It can be dangerous for a pastor to start musing, particularly with a keyboard under his fingers, on a Sunday evening. I don’t trust my own brain after preaching twice, so feel free to use your delete button now or at any point that I start to ramble.
Currently I’m working through the Book of Psalms on Sunday evenings, not covering every Psalm, but preaching on many of them. Usually it is one Psalm per Sunday evening. But tonight I preached on Psalms 127 and 128 together — they do have interwoven themes and language. Although I don’t usually follow the Hallmark liturgical calendar, in the past I have preached on one of them on Mothers Day and the other on Fathers Day with the hope that a biblical, redemptive message on the family might be better than the sentimentality often served up on those occasions. But this time I was preaching on them simply because the previous Sunday evening message was on Psalm 126 (lectio continua does shorten the time spent looking for a text).
In the past I have brought out the connection in Psalm 127 with Genesis 3. The early rising and staying up late to toil for food echoes the curse on the ground for Adam’s sake. And the vanity of building and guarding without the LORD is the result of, and part of the punishment for, the fall as far as unbelievers are concerned. Although the sleep with which God blesses his people is temporary, it is an anticipation of the rest into which God is calling us by his Son, the rest into which he entered on the seventh day. So, I have recognized that these Psalms go a lot deeper into the history of God’s dealing with us than simply “have a well-ordered home and all will be well with you” (our reformed version of the health and wealth gospel).
What was tugging at me this time around (I’m still trying to learn) is the reference in Psalm 128:3 to the wife as a fruitful vine and the children as olive plants. (As I said, the two Psalms are intertwined, and 128 also echoes Psalm 1.)
The wife as a fruitful vine is more than simply a beautiful adornment for her husband, though she is that. (I have seen too much of the idea in patriarchal camps that dominion is a masculine concept, and man needs a woman so that he can have a family and raise sons, because dominion is not a solo matter.)
Some time ago Anna Anderson posted in What Our Sexuality Points To : The Woman and Setting our Minds on Things Above . . . :
God gave Eve to Adam to point him to his end. God gave Adam to Eve to point her to the means to her end, which she herself symbolized. Though Eve betrayed her means, and Adam rejected his end, God has provided the means, the Second Adam, and assured the end, Jerusalem Above. The second Adam has taken on flesh and Eve has surely become “mother of the all-living.” Our differences as male and female offer solid encouragement to us. They steady our eyes on the man Jesus Christ and all he has prepared for them that love him.
She suggests that God created Eve to help him enter the Sabbath rest into which the Creator had entered. Of course, our first parents both failed. Our sabbathing points us to the rest (which Joshua failed to provide, though he brought the people into the typical rest of the promised land) that we enter as we take hold of Christ (thank you, Dick Gaffin).
If Anna is correct, and I am inclined to think that she is, could the Psalm’s imagery of the vine be pointing us, not just to a joyful, godly marriage, though it does that, but even beyond that to the wedding feast of the Lamb, the ultimate rest? Micah 4 begins by tellings us, “In the last days the mountain of the LORD’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains.” (Psalms 127 & 128 are songs of ascent, presumably to the mountain of the Lord’s temple.) Micah 4:3 describes the rest of the last days as a time when swords will be beaten into plowshares, using Old Testament imagery for the eschaton (the last days). In verse 4, in those last days “Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree.” Zechariah 3:10 uses similar imagery, with a note of outreach—inviting the neighbor to sit under the vine.
(I read somewhere recently, but can’t remember where, the suggestion that Nathaniel seen by the Lord under his fig tree in John 1 has that eschatalogical emphasis given the Micah and Zechariah references. Of course, the reference by our Lord to Jacob’s vision at Bethel makes the eschatalogical reference more explicit.)
Psalm 128, after repeated benedictions within the short poem, culminates in the shalom which God pours out on Israel, peace that comes ultimately to the Israel of God, Galatians 6:16.