On a road trip with my friend Josh a couple of weeks back, we were listening to a weekly podcast by the editors of Relevant magazine, when they started talking about the Israel/Lebanon conflict. We were both a little startled when the Scripture that says to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” was mentioned, and one of the hosts commented about the need for Christians to support Israel. Then, the other two hosts chimed in in agreement.

That verse in psalm 122, they contend, commands Christians to actively support the modern political state of Israel.

It doesn’t surprise me when Pat Robertson makes a comment like that, but the editors of Relevant spend their energies hunting down interviews with Sufjan Stevens and Bono, so they’re hardly extremists who set themselves up against the world –– at least from what little I had previously heard about them.

But regardless of their particular loyalties, support of Israel apparently is a position shared by millions of North American Christians, and a position they believe is mandated by Scripture.

Naturally, we all should be praying for peace in Jerusalem –– as we should be praying for peace in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and the streets and homes of America. But that’s not what the folks on the podcast were talking about, and I don’t think it’s what most of those featured on this website have in mind either.

But come on. To quote Mugatu, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. Something like sixteen different (but mostly interrelated) reasons jump out at me why this whole thing is nonsense.

Just read the psalm: It’s a song sung by a Jew about his pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple to worship. It emphasizes the “tribes” going to worship according to the “statute given to Israel,” visiting the place where those who sit on the “thrones of the house of David” maintain justice for the land. The prayer for peace is for “the sake of my brothers and friends” and “for the sake of the house of the Lord our God.”

It’s difficult to imagine a more culturally specific psalm. There’s not a lot of mystery here: the Jerusalem temple was the symbol of God’s presence among the Israelites, and to pray for its peace was to pray that God would remain faithful to his people and protect them and their king amidst the enemies that surrounded them. The pilgrimage (”going up”) was a regular event as commanded in Torah, and Jews (Jesus and his family among them) obeyed and celebrated it.

Now try to apply that to Christians today. The temple was razed 1,936 years ago, the sacrifices have stopped, and virtually none of us make the pilgrimage for the feasts. Everything tying the religious content of Psalm 122 to Jerusalem no longer exists. So by what sick interpretive contortion do we pull from this that God is commanding us to help Israelis keep Palestinians out of their homeland?

The first problem, I suppose, is a misunderstanding of genre. Psalm 122 is a song of praise and exhortation to worshippers, not a legal text prescribing what everyone must do. How much of what’s said in the psalms do we actually consider commands to be obeyed? To use the easiest counter-example, if we could find a society of Babylonians, should we bash their infants’ heads against a rock (Psalm 137)? Wait –– Babylon is essentially modern-day Iraq, so maybe that’s not such a stretch…

But second, even if the psalm was intended as a genuine command, it clearly is a text for Jews worshipping under the old (from a Christian perspective) covenant. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was absolutely essential to Palestinian Jewish identity, and absolutely not required of Gentile believers.

To borrow from a recent discussion on matthew’s blog the other day, Jesus claimed explicitly to inaugurate a new age in which worship is centered not on a location, but in which “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). So even a conservative reading of Scripture here should lead us to see the entire context of Psalm 122 as obsolete. If we are to read this psalm as Christians, then, it must be symbolically. As commentator J. Clinton McCann Jr. writes,

Ironically, much of the ongoing controversy surrounding Jerusalem stems from the failure to discern its symbolic function; the city has often been viewed only as a place to be possessed rather than a symbol of the concrete presence in the world of a God who cannot ultimately be possessed and whose presence certainly cannot be limited to a particular place (as Psalm 121 proclaims!).

A Christian reading of Psalm 122 should focus on worship, not geography, and we ought not pray concerning a particular geographical/political entity, if what we’re aiming for is the preservation of God’s presence among us. To do so is actually to deny what Jesus claimed about the nature of worship under his messiahship.

So am I missing something here? Have I just lucked into a better reading of the psalm because I grew up in a tradition that believes in a sharp divide between the old and new covenants? Or am I ignoring some key New Testament text concerning the end-times, which would give me a fuller perspective?

Feel free to comment with agreement, disagreement, lament, outrage (at me or at these other folks), or perhaps suggestions for broader perspective.