As I write this, I don’t have access to my copy of St. Bonaventure’s life of St. Francis, so the continuation of those reflections will have to wait a week.
The First Reading for this weekend’s Mass, however, provides us with a good scriptural reality to ponder. St. Peter, in his speech on the day of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles, quotes Psalm 16 to teach about Jesus. This quotation is significant, and it begins to teach us the powerful and profound truth that Jesus has fulfilled the scriptures of the Old Testament.
We read in the Gospel of Luke that after Jesus rose from the dead he appeared to his apostles in the upper room and “he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures…” (Luke 24:44-45). Everything written about him in the Psalms must be fulfilled.
When we think of the psalms, we generally think of long sung prayers from a book in the Old Testament. We might think of a song between the two readings at Mass – generally kind of hard to hear or understand. We might even love to pray the Psalms and think of them as beautiful prayers to God. All of that is true, yet it is good for us to remember and read them also as strikingly accurate prophecies of the Messiah, Jesus Christ – words that he himself prayed.
Really, the book of the Psalms is the most-quoted book of the New Testament. The early Christians and the Apostles especially, with their minds opened to the ways that the Old Testament scriptures had been fulfilled, saw in the Psalms a rich prefiguring of Jesus. Perhaps most poignantly is the great Psalm 22 which we hear quoted by Jesus himself on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me.” If you read through the rest of that psalm, you will see that the whole of it really describes in detail the sufferings Jesus would endure during his passion.
On a happier note, in this Easter season and particularly with today’s first reading in mind, the Psalms also prefigure the resurrection of Christ. We read in the Psalms about how God triumphs over worldly struggles and even over death itself. The quotation of today’s first reading is, again, from Psalm 16. One could, before Christ, read this psalm about God’s promise that he would take care of the one who takes refuge in him. After Christ, however, we see that the words of this psalm are clearly oriented toward the future resurrection.
Here is the section of the Psalm that St. Peter quotes. Read it as though you were Christ preparing for his passion in the Agony in the Garden:
“I saw the Lord ever before me,
with him at my right hand I shall not be disturbed.
Therefore my heart has been glad and my tongue has exulted;
my flesh, too, will dwell in hope,
because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld,
nor will you suffer your holy one to see corruption.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence.”