Ps 22 (23)

Psalms 22:1 Psalm. David's.

The Lord is my shepherd:

I shall not want;

Psalm 23 is a psalm of thanksgiving (Todah in Hebrew). But thanksgiving is only part of something greater: praise, and praise consists of recognising God as the source of every good thing we can have in life.

We live in a world where most people have fears and anxieties. Many are afraid of the future and anxious about what is to come. But one can also be afraid of the past and be anxious about what has happened. One can also be afraid of the present, when anxiety no longer allows us to imagine how we can cope with the difficult circumstances of life. How many people wake up every day with enormous burdens to carry and have to deal with their anxiety?

The question then is: "How should I react to the anxieties of my life?". Scripture gives us an answer, and it gives it to us through a psalm of David, Psalm 22(23). It tells us that we must trust in God because he is good, he is a faithful Shepherd, and we must rejoice in his grace. If we react as David did, God will convince us that it is He who guides our lives, it is He who is in control of all circumstances. It is only this that will bring us peace.

But so beautiful is this psalm, that there is a danger of spoiling it by commenting on it. David was a man like us. He afflicted himself many times in his life, and one of the many afflictions was when Saul tried to kill him. David composed this psalm when he was fleeing from King Saul, and so it was written first and foremost in reference to himself. David overcame his worry by trusting in God, and the psalm becomes a model for us to follow in life, to respond to the difficulties and worries we encounter on our journey.

The psalm has only six verses, and is divided into two parts. The first four verses focus on God as the faithful and good shepherd of his people. He calls us to trust Him. The second part - the last two verses - describes God as a host who prepares a banquet for the guests, and whose consequence is our joy. Thus the psalm resorts to two very simple images to express the believer's trust in his God: the image of the shepherd with his flock, and the image of the table. The Lord is presented as the shepherd who leads his flock, and he is presented as the one who hosts the believer at his table.

In Jewish tradition, it is customary to recite this psalm before the blessing of the meal, particularly at the third meal of the shabbat. The kabbalist Isaac Luria explained the connection between Psalm 22 and the meal by saying that the psalm contains 57 words, which is the numerical value of the Hebrew word 'hazanah' (food). It is also used to be recited at funerals.

The psalm opens with the very famous image: 'The Lord is my shepherd', which actually we could also translate in another way because here we do not have a noun but a participle: The Lord is my shepherd, that is, he who shepherds me. Here we must free our heads from so many superstructures, and make the effort to re-appropriate an image that is not so close to us, so immediate, especially to those who have always lived in the city.

For Israel it was a very usual image. Israel was a people with many shepherds, David was a shepherd, and it is no coincidence that the first time he appears in the Bible is when he returns home from the fields where he had gone to shepherd his flock. It is an image that appears so many times in the Bible, particularly to describe God as shepherd and the people as flock.

We need to purify our minds of something else as well, namely the idea of the flock as all equal and uniform beings. The flock should be understood as people that God cares for. God is like a shepherd who provides and cares for us. Without his benevolence we would be as weak and helpless as sheep.

The originality of this psalm is that it refers to God in the singular. Usually one defines God as 'our' shepherd, here instead one says 'my' shepherd. And since the Lord is my shepherd - and not someone else - "I shall lack nothing": Since God is my shepherd, says David, then I shall lack nothing in the way I am going. Just as the sheep are not anxious because the shepherd provides for their needs, so we express our knowledge that God will not deny us anything we need.

In Hebrew, this first verse consists of only four words: "Yhwh rō'î lō' 'eḥsār". It is of an exceptional, minimalist brevity, which contrasts with the concept it expresses: I shall lack nothing.

But who among us can say 'I lack nothing'? It is a utopia. One thing at least we always lack. To the rich young man who asks what to do to have eternal life, Jesus says: one thing you lack. In the Garden of Eden God tells man that he can eat of all the trees but not of one. There is always something missing in our lives. Yet the believer can say to God, in the outburst of his love: I lack nothing! It is the typical expression of the lover, filled with love!   

This is not a work done out of antipathy towards Protestantism, or resentment towards evangelicals, but to defend the true faith, without warlike aspirations. I spent much of my life in the Protestant world, and late in life I discovered that I did not know the Catholic Church I was criticising at all, and it is this ignorance that leads many Catholics to allow themselves to be convinced or influenced by Protestants.  

These are divided into a myriad of denominations, some of which do not like to be called 'Protestant', but would like to be referred to only as 'Christian'. We also know that for Protestants, Catholics are not Christians, but idolaters and pagans; it follows that evangelicals in wanting to be called only 'Christians' aspire to the implicit recognition that they are the only 'true Christians'.

The problem is that only very few Protestants know the history of the Church; a great many only accuse by hearsay, but have never opened a book on Christian history over the centuries. All they need is what the pastor on duty says, a few pamphlets, and the internet to form their anti-Catholic 'culture'.

Many Protestants and/or Evangelicals, rather than being ashamed of their ignorance about Christianity, are proud of it, saying the classic phrase 'I am only interested in the Bible', a phrase that is already a whole programme. People's biblical-historical ignorance is essential in order to be able to guide them. A serious Protestant who would study the history of Christianity would have a good chance of ceasing to be a Protestant. 

In all Protestantism there is a do-it-yourself faith! The Holy Spirit guides us to understand the Bible well, it is true, but in the Protestant world, this pretext is used to cover an unrestrained and in some ways arrogant presumption, which leads every pastor to become a kind of infallible 'pope' in teaching people.

Presumption and arrogance are not immediately apparent - no one shows these faults so easily. They all seem God-fearing, observant of the Word and full of love for their neighbour. Too bad that their neighbour in most cases is the one who listens passively and does not contradict their biblical teachings. Those who dare to dissent are then no longer loved, often no longer greeted, and sometimes slandered. 

For a long time, thanks to Luther, the pope was considered the antichrist, therefore hated and accused, and so were all Catholic bishops and priests. Observant individual Catholics were also included in this climate. 

Protestants criticise papal infallibility, but in fact behave as infallibles; each in their own community, free to invent whatever they want, pulling the jacket on the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of their doctrines! The result? A myriad of denominations with doctrines that often conflict heavily with each other.  

The problem lies in the great ignorance mixed with presumption that so many Protestants and/or Evangelicals have. Are Catholics less ignorant? No, most Catholics, unfortunately, are very ignorant in biblical matters, but at least they do not set themselves up as teachers to anyone who happens to be within their reach. The average Catholic is aware of his own ignorance, the average Protestant, on the other hand, is very presumptuous in biblical matters.

A Protestant who truly loved, as he says, the truth, would go and see for himself what the early Christians, our ancestors in the faith, wrote and how they lived, in order to understand if and how the Catholic Church is wrong, or where the Protestants are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible.    

Logically, rather than trusting a pastor who explains the Bible 2000 years later, it would be better to trust the early fathers, who learned Christian teaching directly from the voice of the apostles. Unfortunately, many Protestants do not use logic, but only anti-Catholic ideologies, cultivating a visceral dislike for everything Catholic, because they dismiss a priori the evidence of how the very first Christians lived, who lived after the apostles but before Constantine.  

The Christian faith is one, because the Spirit of God is one! So many take the wrong path, and we have a duty to understand who is in the right one and who is in the wrong one. Unity is the cohesion of the elements, of the parts that make up an entity (e.g. the cohesion between the parts of a car such as the body, the wheels, the engine, etc.) as Plotinus already said; if unity is lacking, that entity is also lacking and others may result, but no longer the entity it was before [if the cohesion of the body, wheels and engine is lacking, there is no longer the car entity, but rather the entities body, wheels, engine]. Here, Protestantism looks so much like the pile of sheet metal that a car once was. There is much criticism of the Catholic Church, but how many people know, for example, that Bultmann, a famous Lutheran Protestant theologian and exegete, reduced the resurrection to a theological symbol? Indeed, he did not consider it possible that physically Jesus was resurrected. In order to compare different biblical interpretations, one must have one's mind as clear as possible of ideologies and preconceptions. One must be open to any hypothesis if it is properly motivated and proven. If we rely on ideological prejudices that bind us to our doctrinal beliefs, we can do without reading or listening to any text or person; it is useless anyway. Our pride will prevent us from learning truths other than 'our own'. We often defend our biblical error with an impenetrable shell, we keep our truth, rejecting any other, which bangs on the shell and slips away. As soon as one touches the religious/spiritual plane, strangely enough, it is as if many pull the switch off their own mind, or at least a part of it. When Protestants converse with a Catholic, for example, they receive no information at all, only sounds that slip over their eardrums, but do not reach their brains. They do not listen.   

The history of Christianity means nothing to them, it is of no importance, except in the events to be held against them - see crusades, inquisitions, etc. - without knowing the true history of these events, and without knowing that the Protestants also had their wars, and also had their inquisitions, which were much bloodier than the Catholic ones.

They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit, but strangely enough there are many groups that receive different and contradictory information from the same Holy Spirit, inexorably losing credibility. 

I realise that the Catholic Church has neglected the problem of Protestant proselytism. Evangelicals have been successful not because they are right, but simply because they find the Catholic people very ignorant in biblical matters, incapable of defending their faith properly, taking refuge behind the classic "I have no time to lose"; perhaps they even lose their faith... but time cannot be touched.   

Many Catholics claim to have faith in Jesus Christ, but this faith of theirs is only seen in times of need: when everything runs smoothly, Jesus is forgotten, and the Bible is of no interest to anyone to read. In contexts like these, evangelicals find a people who really need to be evangelised, by them. Many Catholics do not resist this proselytism because they have no biblical answers to give, only ignorance to hide. In such terrain the Protestant conquest is easy, and it is as if they were facing an unarmed army.   

But those who study the Bible and strive to deepen their understanding of the meaning of God's word realise that in reality Protestants are not at all the biblical teachers they appear to be, but are profoundly ignorant historians and biblical scholars, plagiarised by their sect of membership. By calling them ignorant I do not mean to offend them, for otherwise I would call them "false and liars". By calling them ignorant I acknowledge their good faith, they believe in some wrong doctrines, not realising that they are wrong.  

The point is that the Holy Spirit cannot contradict Himself, and so certainly the conflicting interpretations of different denominations cannot all be true, nor all inspired. Clearly, it is not possible for the same Spirit to suggest different doctrines to each. This creates watertight compartments, each Protestant group believing it is in the truth more than the others, isolating itself and preaching its own gospel. For example, according to the Adventists, all other Christian churches have abolished the Sabbath commandment by worshipping on Sunday, and therefore everyone except them is doomed to hell if they do not abolish Sunday as the Lord's Day. Of course, they justify these accusations of theirs with certain Bible verses, interpreting them in their own way. Here, this is the point that escapes all Protestants, classical and modern: the Bible cannot be interpreted subjectively, because the Truth is not subjective at all.

But being divided into watertight compartments, not communicating with one another, it is difficult for any of them to notice the doctrinal differences with other Protestants. If anyone does notice them, they pretend that they do not, or do not give them the proper weight, just believe in Jesus as our personal saviour. Their attention is only turned towards the Catholic Church, the enemy to be defeated! It is all too convenient to proudly claim that "I understand what is written in the Bible because the Holy Spirit guides me. God has hidden the truth from the wise and revealed it to the humble'. Here, every good Protestant uses such phrases to reject the interpretative authority of the fathers and doctors of the Church.In this context, we witness scenes in which any Protestant, of any degree of culture, scoffs at the writings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and does so casually, because in interpreting the Bible he feels humble enough to be guided directly by God, but at the same time he is blind enough not to realise that too many 'humble' Protestants then profess very different doctrines. They despise the Catholic, but elect a "do-it-yourself" that prides itself and says: "I do not need to read the writings of the church fathers, the Bible alone is enough for me", so the teachers of which the Apostle Paul speaks would be of no use: "It is he who established some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers" (Eph 4:11). 

One only has to read the history of the heresies that have affected Christianity throughout the centuries to realise that heretics based and always base their theses on the Bible, explaining it in their own way. People are unlikely to go poking around intertwined doctrinal and theological issues. It is easier to find a priest who has committed some human error and choose him as a target, in order to corroborate anti-Catholic theses and consider the Catholic Church as the enemy of Christianity and truth, allied with Satan to mislead souls and lead them to hell. Not even the archangel Michael flaunted such confidence in branding or judging the devil, yet it was the devil (Jd 1:9):  

The archangel Michael, when in dispute with the devil over the body of Moses, did not dare to accuse him with offensive words, but said: You condemn the Lord!

The truth is that the accuser par excellence is Satan himself; the saints do not accuse anyone, not out of respect, but because they defer to God's judgement. For a Protestant, on the other hand, it is normal to say that Catholics go to hell because they are idolaters. They set themselves up as judges, believing they know the hearts, and misunderstand the concept of worship. Any Christian should ask himself questions, to verify what he believes, and should be able to discern whether his beliefs in matters of faith are just the result of autosuggestion, induced fantasies, or whether they find confirmation in the history of Christianity and in the Bible.   

Argentino Quintavalle

 author of the books

 Argentino Quintavalle, author of the books 

- Revelation - exegetical commentary 

- The Apostle Paul and the Judaizers - Law or Gospel?

Jesus Christ true God and true Man in the Trinitarian mystery

The prophetic discourse of Jesus (Matthew 24-25)

All generations will call me blessed

 Catholics and Protestants compared - In defence of the faith

(Buyable on Amazon)