Soulfood

I’m headed to the St Gallen area of Switzerland for a week which means lots of travel time for reading! I just finished David Lindsay’s book A Voyage to Arcturus which was recommended to me by C.S. Lewis in one of his essays on stories. It was…interesting. I need to re-read it, I’m still not sure exactly what happened (which might be most of the point of the story, honestly).

I’m now turning to try and finish David Gibson’s The Lord of Psalm 23 before my Libby loan expires.

There’s a great section from Chapter 3 about the Sabbath (drawing on Abraham Joshua Heschel’s treatise on the same). Excerpts:

“You do not rest on the Sabbath to be refreshed for work; rather, the point of all labor and work is for the sake of the Sabbath…The key idea here, which I believe to be implied in Psalm 23, is spending time with the LORD, who has already entered into his rest and who therefore invites others to share it with him.”

From Heschel – “the Sabbath is about coming ‘to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man.’”

Rest is an opportunity for our souls to reintegrate! And it is offered to us on the Sabbath.

From Chapter 4 (Psalm 23:4): “The unexpected development of the story of Psalm 23 is that the good shepherd’s paths of righteousness sometimes include the valley of the shadow of death. If I find myself in the valley of deep darkness, it is because he has led me there.” All the feels…

From Chapter 7 (23:5)

“So the table is spread in the presence of his enemies, but it is precisely that – a table. It is not a bar of justice in their presence; not yet anyway. It is not a sword. Not yet. It is a table, where Jesus is defining the people of God as those who will recognize him as the true shepherd of Israel, the good shepherd, the now-present-with-us Immanuel-host of the messianic banquet long promised in the prophets and so passionately anticipated by God’s people. A table, with food and drink, is where covenants are made and fellowship formed, it is where relationships can be restored and enemies reconciled as friends, and it is where so many choose to seal their fate by their rejection of Jesus. Judas went out into the night, but he went with clean feet and a belly full of bread and wine. He left a table prepared by a loving host in the presence of murderous enemies.”

On the translation of the word “surely” in verse 6 (I think this was in chapter 8):

As we look back someday, we who are in Christ will be able to say with David that only and always has the mercy and steadfast love of YHWH followed us (or better, as Gibson argues, pursued us). Thanks be to God for his mercy and steadfast love to us in Jesus Christ, our good shepherd!

(I finished the book sometime on my overnight flight.)