NOTES for Psa 112

It is hard to imagine a situation in which, while listening to another person pray, we would allow ourselves to say: “He is not at his best today; he could have said it more beautifully, he repeats himself too often, and in general he is talking about the wrong thing.” It is the same when reflecting on the Psalms: very often there are simply no words, because before us is an example of living prayer, another person’s conversation with God.

Nevertheless, today’s psalm is the cry of a person overflowing with gratitude, who uses whatever comes to hand to glorify God. Not for any particular deeds, not in response to a request. It is simply the cry of a person who is delighted, amazed, and overwhelmed by the realization that God is Love.

Remarkably, the fact that the Lord is high above all nations does not contradict the fact that He raises the poor to seat them with princes. It is not only that He shows no partiality and that human ambitions for advancement are irrelevant before Him. The Lord truly can make a cook capable of governing a state, but such changes cannot be ends in themselves. Before Him we are all equal, and whatever rung of the social ladder we may occupy, each of us is dear and precious to Him. He wants to draw each person near to Himself, and therefore to raise each one higher than princes.

Human prejudices, including social ones, have become so deeply ingrained in us that we drag them even into the Church, and all too often they defile both the Church and our perception of Revelation. But whatever is alien, the Lord will certainly reject.

Several peoples of antiquity knew the Only, Who created the heavens and the earth the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Indians. But none of them adored Him: he was too far from earth and from people with their life and their problems. Such a distant God was practically inaccessible, that is why it is as if He didn’t existed at all: what man has to do with a God, Who does not have the time of man? His laws act in the world as an inexorable power, but addressing Him is useless: he will not still hear and will change nothing in His world created once for all, world living according to the once and for all asserted, unwavering and inexorable laws.

Many people believed in the existence of such God later, already in the new time, sometimes covering with this believe their practical atheism, sometimes suffering from the idea that the world is ruled by a merciless Lord, to Whom it is useless to ask for anything. The originality of the Bible consists not of what it tells us about the only God who created the heavens and the earth: it was not news nor in the time of Abraham, or in the time of Moses. The originality of the Bible - in the tradition kept by it, a unique tradition, in the basis of which lie the revelation of this unique God and the experience of the living relationships with Him. God remains not only a kind of transcendent being, He condescends to man, He, according to the words of the hymnography, "inclined to glance on the heavens and on the earth", inclined from His transcendent eternity in order to meet face to face with man, with this same man whom He created, whom He freed and who he wants to see now as His son.

Here they are in particular living relations, relations, in which any thing can happen: acceptance and rejection, "yes" and "no", the ups and downs, which is not always a joy not only to man having forgotten for a long time God, but also to God Himself often receiving from the man who forgot Him not at all answer such as He would have wanted to hear. But without these living relations God's plan remains impracticable, and the life of man loses any sense, that is why God comes to them, no matter what. Comes in order to save man from sin and offer him a new life - the life of His Kingdom, which He prepared for those who He loves.