Proclaim God’s wondrous deeds
Psalm 105:1-9. April 12, 2023 - Wednesday in the Octave of Easter
Psalm 105 accompanies the first reading describing the miraculous healing of a cripple man by Saint Peter. We hear that the healed man was praising God while walking and the people who witnessed the miracle “were filled with amazement and astonishment” (Acts 3:8,10). By telling us that story Saint Luke joins the psalmist in proclaiming God’s “wondrous deeds” (Ps 105:2).
Psalm 105 proclaims God’s deeds by retelling for us the story that began in Genesis 12 and ended in the Book of Joshua. God called Abraham from his native land, then he fulfilled for him a promise of numerous descendants whom he freed from the oppressive slavery in Egypt and brought to the Promised Land. But what is narrated in the first six books of the Old Testament is told by the psalmist in a poem of 45 verses. There are two possible reasons for it. First, when he sang about those wondrous deeds of God, the Old Testament was not yet completed in its present form. Second, he gave those events his interpretation. He avoided talking about Israel’s sins and focused entirely on God’s faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham.
The Proclamation of God’s wondrous deeds continues in the New Testament. The apostles of Christ shared the story of Jesus Christ that could be summarised in this way. The eternal Word of God descended from his heavenly abode and dwelled among us. Jesus lived an ordinary life, preached the Kingdom of God, and performed various miracles. He died on the cross, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and from the Father sent the Holy Spirit upon the Church. Then, he will come again to judge the world and to complete God’s plan of salvation by establishing a new heaven and a new earth.
The Church distinguishes three main phases in transmitting the Gospel. The first phase embraces Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension at the right hand of the Father. The second phase is called oral tradition during which the apostles shared what they experienced and those who listened to them passed it on to others by word of mouth. Finally, there is the phase when some apostles and evangelists collected things they thought important and put them into writing. In this final stage, the New Testament was slowly being written. But, even though the New Testament was written, the main vehicle for proclaiming the Gospel remained the word of mouth. Most people could not afford to have a personal copy of the Bible. They listened to the history of salvation in the Church during liturgical celebrations and with the outside world shared personal testimonies, sang songs, and retold miraculous they heard happened to someone somewhere.
Today, it is our turn to ”make known among the nations [God’s] deeds”. Unlike our ancestors, we can afford to have a personal copy of the entire Bible, read it daily, and get to know the history of our salvation by heart. But then, we have to find a way to tell the Gospel to the world. It has to be a personal, testimonial, and right to the point. We have to learn from the psalmist how to tell the history of salvation that span the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, in a short but powerful form that would draw people to Jesus Christ.