward God, because it is God alone who is.
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If the first movement of the Psalm—the “is”— places us before the singularity, the eternality of God which brings past and future to bear upon the present, placing the moral agent always before the singularly present God, the second movement places us—within time—before God: the LORD is the shepherd.
It is not before a friend that we stand, Kierkegaard reminds us, but before the eternal God; there is a qualitative difference, then, with the authority which we are confronted with. Whereas with another creature, there is giving and receiving of reasons, for neither of us are entirely certain of future outcomes, present contingencies, or, to be sure, the past which we appeal to. We offer them obedience because of contingencies: because people are (for the moment) in authority over us, or because they are wiser or make a more compelling argument. But none of this makes sense with God, Kierkegaard writes. To say to God “You make a good argument, but we’ll see about next time” is to mistake God for our contemporary, a peer.
To attend to the God who is, within time, means ultimately to distance oneself from the judgments of others, and indeed, from the relative wisdom from others on all things theological. But there is a risk here, Bonhoeffer notes: in making this division between God and the world so absolute—in separating THE LORD from the shepherd—I create a false division between God and the world which even God does not make. In the pursuit of single-minded piety, I make any other co-hearers of God into delightful but distracting counsel from the Way. If we hear God in such a stripped down kind of way, attending to God apart from the world, then our division from others is not simply desirable, but absolutely required for us to attend to God as we should.
To listen to THE LORD who is the shepherd, though, requires no such choice of us: the only God there is is one who took and flesh and walked among us, and this qualification makes all the difference in terms of how we read the presence of the LORD. And as such, our seeking of the LORD’s wisdom is not something which requires each creature to disavow all other creatures in order to hear the LORD: this is not a zero-sum game.
To hear the LORD well is to hear the LORD, both as the One who is not a creature, but also as the One who has a body: the frail and gathered church. We attend to the alien presence of God as our very life, the One who sustains us our creaturely life as the One who took on creatureliness and yet sustained that life from beyond the limits of being a creature. We attend to God as creatures do: waiting, listening, responding, questioning. For God does not lead us in the way as angels, but as humans, expecting that it is good and proper for humans to be led by God as humans are led.
The moral life begins here—not in division from others, but always and ever knit to other creatures. Moses hears the voice of the LORD within the burning bush, as one who is ensconced within his life in Midian; Abraham takes his whole household with him in search of the Promised Land. There is no place we could ever hear God than from within the complexities of where we start, and it is no problem for the LORD that we do so.
For the word of the LORD is knit together the folds of creation which are broken, not to extract up the people of the LORD from creation, but that through them, the light of God might break forth to the nations, refracted in light upon bending light.
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If the first two affirmations that we make in the moral life are one of distance and difference—that God IS, and that it is GOD who is among us as the shepherd—then the third affirmation here is one which removes from us a very real danger: that this alien presence, this LORD, is an unknown tyrant. We begin, as it were, within the gaze of the shepherd, known by the One who takes on flesh.
By beginning with God, we are a long way from the moral quest, if what we mean by that is a description of policy or agenda. We begin the Christian moral life not by establishing, without question, the social conditions we wish to rectify or the cultural conditions which we wish to have an answer to. As creatures afflicted by sin, to say that we have a clear idea of what is harming us, and then building outward to the cure, is precisely backwards. If sin does anything, then it certainly obscures my knowledge of myself, calling my understanding of my own issues into question, constantly asking if God really did say that.
We begin the moral journey by not beginning it unsummoned to it, but by learning the One who has pioneered it before us. For only in this, Karl Barth writes, can we say anything about the world. We begin not by naming the way out by assuming that I have a clear grasp on either my own vices (which obscure my reasoning), or assuming that I have a grasp on all the relevant particulars.
We will begin to ask questions about particular ways into the world, but we first do it by remembering that we are living the moral life within a world in which God is. To begin here is not to deflate aims like the kingdom coming on earth, but to expand our notions of what this entails. The Christian life is not anti-materialist, after all, but materialist: affirming in that GOD is the creator of all things, and that through all things, we are being drawn to the LORD.
Before us lies a world which is beyond our control, and as such, beyond our grasp to cultivate into the image of holiness. The LORD who is the shepherd works us through the world, a working laborer within an economy which the shepherd does not control, an environment which the shepherd must navigate, and with a face that is mistakable for a shepherd among shepherds.
We enter into the world not of our own construction, by One who identifies with creation and is, as the shepherd, not above the creation that He has made. It is this that begins our journey in the world with hope: that we are led by a fellow creature—the shepherd—but that the LORD is our shepherd, the One who leads sheep even in times of drought, and who invites us all into green pastures that are shared. For it is the shepherd—the Holy One of Israel present among us— who owns the means of production, the still waters, the green pastures.
The tethering of the LORD to the shepherd is the covenant of God: God will be our God, and we will be God’s people. This is the way of the way of the people of God through the world, led by a wandering shepherd who is the LORD, alongside enemies, through darkness, alongside holy waters, and into the house of One who Is.
“The Lord is My Shepherd”: The Moral Life Begins with the God Who Is
I was particularly struck by the following para in this article - probably because I've been reading Douglas Campbell (Pauline Dogmatics; The Deliverance of God) over the last couple of years and he consistently labours this point. It is SO helpful and can save us (me) from so many theological and pastoral leadership problems: "As creatures afflicted by sin, to say that we have a clear idea of what is harming us, and then building outward to the cure, is precisely backwards. If sin does anything, then it certainly obscures my knowledge of myself, calling my understanding of my own issues into question, constantly asking if God really did say that.
We begin the moral journey by not beginning it unsummoned to it, but by learning the One who has pioneered it before us. For only in this, Karl Barth writes, can we say anything about the world. We begin not by naming the way out by assuming that I have a clear grasp on either my own vices (which obscure my reasoning), or assuming that I have a grasp on all the relevant particulars." Thankyou Myles Werntz.