The salvation that God brings us is a marriage between heaven and earth, a shared project between God and humans. Christ is simultaneously the plenitude of God and the fruit of the earth.
① 1* 2You have favored your land, O Lord;
you have brought back the exiles of Jacob.
3You have forgiven the sin of your people;
you have pardoned their offenses.
4You have withdrawn your wrath
and turned from your burning rage.
5But restore us, God our savior;
put away altogether your indignation.
6Will your anger be ever with us,
carried over to all generations?
7Will you not give us life anew,
that your people may rejoice in you?
8Show us, O Lord, your unfailing love
and grant us your saving help.
9Would that I hear God’s proclamation,
that he promise peace to his people,
his saints – lest they come back to their folly.
10Yet his salvation is near to those who fear him,
and his Glory will dwell in our land.
11Love and faithfulness have met;
righteousness and peace have embraced.
12Faithfulness will reach up from the earth
while justice bends down from heaven.
13The Lord will give what is good,
and our land will yield its fruit.
14Justice will go before him,
and peace will follow along his path.
- This psalm, written when the Israelites had returned from captivity in Babylon adopts the most universal terms of the human vocabulary: liberty, life, joy, salvation, love, justice, peace, happiness.
This return of the exiled Jews, however, was only one step towards authentic liberation. Nothing is definitive and each phase in the realization of God’s plan leads us to another stage. God’s people are forever being called to go further ahead. Even the actual reign of the risen Christ and the work of salvation accomplished by the Church are only an image of the eternal kingdom.
God loves our earth. When we feel troubled and discouraged by so much that is ugly around us, let us come back to the declaration of this psalm: You have favored your land, O Lord; justice bends down from heaven; glory will dwell in our land.
Salvation comes from God, but it is brought by a man, Christ, freely welcomed by a woman in the name of humanity. With the incarnation, it is not possible to believe in God without believing in humankind.
