This is the Day?
This is the day that the Lord has made?
Intonation is everything.
Some people seem to speak every question as if it were a sentence. Have you ever heard that?
Think of the most basic kind of sentence. Something like “That is a cat.” The “question sentence” people either due to insecurity or just speaking style, a lack of confidence or maybe they don’t know what a cat looks like, they say “That is a cat?” See the difference? Hear the difference?
If you’ve been around a Christian Church for any amount of time you have heard a particular verse of scripture multiple times; the 24th verse of the 118th Psalm. Here it is;
“This is the day that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”
I’ve been around church a lot in my life and I’ve heard the verse a lot. I actually try to pray it on many mornings. It is a blessing to get to live this particular day at this particular time.
It can be easier to feel on a sunny day or on a day in which positive appointments and plans are anticipated.
It might be a little harder to pray and recite on a cold and rainy dark day, or on a day which contains unwanted obligation, or on a pandemic day.
On not so obviously great days I have prayed the verse as well, but sometimes as a kind of playful prayerful turn, I change the intonation; so it’s like this;
“THIS is the day that the Lord has made? We will rejoice and be glad in it?”
It can actually help, it makes me laugh a little at the day and not take myself so seriously. The death knell of true spirituality is when we take ourselves seriously, after all.
In the Psalm there is actually not a description of the day much at all. You’d think that the Psalm was a kind of vacation brochure. “Wake up to sunny mornings with the sound of ocean waves. Enjoy the evening breeze on your own private deck” – “This is the day …”
It’s not that at all. Here are some excerpts from the Psalm;
“I was pushed hard so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me.”
“Out of my distress I called on the Lord.”
“Save us, we pray, O Lord.”
The Psalm is a reminder. There is also a lot in there about God’s faithful love and about God’s rescue and redemption.
“The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation.”
The declaration of the day bringing about rejoicing, as it turns out, is not about how great or beautiful the day is. It is not, “the day is great so I will rejoice”.
Rather, the rejoicing comes about because we know and declare God’s sovereignty over everything, even THIS day.
The emphasis is not on the day. The emphasis is on “the Lord has made”.
One of the questions in the Heidelberg Catechism is, “What is my only comfort in life and in death?”
The answer starts, “That I belong, body and soul to Jesus Christ.”
In life and in death, on a perfect spring day or on a COVID spring day.
Dear God;
I know that all good things come from you. I know that you are sovereign. I know that one day disease and sickness and death will be no more.
Help me to see today, even now, even before things are as they should be, that you are sovereign over even this day. The pain and death and sorrow and loneliness and anxiety that are around right not are not of you, but you are still sovereign. You know this day. You know me. You know every single person. Bless those who are sick. Strengthen those who are working to help and to heal.
“This is the day that the Lord has made. I WILL rejoice and be glad in it.”
Amen.
