Psalm 113 opens the Egyptian Hallel, the collection of psalms sung at Passover and, by long tradition, very likely among the hymns Jesus and his disciples sang after the Last Supper before going out to the Mount of Olives. The psalm summons the servants of the LORD to praise, and it grounds that summons in the name of the LORD itself, the name revealed to Moses at the burning bush, a disclosure of God's own character and power.
The center of Psalm 113 is a single, carefully built paradox. 4"The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens!" Then the psalm asks who is like him and answers with two matched claims: he is seated on high, and he 6"looks far down on the heavens and the earth." God's transcendence is what makes his condescension remarkable. He stoops from a freedom that has nothing to do with weakness, a height nothing else shares. What follows makes the pattern concrete. 7"He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, 8to make them sit with princes." 9"He gives the barren woman a home." The language echoes Hannah's song, and degradation reversed into dignity is what this transcendence is for.
The turn from verse 4 to verse 7 happens in one breath. The same line that calls God high above all nations describes him reaching down into an ash heap. There is a respect that only someone above another person can pay, the kind we see when someone who could rightly keep his distance gets down on the floor to speak to a frightened child at eye level. The stooping shows what the authority was for. Paul applies the same logic to Christ, who was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, and emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (Philippians 2:6-7). Psalm 113 gives the pattern in miniature, a God secure enough in his height to stoop, and a stooping that is the very shape of his glory. No low place, whatever ash heap you are sitting in, is hidden from that kind of God.
Psalm 114 makes the same claim by story. 1"When Israel went out from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language." Egypt is marked as foreign territory, a place Israel never belonged, before a single miracle is narrated. Then the psalm addresses creation directly. 5"What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back? O mountains, that you skip like rams?" The sea flees and the mountains skip, obeying, because nothing here was ever a rival to God. The last lines say why. The earth is told to tremble at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water.
The two psalms cohere. Psalm 113 states in a hymn that the transcendent God condescends to the lowly, and Psalm 114 shows that same condescension enacted in history, a God high enough to command creation's obedience and near enough to walk an enslaved people out of Egypt by hand.
The praise in these psalms comes out of memory. Every life has an exodus of its own, some place where deliverance came from a bondage we did not engineer our own way out of, even if it never made a mountain skip. A fresh reason to praise him this week is often less needed than an old one, half forgotten and worth going back to name.
Name one deliverance you have half forgotten. Say it aloud, and let the praise follow the memory.
Prayer
Father, you are seated on high, and you still look far down, into whatever ash heap we are sitting in. Thank you for the specific ways you have lifted us, reversals we could name if we stopped to remember. Let our praise come from memory more than mood. We bless your name from this time forth and forevermore. Amen.