Eucharistic meditation

1 Peter 3:10-12: He who would love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips from speaking deceit.  Let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayers; but the face of the LORD is against those who do evil.”

Pastor Sumpter’s sermon text closes with a quotation from Psalm 34.  In the Psalm, David praises the Lord for delivering him from his troubles.  “This poor man cried and Yahweh heard Him,” he says, and he rejoices because the “angel of Yahweh encamps around those who fear Him and rescues them.”

David praises God because His “face is against evildoers, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.”  Yahweh is near to the “brokenhearted,” and He rescues “those who are crushed in spirit.”  In sum, “many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.”

This Psalm is directly relevant to Peter’s audience.  They too are poor and broken and crushed, surrounded by enemies and overwhelmed by troubles.  They face persecutors who want to destroy them. Peter points them to the Lord who rescues the righteous, who turns His eyes and ears to their cries.

Peter points his readers to the example of Jesus, and so, in a sense, does the Psalm.  Like all the Psalms, Psalm 34 is a Messianic Psalm.  Toward the end, David says that the Lord “keeps all my bones, not one of them is broken.” That is fulfilled on the cross, when the Roman soldiers refuse to break the legs of Jesus.  But the entire Psalm is about Jesus: He is the poor one, the one crushed and broken, but also the beloved Son to whom the Father turns His eyes and ears.

All this provides the context for the most famous verse of Psalm 34: Verse 8, which reads “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”  What is the goodness of the Lord?  In the Psalm, it is the Lord’s faithfulness in rescuing His people from affliction, His attentiveness toward the righteous. That is the goodness we taste, the promise sealed here at this table.  As certainly as we taste bread and wine, just as certainly we know that the Lord will not forsake us when we are in trouble.