THE RESPONSORIAL PSALM

The story of the passion and death of Jesus is central to the four Gospels. A careful reading of the passion story reveals that the early Christian communities valued the psalms and placed words taken from the psalms on the lips of the dying Jesus. The psalms are musical prayers. They express the sentiments of the Jewish community. The psalms petition and praise God, thank and glorify God. They cry out in anguish and sorrow. They dance and shout out with exultant joy. The psalms belong to the Jewish community. This community used the psalms in fulfilling their vocation as God's cantors and covenant keepers.

Fr. Carroll Stuhlmueller, C.P., wrote: "Opening the Book of Psalms is like walking into a home, lived in for many generations. Photos and mementos, some ancient and some new, blend together. Some are well preserved, others were dropped and cracked by the children, still others have faded, and a few are even difficult to identify. Only the grandparents know the story of each precious remembrance - if only they were still with us.

We turn to our ancestors in the faith to hear what they tell us about this sacred home, their house of prayer, the Book of Psalms. As in the family homestead, some psalms are carefully preserved, like Psalm 70, and other are almost indecipherable, like Psalms 2:1-12 and 14:5-7. Still others, like Psalm 139, use rare Hebrew forms, possibly some Aramaic words or endings. Yet whatever the problem, this psalm is well loved....The Psalms, like the home, lead us through many stages of life, necessary to carry on, even if not our finest moments.

The psalms remained so precious that the early Christians never added their own book of prayer to the New Testament. They kept with the prayer book of their religious ancestors."

Early Christian communities learned the psalms by singing these musical prayers. Music always enhances the feelings that are expressed in a particular psalm. Music and singing allows the psalm to etch itself upon our memory. Sometimes we find ourselves humming the psalm tune. Other times we find ourselves repeating a line of the psalm. The words and the melody are chewed over, made personal and permanent through musical repetition. Repetition is how we commit anything to our minds and hearts. The ancients even felt that quiet repetition of the psalm became part of our jaws and facial muscles. Singing the psalm is how we resonate with the psalm's Sentiments. It is how we let the psalm ingrain itself upon the wax tablets of our bodies, minds, and hearts.

The church always uses the psalms in its public prayer at sunrise and at sunset. Sometimes it used psalms appropriate to these two hinges of time. At other times it started with psalm 1 and kept going continuously until it got to psalm 150.

Now the Church uses the psalms as the way for the community to respond to the proclamation of the Word of God. Christians use scripture to make a communal response to the scripture.

"The psalms bring us home to God, no matter how we are dressed, how we feel, what we have done or left undone. What they ask is already present in our heart from the opening Psalm 1 ...to Psalm 150. The psalms lead us through...the rooms of our life, always ending with a strong Amen."