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Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.  Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.  For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. (Psalm 1)

Today we begin a new journey in our Wilderness Wanderings.  Having reached the end of the Gospel of Luke, our intent is to begin walking through the Psalms.  Today, we enter the Psalter through the front door of Psalm 1.

It presents before us two paths: the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked.  It is reminiscent of Moses and Joshua setting two ways before the people in days of old—the way of life and the way of death—with the injunction: “now choose life!”

This will be a question set before us all throughout the Psalter as the wicked are contemplated and the righteous too.  What separates them?  Why do the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer?  What does God mean by the “way of life” and “fruitfulness,” even and especially in times of hardship, sorrow, evil and enemies?  In the Psalter we are confronted even with dark and painful expressions of faith in lament, like Psalm 88, that makes no turn back to God or the light at all… and yet somehow remains on the faithful path of the righteous. 

So: Psalm 1 prepares our hearts for this journey, and already here there is a curious echo of what is to come.  An echo that may be lost on we Westerners who live in the lush land of the Great Lakes and Greenbelt. 

A colleague recently wondered aloud, given our COVID experiences, what exactly that tree planted by streams of water might have been, in the mind of the Psalmist.  We might imagine a mighty oak tree or one that bears edible fruit, like an apple tree or something.  Or, if we’re really imaginative and get our heads a little closer to the Middle Eastern context of the Bible, perhaps we even imagine something a bit more native to the terrain, like a cedar, fig or even an olive tree. 

But this colleague of mine wondered if the tree the Psalmist had in mind wasn’t more like the Acacia tree.  You see, the hills around Jerusalem—that famed hill country of Judea, is pretty dusty, rocky, and bare.  Just sprigs of yellowed grass that pop up here and there, a couple of prickly shrubs.  To our eyes the land is mostly indistinguishable from desert. 

But there is a tree that grows in that desert.  You can find it in the sandy, dry river beds where the torrent rushes through on those rare occasions when the rain does fall in the desert.  This tree makes for some of the hardest wood on earth.  A 2019 study in Israel discovered that unlike every other tree in Israel: the Acacia grows year round, including in the dry season.  It has sunk its roots deep enough, like tens of meters deep, to the place where whatever water there might still be in those desert streams can be found.  As a result, the Acacia tree’s leaves do not wither, even when all the other plants have.

So: what if the life of righteousness looks less like the easy life of lush luxury, and more like a hard wooded work of straining for the sub-terranean waters of life, even when all else on the surface looks dry and dead?