The Rev’d Armando Ghinaglia
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
November 10, 2019
Under the Shadow of God’s Wings
Keep me, O Lord, as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our psalm this morning is a striking song—in the psalmist’s words, “hear the right.”[i] We ask the Lord to “hearken unto” our “prayer,”[ii] to “visit” our “heart,” to “prove” us, to see that there is “no wickedness” in us.[iii] With the psalmist, we call to the Lord for protection: “Show thy marvelous loving-kindness, thou that art the Saviour of them which put their trust in thee.”[iv]
And what, one might ask, does the Lord’s loving-kindness look like? “Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings from the ungodly that trouble me,” from those who “compass me round about to take away my soul.”[v]
“Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings.”[vi]
The verse is beautiful, and for over a thousand years, those words have been part of the service of Compline. Still, the first half is admittedly strange, even to our ears. “Hide me under the shadow of thy wings” seems obvious enough. But “keep me as the apple of an eye”? In our day, “apple of your eye” or “apple of my eye” probably means something like the thing we love or cherish most, and so the verse comes across as “Keep me in your sight like the one you love most.” And that’s not a bad prayer by any means. But it’s not what the psalmist means here. The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin all render the phrase “keep me as the pupil of your eye.”
In that context, the parallelism here makes more sense: keep us safe, the way that people shield their eyes from damage; hide us away, the way a bird shields its young from danger. In both cases: Lord, gather us in; hold us so close to you—to your mind and to your heart—that we might, as it were, become one with you.
As Christ himself says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”[vii]
Now, it may well be our prayer much of the time—if not most of the time—that the Lord would hide us under the shadow of his wings, that God would “defend[] [us] from all adversities which may happen to the body and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”[viii] In a broken and sinful world, we could hardly pray otherwise.
The circumstances of this life—financial hardships, relationship problems, health issues, whatever they may be—lead us to pray that God would guard and protect us. Lord, help me have enough to pay my bills this month. Lord, help me love my partner or my parents or my siblings the way I want to and the way I should. Lord, help me get through this pain or this anxiety or this sickness. All of these are good prayers, even necessary, because they lay bare the deepest desires of our hearts and they remind us that we are utterly dependent on God for all “good things.”[ix]
But there is more to God protecting us than merely making sure we live a long and undisturbed life here on earth or that we receive all the material or physical blessings we desire. The end of our psalm from today doesn’t make it into the lectionary, but it points in that very direction: O Lord, “deliver my soul from the ungodly,” “which have their portion in this life,”[x] and “I will behold thy presence in righteousness, and when I awake up after thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it.”[xi]
To be hidden with God isn’t simply to be protected. It’s to be hidden with Christ. And as the disciples knew well, being hidden with Christ doesn’t mean that no harm will ever happen to us.[xii] Sometimes it means being hidden with him in his healing and miracles; sometimes it means being hidden with him in his suffering and death, to pass through the “refiner’s fire” and the “fullers’ soap.”[xiii] In ways we may not appreciate fully in this life and may only understand in the next, God the Father has already hidden us under the shadow of the wings of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
As the book of Deuteronomy has it, not only does the “eagle stir up its nest and hover over its young”; it also “spreads its wings, takes [] up [its young], and bears them aloft on its pinions.”[xiv] In that way, we find in Deuteronomy, “the Lord alone guided Israel . . . and set him atop the heights of the land.”[xv]
The Spirit has stirred our hearts to seek God’s face in Jesus Christ.[xvi] And by water and the Spirit, Jesus has gathered us together[xvii] in his body,[xviii] and in the shadow between the Ascension and the Second Coming,[xix] our “life is hidden with Christ in God.”[xx] More than that, God has “borne [us] on eagles’ wings and brought [us] to [him]self.”[xxi] For Jesus himself “stretched out his arms upon the cross”[xxii]; he has taken us up and borne us aloft with him[xxiii]—along with all our griefs and sorrows and burdens[xxiv]—so that they, like the wounds in his hands and feet and side, might be transformed,[xxv] and so that we, like him, might live forever.[xxvi]
Hiddenness with Christ in God bears with it the seed of the promise that suffering does not have the final word—that if “we suffer with him,” we will “also be glorified with him.”[xxvii] For we who are “buried with him in baptism” are “also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised Christ from the dead.”[xxviii]
Perhaps only then will we be “satisfied,” “behold[ing] [God’s] presence”[xxix] “face to face.”[xxx] For then we shall know all things fully, “even as [we] have been fully known.”[xxxi]
This is God’s “marvelous loving-kindness,”[xxxii] and this is our hope.[xxxiii]
Keep us, O Lord, as the apple of an eye. Hide us under the shadow of thy wings. Amen.
[i] Ps. 17:1.
[ii] Id.
[iii] Ps. 17:3.
[iv] Ps. 17:7.
[v] Ps. 17:8-9.
[vi] Id.
[vii] Mt. 23:37; Lk. 13:34.
[viii] BCP 218 (Collect for the Third Sunday in Lent).
[ix] Mt. 7:11.
[x] Ps. 17:13-14 (emphasis added).
[xi] Ps. 17:16.
[xii] See Ps. 10:6.
[xiii] Mal. 3:2.
[xiv] Cf. Deut. 32:11.
[xv] Deut. 32:12-13.
[xvi] See Ps. 27:11; 1 Cor. 2:10; 2 Cor. 4:6.
[xvii] See Jn. 3:5; Tit. 3:5.
[xviii] See Eph. 5:30.
[xix] See Col. 2:17.
[xx] Col. 3:3.
[xxi] Ex. 19:4.
[xxii] BCP 362 (Eucharistic Prayer A).
[xxiii] See Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1.
[xxiv] See Is. 53.
[xxv] See Jn. 20:27.
[xxvi] See 2 Cor. 4:14; Jn. 6:51.
[xxvii] Rom. 8:17.
[xxviii] Col. 2:12.
[xxix] Ps. 17:16.
[xxx] 1 Cor. 13:12.
[xxxi] Id.
[xxxii] Ps. 17:7.
[xxxiii] Cf. 1 Pet. 3:15.