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Office Of Readings | Wednesday, Lent Week 5 | A Reading From The Discourses Of Saint Augustine On The Psalms
‘Jesus Christ prays for us, prays in us, is prayed to by us.’
In his commentary on the psalms, Saint Augustine invites us to reflect on the nature of prayer in the light of the Incarnation. Christ, he says, prays for us, prays in us, and is the one to whom we pray. This threefold pattern expresses the deep mystery of how Christ, as both God and man, draws us into communion with the Father.
At the centre of Augustine’s reflection is the conviction that Christ is inseparably united to his Church. Christ is the Head; the Church is his Body. Together, they form one person, what Augustine elsewhere calls the Totus Christus – the whole Christ. This means that the voice of the Church in prayer is the voice of Christ; and the voice of Christ, especially in the Psalms, is the voice of his Body. We speak to God in him, and he speaks to God in us.
This helps explain the wide range of expressions we encounter in the Psalms – some joyful, some confused, others desperate or afraid. When Christ speaks through the Psalms, he gives voice not only to his own suffering and obedience, but to the full range of human experience. He prays in the weakness of our flesh. He prays as one of us. This is not something to be glossed over or ‘explained away’. Augustine warns us against trying to filter out what seems unworthy of God – sighs, sorrows, and cries for help – as though the Word made flesh would be diminished by sharing in our condition.
This is exactly what the Incarnation means: that the eternal Son of God took on a full human nature, including its vulnerability and dependence. In assuming human nature, he sanctified all of it – including our prayer. So, when he cries out in the words of the Psalmist, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ this is not a contradiction of his divinity, but a mark of his solidarity with us.
Augustine also reminds us that prayer is not a one-way act. Christ not only speaks our prayers but remains the object of our worship. As God, he receives the prayer of his Church; as man, he offers the perfect prayer to the Father. When we pray, we do so in him, because he is the Mediator through whom we have access to the Father. His humanity becomes the place of encounter between human longing and divine grace.
This is why the Church prays the Psalms as her own. In them, Christ prays on behalf of all humanity, and all humanity finds its voice in Christ. The Psalms, for Augustine, are not simply ancient texts; they are the living breath of the Church, expressing the faith, hope, and sorrow of a people united to their crucified and risen Lord.
For Lent, this reading offers a powerful reflection. We are reminded that when we kneel in prayer, we are never alone. Christ is praying in us. When we find ourselves overwhelmed, inarticulate, or unsure how to speak to God, Augustine points us to the Psalms and to Christ, who continues to speak on our behalf. The one who once sighed, wept, and cried out now intercedes for us, and unites our small prayers to his eternal one.
In prayer, we are caught up into Christ’s own relationship with the Father. Through him, with him, and in him, we speak and are heard. And through his Spirit, our words are shaped into his own.
A Reading From The Discourses Of Saint Augustine On The Psalms
God could give no greater gift to men than to make his Word, through whom he created all things, their head and to join them to him as his members, so that the Word might be both Son of God and son of man, one God with the Father, and one man with all men. The result is that when we speak with God in prayer we do not separate the Son from him, and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself: it is the one Saviour of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us and in us and is himself the object of our prayers.
He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, he is the object of our prayers as our God.
Let us then recognise both our voice in his, and his voice in ours. When something is said, especially in prophecy, about the Lord Jesus Christ that seems to belong to a condition of lowliness unworthy of God, we must not hesitate to ascribe this condition to one who did not hesitate to unite himself with us. Every creature is his servant, for it was through him that every creature came to be.
We contemplate his glory and divinity when we listen to these words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made. Here we gaze on the divinity of the Son of God, something supremely great and surpassing all the greatness of his creatures. Yet in other parts of Scripture we hear him as one sighing, praying, giving praise and thanks.
We hesitate to attribute these words to him because our minds are slow to come down to his humble level when we have just been contemplating him in his divinity. It is as though we were doing him an injustice in acknowledging in a man the words of one with whom we spoke when we prayed to God. We are usually at a loss and try to change the meaning. Yet our minds find nothing in Scripture that does not go back to him, nothing that will allow us to stray from him.
Our thoughts must then be awakened to keep their vigil of faith. We must realise that the one whom we were contemplating a short time before in his nature as God took to himself the nature of a servant; he was made in the likeness of men and found to be a man like others; he humbled himself by being obedient even to accepting death; as he hung on the cross he made the psalmist’s words his own: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
We pray to him as God, he prays for us as a servant. In the first case he is the Creator, in the second a creature. Himself unchanged, he took to himself our created nature in order to change it, and made us one man with himself, head and body. We pray then to him, through him, in him, and we speak along with him and he along with us.
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Psalm 111 likely originates from the post-exilic era, a time of rebuilding and re-establishing Jewish religious and community life after the Babylonian Exile. This background is essential to understanding the psalm’s emphasis on communal worship and remembering God’s acts [ … ]
