Book Review #3 – “Christ in the Psalms” by Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon

Book Review #3 – “Christ in the Psalms” by Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon; published 2000 by Conciliar Press.

“Every now and then a book comes along which is potentially a small classic. Here is such a book: elegantly written, deceptively simple, and utterly absorbing. More than a mere commentary on the Psalter, it is a profoundly Christian look at each and every Psalm, revealing in the Word written the living presence of God the Word Himself. With each brief exposition, Father Reardon helps us to drink deeply from the spiritual fountain of the Church’s tradition and wisdom.” (from notes by Rev. Addison Hart).

Brief Bio of Author and Background of Book. “Father Pat,” as he likes to be called, was a Trappist monk in a Catholic monastery early in his life, then he studied at a Southern Baptist Seminary, then a divinity school in Rome, then taught at various Episcopal seminaries, and after converting to the Orthodox faith in 1990, he finally earned his divinity degree at an Eastern Orthodox seminary to fulfill his calling to be an Orthodox priest. After many years as pastor at All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, he retired in 2020. Father Reardon has authored twelve books and over 500 articles, and this book in particular has spread his wisdom around the world. Some books are meant to be reference materials and read from; other books are read through from beginning to end; some books are works of scholarship and intended to stimulate the mind; other books are devotional and aimed at more of the heart level. This masterpiece is all of the above. Rev. Reardon calls these meditations of each psalm his “pastoral ponderings,” and are sure to enrich one’s faith in Jesus and deepen the reader’s understanding of Scripture. His approach to the study of the Psalter in this book is both systematic and imaginative as it moves from Psalm 1 all the way to Psalm 150. Asked to comment on why he chose this topic for his book, some of his answers included:

• “It is the profound Christan persuasion that Christ walks within the psalms, and this is the reason that the Book of Psalms is the Old Testament book most often quoted in the New Testament.”
• “All I have done is to try to look at the psalms through the lens of Christ. The whole idea is to pray the psalms with what St. Paul calls “the mind of Christ,” which means the life of divine grace, the mystery of our redemption, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the nourishing breast of the Holy Mother Church.” 
• “To pray the psalms is to pray them in Jesus’ name, because the voice in the Psalter is Christ’s own voice. Christ is the referential center of the Book of Psalms. Ultimately the words of the psalms are the mighty name of Jesus broken down into its component parts. Thus it has always been.” 
• “Those modern Protestant pocketbook bibles containing only the New Testament and the Psalms embody a very ancient and deep insight of the Christian faith that sees the Psalter almost as part of the New Testament itself.” 
• “The divine promises made with respect to David’s messianic throne are fulfilled in the Kingdom of Jesus, at once David’s descendant and his Lord. Following the lead of Jesus Himself in Luke 24:44 (when the risen Lord explained to His disciples the things concerning Himself ‘in the Law of Moses, in the prophets, and in the psalms’), we interpret and pray the psalms in the light of this fulfillment of biblical prophecy.” 

Some of My Favorite Quotes in Christ in the Psalms: 

Psalm 8. “Christ is no afterthought. He is the original meaning of humanity. Christ is what God had in mind when He reached down and formed that first lump of mud into a man. The old Adam was not the model of the new, it was the New Adam that was the model of the old. It was towards Christ that man’s mind and desire were oriented. We were given a mind that we might know Christ, and desire, that we might run to Him; and memory, that we might remember Him, because even at the time of creation it was He who was the archetype.” 

Psalm 135 (136). “The root of all of God’s activity in the world, beginning even with the world’s creation, is mercy – ‘hesed’. Mercy is the cause and reason of all that God does. He does nothing, absolutely nothing, except as an expression of His mercy. His mercy stretches out to both extremes of eternity. The encounter with God’s mercy is the root of all Christian worship. Everything else that can be said of God is but an aspect of His mercy. Mercy is the defining explanation of everything that God has revealed of Himself. Mercy is the explanation of every single thought that God has with respect to us. When we deal with God, everything is mercy; all we will ever discover of God will be the deepening levels of His great, abundant, overflowing, rich and endless mercy.”

 Psalm 118 (119). “Language is the gift of God. Its primary function is the formation of thought in accord with reality. The world’s deepest created reality is the eternal Law of God, the Torah, on which the inner being of all created reality is based. The final purpose of language is to lead man’s thought to the knowledge of God, that man may know the truth.  The Torah speaks of Christ. The Law of God points to Christ and is fulfilled in Christ. The final purpose of language is that mankind may know Christ. He is, after all, the Word, the very Word that was in the beginning. He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of language. Christ is God’s Word abbreviated, in the sense that all God has to say is summed up in Christ. 

Psalm 1. “Just who is this ‘blessed man’ of whom the psalmist speaks? It is not man in general. The underlying word translated as ‘man’ is gender-specific and does not translate as ‘human being.’ The ‘man’ of reference in this psalm is a particular man. He is the one Mediator between God and man., the Man Jesus Christ. The ‘Law of the Lord,’ which is to be our delight and meditation day and night, finds its meaning only in Him. Christ is the One who fulfills the Law, and He is the key to its understanding.” 

Psalm 61 (62). “Salvation in this psalm, as frequently in the Bible, is something for which we wait in patience. In the grammar of the Holy Scripture, salvation is very often spoken of in the future tense. This future perspective of salvation is certainly the one that dominates in the Psalms. The life of faith is pretty much evenly divided between serving and waiting. These are the two activities of faith -‘to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven.’ (1 Thess. 1:9-10). 

Psalm 51 (52). “This psalm presents a simple but stark contrast between good and evil, in which the ‘bad guy’ really does appear quite bad. The problem is that he is not only bad, but he is so evil as to be uninteresting – an utterly one-dimensional character. So this psalm paints evil as completely evil. The dialectic involved here is important, for if evil is not really evil, then good is not really good. Evil is portrayed here in all its ugliness, so that good may be pictured in all its glory.” 

Psalm 27 (28). “This is a psalm of the Lord’s Resurrection. This revival of the very flesh of Christ was not a simple return to a life in the flesh, for the risen body of our Lord is saturated with the transforming energies of the Holy Spirit. It is a spiritual and heavenly body, not in the sense of being immaterial, but in the sense that its material composition is itself completely filled with, and inwardly transformed by, God’s definitive outpouring of the divine life. The risen flesh of Christ is thus the first fruits of the new creation, the root and initial installment of that universal transformation by which God will make things new. To say that the risen body is spiritual does not mean that it is immaterial, but that it is incorruptible. Our corruptible bodies were descended from Adam; our new bodies are derived from Christ. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.” 

Psalm 99 (100). “The correct praise of God in this psalm, as truly in all of Holy Scripture, is inseparable from our relationship to Him in covenant. He is ‘our’ God, as distinct from simply ‘God.’ And we are ‘His people,’ as distinct from just a bunch of folks. This mutual belonging to one another is the whole business of the covenant. This is the source of the joy in our psalm. Our prayer is founded on the mercy and truth of God… ‘For the Lord is gracious,’ we say, ‘His mercy is everlasting, and His truth stands fast for all generations.’ To come into His courts with songs of praise is to step into the realm of eternal mercy and eternal truth.”

Psalm 26 (27). “This psalm touches on the deeper longing of all prayer, the desire to live in intimacy with God, to find joy in His worship, to abide in the consolation and light of His sanctuary. We pray for this union with God, but we also actively follow after it, says our psalm. Closeness to the Lord is inseparable from the doing of His will, love itself involving chiefly a union of wills. Thus, union with God comes of both pure grace and strenuous effort. Such things as fasting, self-denial, patience, kindness, obedience to the Lord’s commandments, and the disciplined exercise of the virtues are all components of this pursuit.”