Psalm 84:11
For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
he bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does the LORD withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
The psalms are poetry first and foremost and today’s passage is a particularly poetic piece of poetry. Read from the standpoint of pure logic-chopping rationalism, today’s passage is most odd. “The Lord God is a sun and a shield.” What a curious combination of images. What has the sun got to do with a shield? But the moment we drop our hard-boiled rationalism and simply receive the images as images we notice something: this psalm is intensely heraldic. It immediately puts us in mind of the coats of arms and shields (often decorated with suns) used by knights in armor or great kings like Arthur or David or Charlemagne. It is this quality of kingly valor and magnanimity that the psalms want us to see in God. It speaks of a sort of courtliness of which all earthly royalty is but a dim reflection. In the ancient Near East it was the glory of kings to “bestow favors” on courtiers and, in so doing, to show forth glory, majesty and generosity. God, in this passage, declares that no earthly king can be more generous than he. For he withholds “no good thing” from his children. That means, quite simply, that the whole world belongs to those who walk in his ways, for all creation is good. And greater than all this is the gift he has given of his own Son, whom he “handed over” to us first in death and then in everlasting life—a life now “handed over” to us with each and every Eucharist we receive.
