Today our Psalm reading at mass is the most important Psalm. You might say “Where does it say that Psalm 95 is more important that the other 149. It actually doesn’t, but each day, when those committed to a religious vocation have to pray their daily breviary, the Church says that the first Psalm is preferably 95. There are others suggested, but this one is preferred. So, that makes it the most important of all the psalms.

Let us look at it. It is filled with so much:

Come, let us sing joyfully to the LORD;

cry out to the rock of our salvation.Let us come before him with a song of praise,

joyfully sing out our psalms.

For the LORD is the great God,

the great king over all gods,

Whose hand holds the depths of the earth;

who owns the tops of the mountains.

The sea and dry land belong to God,

who made them, formed them by hand.

Enter, let us bow down in worship;

let us kneel before the LORD who made us.

For he is our God,

we are the people he shepherds,

the sheep in his hands.

Oh, that today you would hear his voice:

Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah,

as on the day of Massah in the desert.

There your ancestors tested me;

they tried me though they had seen my works.

Forty years I loathed that generation;

I said: “This people’s heart goes astray;

they do not know my ways.”

Therefore I swore in my anger:

“They shall never enter my rest.” (Psalm 95 NAB)

When we look at the Psalm notice it begins in the first person plural: We are the people of God as a community. As one priest taught me back when I was a sailor, “God is not saving you and He is not saving me, He is saving us. ” Therefore we come to Him as our God whom we worship not only as a parish, but as the worldwide community of the Catholic Church.

Notice that we have a calling to sing joyfully to Him. We come to him in joy for he is the God who cares for us and we trust in His care. There are many that will try to drive us from Him, but they do not care for us, we go joyfully to the One who cares for us.

Notice that we call Him the rock of Salvation.

Imagine this desert culture. Some oases surrounded by sand. The terrain there can be changed in an instant. A heavy rain, a strong wind and suddenly there is a great change. However, if you have a huge rock, or even a mount, that will never move. So it is with our God, he is not changing with the weather, He is in whom we put our trust and He is as strong and as reliable as the rocks that surround us. Every so often we hear of Mt Vesuvius erupting or even Mt St. Helens. We know where they are because although they are volcanos, they themselves do not move. They are solid. So even though Mt. Vesuvius is the famous volcano that covered Pompeii, it is still there thousands of years later. The world around Vesuvius changed, the mountain remains. This is the stability of God. He is the solid rock on which we put our trust, for we know, He remains, even if all else changes. We rely on Him.

The Lord is great, the great king over all gods.

If there is one theme that is prevalent throughout the Old Testament it is the reality that God alone is the true God, there are no other gods but He. We see this theme right from the beginning of the bible in Genesis.

If God created all things, then there is no sun god, or moon god. There is no Poseidon and there is no Gaia. There is our God, He alone. Therefore, we do not worship other gods, for there are no other gods, there is God alone.

This God is more than just any other concept of God, He is so personal that he shepherds us like a shepherd His sheep. He knows us personally. If you have ever been on a farm, you will see a shepherd not only tend guard and direct the sheep, he will also care for every injury and trouble that sheep suffers. He will keep the wolf away, but he will also clean and bind all wounds. This is what the shepherd does for  us, he cares for his sheep and God cares for us in the same way. We should expect and be open to His care.

The psalm then takes a turn and warns against turning from God as the Jews did in Meribah and Massah. This highlights a fascinating reality that is rarely understood. If y0u to find a list of sins that many say would get you in great trouble with God, I would be interested to know if this sin is one of them. Yet, it is considered one of the worst of all sins: grumbling.

The psalmist goes to great length to show that approach God with trust, and with joy. He warns us from doing the opposite, whining and complaining. This is a form of the worst sin of them all which is rejecting the Holy Spirit.

In Massah and Meribah which is found in Exodus 17, the Jews complained to Moses for the umpteenth time that he had led them to the desert to die. This is despite all they saw God do through Moses to show that they could trust the prophet. Here, yet again, they complain that Moses led them to the desert to die. God grows angry with this and as the Psalmist says he gives them their complaint. He swears that this generation that grumbles over and over again will never find God’s promise. This led the Jews to be forced to live forty years in the desert until everyone of them died there. This is because they complained against God showed that they  would not trust Him and demonstrated their hardened heart.

If you are looking for the worst sin someone can commit, this is it: Grumbling.

The psalm calls us to trust the shepherd as the herd of sheep its shepherd and joyfully experience his care.

The gospel continues this theme by reminding us that we are of his flock and we need to reconcile with one another that we may be of the one flock that joyfully lives  in the provident care of the Lord.

This is something the Church calls us to remember everyday. Let us joyfully worship the Lord as the community He calls us to be.

God bless you,

Fr. Robert J Carr

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