Psalms 120

The first of the pilgrim songs opens not in the temple but in trouble: In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me. Before a single word about the road to Jerusalem, before any mention of the city or the climb, the psalm sets down its foundation - a cry, and a God who heard. Notice the order of the verbs. He cried; the LORD heard. The crying came first, raw and unpolished, the way distress always comes; and the hearing answered it. The word translated distress carries the sense of being hemmed in, pressed into a tight place with no room to move - the experience of being cornered. Out of exactly that place the psalmist calls, and his first testimony, before he has told us a thing about what is wrong, is that the call was not wasted: he heard me. This is how the whole journey up to the house of God begins - with the discovery that the God of that house can be reached from the far country, that the cry of a cornered soul carries all the way up. Everything else in the psalm rests on this opening certainty. The trouble is real, and it will be named; but the hearing came first.

Verses 3 and 4 put a question to the lying tongue and then answer it. What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue? - what, in other words, is the fitting recompense for a tongue that deals in deceit? The answer is swift and double: Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper (v. 4). Both images turn the tongue's own weapons back on itself. A slandering tongue shoots its words like arrows - elsewhere the psalms call bitter speech exactly that, arrows shot in secret (Ps. 64:3-4) - and so the recompense is sharp arrows. A false tongue kindles destruction like a fire - and so the recompense is burning coals of juniper, the wood of the broom tree, which the ancients prized because its coals hold their heat long after other embers have died. The point is not a wish for cruelty; it is the moral order of God's world stated plainly. The harm the deceitful tongue intends does not finally escape; it returns. The lie that flies out as an arrow comes back as an arrow; the fire it lights becomes its own slow-burning coals. The psalmist does not have to take the false tongue's recompense into his own hands. He can leave it, because the arrows and the coals are not his to send.³

The psalm turns now from the lie to the loneliness underneath it: Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar! (v. 5). Mesech and Kedar are real peoples, but they could not be a literal home address - Mesech lay far to the north, near the Black Sea, and Kedar was a nomadic Arab people of the southern deserts. No one lived in both at once. The psalmist names them together precisely because they sit at opposite ends of the known world: he is saying he feels as though he lives at the very edges of the earth, among foreigners, a stranger everywhere, with no people of his own around him. The key word is sojourn - to dwell as an alien, a resident without roots, someone passing through a land that is not his home. That is the deeper trouble beneath the lying tongues. It is not only that he is slandered; it is that he is a stranger among those who slander, far from anyone who shares his heart. And this is exactly the ache that makes the Songs of Ascents begin here. The pilgrim psalms are the songs of people on their way home - up to the house of the LORD - and the longing for that home is born in places like Mesech and Kedar, in the felt distance of the soul that does not yet belong where it is.³

The psalm ends on a single, aching line: I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war (v. 7). The Hebrew is even barer than the English - something close to “I peace; and when I speak, they war.” The psalmist has so given himself to peace that he can almost say he is peace; it is his settled posture, the thing he reaches for. And every time he opens his mouth toward reconciliation, the answer comes back the same: war. He speaks peace; they want a fight. This is the particular exhaustion of being a peacemaker among those who are not interested in peace - the weariness of reaching out a hand again and again only to have it struck away. The psalm does not pretend this is a small thing, and it does not offer a tidy resolution. It simply lays the contrast bare and leaves it standing: I am for peace; they are for war. But laid against the opening verse, the line is not despair. The same soul that is for peace in a hostile world is the soul that cried to the LORD and was heard. He keeps being for peace not because it is working, but because he has entrusted himself to a God who hears - and the next fourteen psalms will carry him, step by step, up out of Mesech and Kedar and home to the city where peace finally dwells.