Psalm 129:7

copious and plentiful

Because with the Lord there is mercy: and with him plentiful redemption. (Psalm 129:7 DR)

In our Lord’s parable of the unmerciful servant (cf. Matthew 18:23-35), a servant is hopelessly indebted to his lord when the bill is called due. The servant begs the lord for leniency and more time so as to avoid slavery and ruin, and both the servant and the lord no doubt are aware that no amount of time will be sufficient to pay off the debt. The lord—in his mercy—thus completely forgives the debt of his servant without any further strings attached.

However, the forgiven servant then turns around and demands the money from a fellow servant who owes him very little, threatening him with the very punishment he was just absolved of. When the lord hears of this he is outraged:

Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all the debt, because thou besoughtest me: Shouldst not thou then have had compassion also on thy fellow servant, even as I had compassion on thee? (Matthew 18:32-33 DR)

Our Lord finishes this parable with a warning about why we must forgive:

And his lord being angry, delivered him to the torturers until he paid all the debt. So also shall my heavenly Father do to you, if you forgive not every one his brother from your hearts. (Matthew 18:34-35 DR)

This follows as the corollary of one of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy (Matthew 5:7),” along with our Lord’s warning that:

For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:2 DR)

When it comes to mercy, we are very good at desiring it for ourselves but very bad at showing it to others. This arises from our self-centeredness and pride which demands that we be given what we are owed when we think it is to our benefit, but then turns around and pleads for mercy when what we are owed is not what we want.

We thus run into severe theological problems when we try to impose or project our very imperfect understanding of mercy upon God. We either imagine God as a tyrant constantly looking for ways to crush us because our understanding of mercy is based on our lack of mercy towards others, or we make God into a toothless and kindly grandfather who is always saccharinely nice and without judgment of any kind because we have a very convenient double-standard when it comes to mercy being shown to us.

Both misunderstandings diabolically pervert God’s mercy and justice and issued forth from the same forked tongue which tempted our first parents in the garden. On the one hand God was made out to be a tyrant who wouldn’t share His wisdom and knowledge with them, but then in the next breathe portrayed as incapable or unwilling to follow through on his warnings about death for disobedience.

The Psalmist grounds his hope—and the hope of his people—not in some vague human idea of mercy but in the very character of God Himself as has already been explicated in the previous passages. St. Bellarmine notes that the Church’s prayers frequently invokes God as both “Almighty” and “merciful”:

[M]ercy, properly speaking, is found with God alone, rests in his bosom alone; mercy it is that removes misery; for, who can remove misery but one that cannot be subject to it? who can cure all defects but the one that is free from them, who is Almighty? To God only can be applied what the same prophet says, “For thou, O Lord, art sweet and mild, and plenteous in mercy to all that call upon thee;” and, therefore, it is that our holy mother, the Church, when appealing to God in her prayers, most commonly commences with, “O Almighty and merciful God.” (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 129, 7.)

In this case, however, the Psalmist speaks prophetically within the poetic structure of this passage, for the “mercy” of which he speaks is explicated as being “plentiful redemption.” The Vulgate renders the LXX’s πολύς (much) as copiosa, which gives English copious and has the sense of plentiful or abundant and thus brings out the abundant nature of this mercy and redemption since it is explicitly tied to God as the source.

It is because of the abundance or overflowing nature of this mercy and redemption that the prophetic aspect comes to light, for this redemption can only be accomplished by God and exceeds the temporal redemption that might be applied to the Psalmist or his people:

[W]hen God in his mercy determined to spare the human race, in order that he may satisfy his justice, he offered a ransom of infinite value, the blood of his only begotten, sufficient to redeem any number of captives in the most plentiful manner, to any amount. Man could have sold himself as a captive for his sins, or he could have been given up to the devil, to whose temptations he had yielded, to torture him for his sins, but he never could have redeemed himself, nor have rescued himself from the power of the devil. What man was unable to do, therefore, God’s mercy did for him, and that through the blood of the only begotten. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 129, 7.)

The Psalmist no doubt has in the back of his mind the Lord’s redemption of Israel from Egypt under Moses, but this redemption is only a figure of what is to come in our Lord Jesus Christ, as will be seen in the concluding verse. For it is not simply this earlier temporal and physical redemption which he has in mind, but a redemption from sins which is a reality still to come in which he prophetically looks forward. The redemption from Egypt brought the people of Israel into the Promised Land, but the wickedness and erring nature of their hearts (cf. Psalm 94:10) was still an ever present reality for which the prophets spoke of a new covenant in which the law would be written in their hearts (cf. Jeremiah 31:33). This New Covenant was accomplished in our Lord’s blood and becomes the source of hope and confidence in God’s mercy, for our Lord purchased this plentiful redemption:

“For you are bought with a great price, glorify and bear God in your body,” which is more clearly expressed by St. Peter, when he says, “You were not redeemed with corruptible gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled.” Such redemption is called “plentiful,” because “he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world,” not only because such a ransom redeems us from captivity, but, besides, raises us to share in the inheritance, and the kingdom, whereby we become “heirs of God and coheirs of Christ.” (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 129, 7.)

---

I wanted to highlight the plentiful nature of redemption spoken of in this passage, and I thought it’d be best accomplished by creating a monstrance, since the entirety of our Lord—body, blood, soul and divinity—is present in the Holy Eucharist, and thus it is impossible to more plentiful than that.

I reached back into the playbook and created this monstrance by drawing all the shapes in Illustrator and then precomping each one in After Effects. I found a bunch of gold and metal textures and placed them in the various precomps, using the shapes therein as mattes for the textures, which I think creates a nice collage hybrid between illustration and texture. At least I think it’s interesting.

I added a slight rotation to some of the sunbursts and set that to loop and then added in some particles using Trapcode Particular. I finally added in some glow with Trapcode Shine and some shading with Shadow Studio 3.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: