Arriving Together

After the distance, the danger and the waiting, the pilgrim collection lands on unity. Not agreement. Dwelling. And it uses two deliberately impossible images to say so.

The climb has been long. Psalm 120 began far from home among lying lips. Psalm 121 walked a road with dangerous hills. Psalm 130 waited in deep water for a morning it could not hasten.

And then the collection arrives, and what it finds at the top is not a private summit experience. It is other people.

How good and how pleasant it is when God's people dwell together in unity.

We would probably have written something else. Something about the temple, or the presence of God, or the relief of having got there. Instead the arrival is described in terms of the group, which is a less flattering ending, because the group is where the friction lives.

The psalm then offers two images, and both are slightly strange.

The first is oil. It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on the collar of his robes. This is anointing oil, and the point is that it does not stop. It runs past the head, into the beard, down onto the clothing. It is a picture of something excessive, going further than was strictly required.

The second image is dew. It is like the dew of Hermon falling on Mount Zion. Hermon is in the far north, snow-capped, well watered. Zion is south, dry, in the hill country of Judah. Dew from Hermon does not fall on Zion. It cannot. The distance makes it impossible, and the psalm knows that.

Which is the point. This unity is not the natural product of people being similar or getting along. It is described as something arriving from somewhere it could not have come from. It is given, not achieved.

And notice the actual word. Dwell together. Not agree. Not resolve their differences. The Hebrew is about living in the same place, which is both less than we might hope for and considerably harder.

We tend to treat unity as the entry requirement for worship. Get the relationships sorted, then come up the mountain. Psalm 133 has it the other way round. Unity is what is waiting at the top, and it is described as a gift, poured out past the point of necessity, arriving from an impossible distance.

Which means the person you find most difficult in your congregation is not an obstacle between you and the summit. According to this psalm, they are part of what is at the summit. That is a harder truth than the one on the wall art, and it is the one the pilgrim songs end on.