The author of [Psalm Twenty-three] has enemies. He has known failure. He has lost people he loved. In the process, he has learned that life is not easy. Life is a challenge, and he has grown stronger as, with God's help, he met the challenges of life. He is a better person, a wiser, stronger person than he would have been, had life not challenged him to grow.
The psalm can teach us another valuable lesson as well: Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly.
In a mere fifty-seven words of Hebrew and just about twice that number in English translation, the author of the Twenty-third Psalm gives us an entire theology, a more practical theology than we can find in many books. He teaches us to look at the world and see it as God would have us see it. If we are anxious, the psalm gives us courage and we overcome our fears. If we are grieving, it offers comfort and we find our way through the valley of the shadow. If our lives are embittered by unpleasant people, it teaches us how to deal with them. If the world threatens to wear us down, the psalm guides us to replenish our souls. If we are obsessed with what we lack, it teaches us gratitude for what we have. And most of all, if we feel alone and adrift in a friendless world, it offers us the priceless reassurance that "Thou art with me."Who wrote the Twenty-third Psalm, this compact spiritual masterpiece that we love so much? Alas, that is a question we will never be able to answer. People of the ancient world had a different understand of what it means to "write" a literary or liturgical work. They understood that just as "it takes a village to raise a child," it takes an entire culture to write a psalm. How could one person take credit for a literary creation and deny credit to his parents who raised him, his teachers who educated him, his religious leaders how inspired him, and most of all God, who was his ultimate inspiration?
There is one aspect of this psalm that has always remained and has always made it almost unique. Here the psalmist does not, as so often elsewhere, approach God with a request: Help me, forgive my sin, crush my enemies, do not let me die. Nor, as also frequently, does he offer God thanksgiving after the fact: You did help me, and I am grateful. Nor is it a psalm that celebrates God's grandeur and mighty deeds. It is just about ordinary daily life, a psalm about You and me: You are my shepherd. In biblical times, no less than nowadays, this assertion might appear altogether foolish. What biblical speaker, living in a world in which the dangers of famine and disease, military invasion, economic collapse, or sudden death, were certainly no less threatening than in our own day, could contemplate his existence and see only grassy fields and peaceful waters? But that is what he does see, and say. In so saying, he is asking for nothing, he does not even offer thanks as such. Indeed, that might be the particular nuance of the first line: Since You are my shepherd, I will never have anything to ask for; and having no occasion for special requests, I will likewise have no reason for giving extraordinary thanks, I am thankful for whatever happens.
