Ps 33 Commentary for Sunday 21B

Ps 33 Commentary for Sunday 21B
by Dr Noel Donnelly

We used psalm 33 for the past two weeks and will continue to sing it today for a third time as our Gospel moves through the Bread of Life discourse in John 6.

This time it might be useful to focus more on the structure of the psalm: it is what’s called an “alphabetical psalm” because each verse begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The Jerusalem Bible text puts these Hebrew letters before the verses using the words Aleph, Bet, Gimel etc We end up with 22 verses going well beyond the 8 selected by our liturgical editor for our weekend Mass.

We can only guess at the intention of the writer of these psalms: perhaps such an arrangement served as a memory-aid; or maybe the number 22 was simply the planned workload for the task ahead of the writer: 22 could well have been a reasonable task to set before him or her at the outset of writing.

Later writers caught on to this design when 110, 111 and 118 were composed. That last one, 118, is quite mind-blowing! It has 22 paragraphs of 8 lines, and each paragraph starts by using a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The lines of each of these paragraphs begins with that letter. When Mgr Ronald Knox translated this psalm into English his agile mind started each line with a successive letter of the English alphabet!

Next Advent we are introduced to the New Lectionary, with revised translations which are said to be more inclusive and more proclaim-able in community.

Back to our weekend liturgy! For the 21^st Sunday of Year B our psalm follows the reading from Joshua 24, where Joshua gathers the tribes and pledges loyalty to the Lord who has delivered them to the land flowing with mil and honey. Ot leads to John 6,6 where Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life!”

We have much to devour over these three weeks weeks, always using the same Psalm 33 as we Taste and See!

This lovely Psalm 33 is a great camp-fire song on our journey through the liturgical year, especially when we gather for sacramental food around God’s altar!

Ps 33 FD – Full Score Ps 33 seek org gf – Full Score