“Guard me as the apple of
the eye;
hide me in the shadow of your wings….”
Psalm 17.8
Okay, I cheated. No, I
was creative. Yes, both! Our e-mail devotion calendar designated a
passage from Zechariah for today’s reflection. It’s one of the assigned
daily lectionary readings. But it’s awful! (Now I’m making you
curious and you’ll want to do some research, look it up, and see why I said
that. Pretty clever, eh?) I dutifully read
it and couldn’t get enough spiritual traction to move forward and write.
So I looked up the other two passages assigned for today (in the back of
our new Evangelical Lutheran Worship book) and found the nugget I was looking
for in Psalm 17. (See above!)
The passages I balked over
describe God defending us from and ultimately punishing our enemies, the
ignorant/cruel/due-to-be-damned demented ones who are making our lives
miserable. These references make life seem very black-and-white, with
good folks on one side of the fence and bad ones on the other. That
skewed perspective sets the stage for wars, “holy” and otherwise. It
becomes justification for humans to treat each other as objects rather than
people (“its” rather than “I’s”), to say it’s okay to
hurt/revile/reject others because they deserve it. That’s a venomous
rather than a virtuous stance. Carl Jung would say it’s the projection of
all the darkness within ourselves onto others.
We convince ourselves that they’re the problem, not us. We
kid ourselves that if we kill them, the problem will be eliminated, the
darkness chased away. But it won’t. Things won’t improve unless we
address the “problem,” the darkness, the black hole of sin, within ourselves.
“They” are “us.”
And so we ask God to guard
us as the apple of God’s eye…. People used to think the pupil was solid;
they credited it with enabling us to see. Few gifts are more valuable/valued than sight. Therefore, we ask God to
cherish and protect us as a most precious possession…. It’s an ancient Scriptural
metaphor. In Deuteronomy we read that:
[God] sustained [
in a howling wilderness waste;
he shielded him, cared for him,
guarded him as the apple of his eye. (Dt. 32.10)
Guard us, O Lord, that we
may not harm Your children, striking out in anger at
the faults which actually lay within ourselves. Pierce our darkness with Your radiance, that we may not walk in darkness but in the
light of life. Protect us from those who see us as “it” rather than
“I.” May all Your children honor Your image in
each other. Amen
Pastor Mary Virginia Farnham