Psalm 23

“I shall not want,” says the psalmist. My first thought is that everybody wants something. Some things we want are good: I want children to grow up feeling valued and loved; I want the unemployed to find work, and the unhoused to find homes. I want the planet Earth to continue to support human life. I want school children to be safe from gun violence. I want quite a lot, really.

But the psalmist in Psalm 23 isn’t saying he’ll never desire anything. What he means is he is free from want – he has what he needs. A better translation of verse 1 is, “I lack nothing,” “I have everything I need to live a healthy, peaceful life.”

We know this doesn’t apply to everyone, locally or globally. In Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond’s book, Poverty By America, he explains that the United States is the richest nation in the world and yet we have more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Almost 1 in 9 Americans lives in poverty, including 1 in 8 children. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who can’t afford the basic necessities. At the same time, we see billionaires hoarding money they couldn’t spend in a lifetime while their workers struggle to get by on two jobs. So, you have to wonder: Is there a way that this verse – “I have everything I need” – can be true for everyone? Because if there isn’t, this psalm could feel like a cruel joke, a gloating paean to privilege.

The beginning of the verse gives us a clue to what the psalmist means. “The Lord is my shepherd.” We’ve heard this psalm so often that the power of those words may be lost on us. The Lord is my shepherd, says the psalm, and then it lists all the basic necessities a shepherd provides for the sheep: food, water, and protection. In the second part of the psalm, the gracious host also provides for these needs.

Psalm 23 affirms that life is essentially a gift, a gift from the shepherd. And even though the psalm is spoken in the first-person singular, we know that the shepherd cares for the entire flock. It’s fine for one individual, this psalmist, to sing a song of gratitude and trust for what the shepherd provides. It’s not okay for any one sheep – or for any one person – to assume God has singled out just one individual or even just one group of individuals for the abundance of God’s gifts.

What if we lived as though, “The Lord is our shepherd”? When we say, “The Lord is my shepherd” we reject the claims of anyone else who seeks that status. It’s like saying, “The Lord is my shepherd – you’re not.” Who is the “you” in “you’re not”? It depends on who or what is oppressing us. In some countries, tyrannical regimes try to take the place of trust in God. In our culture, we’re bombarded with ads telling us we need a new car every few years, we need to wear the latest fashions, we need the newest iPhone even if our current phone works fine. Wealth is status, security, and the measure of a person’s worth. It’s not surprising that our society is characterized by what Alan Greenspan once called “infectious greed.”

But consumer culture is not our shepherd. Greed is not our shepherd. The Lord is our shepherd. A few years ago, a world hunger summit in Rome concluded that there’s enough food in the world today to feed everybody. Hunger isn’t caused by a lack of food but by the fact that some people don’t have the money to buy food. The problem isn’t supply. It is distribution. The Shepherd has provided enough for the basic sustenance of life. That is how “I shall not want” can apply to everybody. What this means is that the Lord is not the problem. We are. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every [one’s] need, but not every [one’s] greed.” Or as Matthew Desmond puts it, “America’s poverty isn’t for lack of resources. We lack something else.”

In order to address poverty in our nation and world, I agree with Desmond that the most important step is acquiring that “something else” that we lack: We need the will, the desire; we need to become “poverty abolitionists,” as Desmond puts it. That is our calling as those who trust that the Lord is our shepherd. The psalm doesn’t tell us we won’t face challenges, enemies, even death, but God has given us all we need to meet them. And: we have God. The focal point of the psalm is, “Thou art with me.” The whole Gospel tells us God is with us. Jesus was called “Emmanuel,” and that means “God with us.”

God is with us. Author Barbara Ehrenreich was asked in an interview what she would give up to live in a more human world. She answered, “I think we shouldn’t think of what we would give up to have a more human world; we should think of what we would gain.”

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.