Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
I have long loved these lines from Psalm 85. I love the way they paint a scene of a reunion, like friends getting together—finally—after a long time of separation, falling into each other’s arms, hugging each other’s necks and kissing. There’s joy dancing between the lines and bright hope glows, and it takes no effort at all to pick up the laughter and the tears, the sense of “yes, now this is how it’s supposed to be.”
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
I love saying these lines and sitting with them, gazing at the happy reunion. The friends’ names are righteousness and peace, names that capture the deepest longings of our hearts for our life together, for fullness and wholeness and justice. In the first line, their names are steadfast love and faithfulness, names that declare the character of God as generations of God’s covenant people have come to know God. With just two lines, the psalmist paints a picture of the world where all is well, and where God and humanity are at home. A kiss seals the coming together of heaven and earth in God’s redeemed creation.
Psalm 85 was written, many scholars believe, during hard times. Inspired by the message of Isaiah, who saw a highway in the wilderness on which the glory of God would return to Zion, people from Jerusalem and Judah had begun to return from exile in Babylon. But the homecoming was rather disappointing. The prophet Haggai said,
You have sown much, and harvested little.
You eat, but you never have enough.
You drink, but you never have your fill.
You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm;
and you that earn wages
earn wages to put them into a bag with holes.
You have looked for much, and it came to little.[1]
The circumstances were dire and painful, but circumstances are never the whole story. The poet who composed this psalm—or perhaps there were several who co-wrote it—may have sat in a corner of the temple ruins, and added line to line, verse to verse. Memory gets to sing first:
Lord, you were favorable to your land;
you restored the fortunes of Jacob.
You forgave, … you pardoned, … you turned.
The second verse moves from memory to plea:
Restore us again, O God of our salvation;
put away you indignation toward us.
Revive us again, … show us your steadfast love, … grant us your salvation.
After the second verse, the bridge; it’s a powerful confession of expectant faith for a solo voice:
I will listen, O Lord God, to what you say,
for you speak peace to your faithful people,
to those who turn their hearts to you.
And in the third verse this God-spoken peace erupts like a Hallelujah chorus:
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.
You will give what is good, Lord God,
and our land will yield its increase.
We shall build houses and inhabit them.
We shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
We shall sow and harvest abundance.
We shall not labor in vain.
We shall eat and drink, and all shall have their fill.[2]
Circumstances are not the whole story, because the creator and redeemer of life speaks peace; because wholeness and fullness are not conditional gifts for some, but the goal to which the Holy One is moving all things. Faithfulness will sprout up from the ground like the freshest green in spring, and faithfulness will describe—finally—not only the character of God, but of all creation, particularly God’s human creation. Righteousness will look down from the sky and see its reflection in how we relate to each other.
Circumstances are not the whole story. And that is never more important to remember than when circumstances seem ready to swallow up everything. We are living through a global health crisis that is on the verge of turning into a paralyzing economic crisis. During the pandemic, old wounds and patterns of injustice in our society have been exposed, and we struggle with how to treat those wounds and change those patterns—finally—while social media algorithms are driving us deeper and deeper into polarized echo chambers.
I hear Psalm 85 as an invitation to us to stand in the place from where it sings: We’re invited to look back on the path that brought us here with as much honesty as we can muster, remembering the faithfulness of God who never left us without prophets and showed us the power of repentance and forgiveness.
We’re invited to stand before God with our frustration and helplessness, our anger, our questions, our fears, our numbness, all of it—and to practice listening to what God is saying,
I will listen, O Lord God, to what you say,
for you speak peace to your faithful people,
to those who turn their hearts to you.
We’re invited to turn our hearts to God whose mighty acts have stretched the horizon of our hope beyond the reach of sin and death. We’re invited to let our hearts be taught by God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.[3] We’re invited to trust that God is no absentee landlord, but always present and always moving to redeem and sustain the good creation.
We’re invited, all of us, to trust that the path before us is one Jesus walked for us and with us, and what awaits us on the way and at the final turn is life that is nothing but life.
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
“Faith,” wrote Martin Luther, “is a work of God in us,” and we’re invited to entrust ourselves, regardless of circumstances, to this working God. “Faith,” Luther continued, “changes us and brings us to birth anew from God,” and we’re invited to entrust ourselves to this God in labor.
[Faith] makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses, and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it. … Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith. Through faith, a person will do good to everyone without coercion, willingly and happily; he [or she] will serve everyone, suffer everything for the love and praise of God, who has shown [them] such grace.[4]
Circumstances are not the whole story because God is speaking, and the Spirit is moving, and Christ is risen. And so we journey through this long Lenten season to the joyful reunion envisioned in an ancient song.
[1] Haggai 1:6ff.
[2] Lines drawn from Isaiah 65:21-23, indicating a reversal of Haggai’s grim observations.
[3] Exodus 34:6 with multiple echoes in Numbers 14:18; Nehemiah 9:17; Jonah 4:2; Psalm 86:15; 103:8; 145:8.
[4] Martin Luther, Preface to Romans https://www.ccel.org/l/luther/romans/pref_romans.html