Everyday life gives us ample opportunity to fulfill all righteousness, at least as far as the gods of global capital are concerned. Building credit, contributing to a 401K plan, purchasing ordinary goods produced through an extraordinary supply chain, we participate in the enchanted world of mammon, in which money defies space and time to make and remake a world that bears its image. But in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus inhabits a different kind of story about God and the world, about empire and capital.
In displaying its cosmic vision, Psalm 8 invites its readers to participate, in some limited way, in the divine perspective that exceeds our own, in which anthropocentric fantasies are judged and redefined.
When we work towards the eradication of structures that perpetuate poverty in our communities, those that divide us, systems that perpetuate classism or any form of caste system, we each become the light that others see around them. This is also how we embody the glory of God as was experienced by the shepherds in the Lukan narrative.
Images of imprisonment appear throughout the Psalter, where the psalmist turns to God as refuge in order to exit the pit of despair. Similar to the life of Omar Ibn Said, and the opera which tells his story, images of shelter and succor help the psalmist escape the abyss of embattlement, imprisonment, or depression, and nurture the attitudes of care, trust, and hope that crest in Psalm 146 and the Hallelujah psalms.