Psalm 22:5

Thou hast prepared a table before me against them that afflict me. Thou hast anointed my head with oil; and my chalice which inebriateth me, how goodly is it! (Psalm 22:5 DR)

In this penultimate verse of Psalm 22 the Psalmist shifts the metaphor from the shepherd caring for the sheep to that of a feast. In some respects, however, there is a natural progression, for this feast involves the fruit of sacrifices which are offered to God, and sheep were often employed in the Old Covenant in this manner. Our Lord Himself is the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. In this passage the table is prepared, which is the altar of sacrifice, which corresponds to our Lord’s Incarnation as the Psalmist elsewhere describes:

Sacrifice and oblation thou didst not desire; but thou hast pierced ears for me. Burnt offering and sin offering thou didst not require: Then said I, Behold I come. In the head of the book it is written of me that I should do thy will: O my God, I have desired it, and thy law in the midst of my heart. (Psalm 39:7-9 DR)

St. Paul directly links this to the Incarnation:

For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sin should be taken away. Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith: Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldest not: but a body thou hast fitted to me: Holocausts for sin did not please thee. Then said I: Behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God. (Hebrews 10:4-7 DR)

St. Paul goes on to demonstrate how the One Sacrifice of our Great High Priest Jesus Christ—which is re-presented at every Mass—fulfills this prophecy of the Psalmist in the New Covenant in our Lord Jesus Christ:

In saying before, “Sacrifices, and oblations, and holocausts for sin thou wouldest not, neither are they pleasing to thee,” which are offered according to the law. “Then said I: Behold, I come to do thy will, O God:” he taketh away the first, that he may establish that which followeth. In the which will, we are sanctified by the oblation of the body of Jesus Christ once. (Hebrews 10:8-10 DR)

This then corresponds to our uniting ourselves to this Holy Sacrifice through the offering of ourselves as “living sacrifices:”

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God, your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2 DR)

Understood in this light, the Psalmist therefore transitions quite reasonably and naturally from describing the care of the Good Shepherd for the sheep, to their offering themselves unto God as living sacrifices. This metaphor of course should not be taken in a crass manner as if the Church is a farm that fattens her members up for slaughter. Instead, this inverts the paradigm of power and desire that the world understands to reframe it around the example of our Lord’s humility, Who humbled Himself upon the cross as a pleasing Sacrifice to the Father, and was thereby exalted to the highest place (cf. Philippians 2:6-11). It is through this same humility and submission of heart and will to God that we have our bodies fitted to do God’s will, as St. Paul and the Psalmist describe, and this then brings us to the table which is prepared:

Here it is plainly the mystic Chrism and the holy Sacrifices of Christ's Table that are meant, by which we are taught to offer to Almighty God through our great High Priest all through our life the celebration of our sacrifices, bloodless, reasonable, and well-pleasing to Him. (Eusebius of Caesarea, Proof of the Gospel, Book I., Chapter X.)

St. Augustine understands this passage as speaking of progress in the spiritual life, as those who feast at it are able to be nourished by its delights:

Now after the rod, whereby, while a little one, and living the natural life, I was brought up among the flock in the pastures; after that rod, I say, when I began to be under the staff, You have prepared a table in my sight, that I should no more be fed as a babe with milk, but being older should take meat, strengthened against them that trouble me. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 22, 5.)

Notice that this comes “after the rod,” meaning that the discipline that the Lord brings upon us for our sins and faults—as well as the trials and tribulations which we undergo—are all part of this rod that corrects us to stay on the right path, that we may mature in our faith and strengthen in virtue and fortitude. He alludes to St. Paul speaking to the Corinthians about how he wished to speak more deeply to them, but they were not ready for it, much like an infant cannot immediately eat solid food but must grow and be strengthened by milk until he is able. St. Paul links this entirely to how much one has subjugated the flesh and its passions:

And I, brethren, could not speak to you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal. As unto little ones in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not meat; for you were not able as yet. But neither indeed are you now able; for you are yet carnal. (1 Corinthians 3:1-2 DR)

This is precisely why the metaphor shifts from that of shepherd and sheep to that of the feast, for only in becoming those “living sacrifices”—by which we have put to death this carnality (cf. Colossians 3:5)—are we able to partake of the table which our Lord prepares for us. On this altar is the One Holy Sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, to which we unite ourselves to Him as His mystical Body in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:

The table of delight, you see, is the passion of Christ, who offered himself for us as a sacrifice to God the Father on the table of the cross, thus bestowing on his Catholic Church the banquet of life, that is to say giving us his body to satisfy our hunger, and his blood to make us drunk. Fed and vitalized at this table, the Church exults against those who distress her, having the hope of eternal life through her life, the Lord Christ, who has anointed her lavishly with the oil of gladness through the Holy Spirit. (St. Augustine, Sermon 366.6., The Works of St. Augustine, Vol. 10.)

The Psalmist speaks of this table being prepared against those that afflict him. The Vulgate uses adversus for the Greek ἐναντίας, both of which have this sense of being against or opposite. This can have both a spatial connotation as well as a moral one, and while not necessarily negative in denotation (as in terms of being against an enemy), the context certainly makes this case, as it is against those that afflict the Psalmist. In this manner this table stands as a contradiction to the enemy, for though they may press in on every side and trouble through persecution, the Lord Himself is the One Who prepares it and consoles those who partake of it:

The seventh favor, namely, the wonderful consolation extended by God to his elect, in the troubles incidental to them in this world. The meaning of this verse is, not that God has prepared a table, wine and oil, against his enemies, as if they were the weapons wherewith to fight; but the meaning is, that God provides great consolations to meet great tribulations; and, as the enemy seeks to do us much injury, so God pours upon us many consolations, which are pictured as if we were enjoying a feast, where the table was overspread with the choicest meats, with the rarest wines, and the most precious perfumed ointments, such as we read of Mary Magdalen having poured on the head of our Savior. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 22, 5.)

Beyond just consolations, however, these delights at the table of the Lord strengthen the soul against the enemy that afflicts it, and herein are set forth the prophetic foreshadowing of the sacraments, especially Confirmation (the oil) and the Eucharist (the cup). The second half of the passage thus serves to expand upon the first, for the table consists of these sacraments, and they are that which strengthen the soul against the enemy’s afflictions. On another level, the soul which has progressed in the spiritual life and entered into the life of grace through the sacrament of Baptism—the waters of refreshment from verse two—is now able to partake of this table and the sacraments of Confirmation and the Eucharist, and is thereby strengthened and united to our Lord at this table:

This banquet consists of the living Bread, the Word of God. At this banquet there is the oil of sanctification, poured richly over the head of the just. This oil strengthens the inner senses. It does away with the oil of the sinner that fattens the head. In this banquet, too, you have the cup that inebriates: “how excellent” it is, or “how powerful,” for the Greek has kratiston, meaning most mighty, strong or powerful. Surely it is a powerful cup that washes away every stain of sin. (St. Ambrose, Commentary on Twelve Psalms, 35.19., ACCS.)

St. Ambrose draws out an important aspect of this passage in that this table is not merely meant for consolations and delights, but also to prepare the soul to do battle against the evil that afflicts it and the Church. The emptying out of our vices and the conforming of our wills to God unites us more closely to Him, and the washing away of the stain of sin takes away the footholds of the devil (cf. Ephesians 4:27). The more we mortify our passions and lay aside our carnality, the more we can resist temptation. In this manner the table is prepared against those that afflict us, and is set in the very midst of the battlefield, as it were, to prepare us to face suffering with perseverance and fortitude:

The word cup is to be understood as the perfect grace of charity by which the strength for undergoing suffering for the name of Christ is infused. This is given in such a way that even if the opportunity by which anyone may undergo suffering is lacking, there is still great strength in the heart by a divine gift that nothing is lacking for putting up with punishment, scorning life and undergoing death for the name of Christ. This is well understood in the text of the Psalm where it is said, “My cup overflows,” and he had just said before, “You anoint my head with oil.” What must be understood by “head anointed with oil” except a mind strengthened by the gift of the Holy Spirit? The shining quality of this oil is the unconquerable fortitude of spiritual grace by which the holy drunkenness is poured into the inner depths of the heart to that every affection of the heart, overcome, is consigned to oblivion. Filled with this drunkenness, the spirit learns to rejoice always in the Lord and to consign to contempt whatever he loved in the world. We drink this drunkenness when, having received the Holy Spirit, we possess the grace of perfect charity that drives out fear. (St. Fulgentius of Ruspe, Letter 14.42., ACCS.)

This “drunkenness” or “inebriation” was a well-loved figure of the Church Fathers, which they would term a sober inebriation. The idea is that the grace of God is poured forth so abundantly into the heart by the Holy Spirit through the Sacraments (cf. Romans 5:5) that it overwhelmed the darkness of sin, cleansing the soul and inebriating it, as it were, in the goodness of God. That is, this charity is so transformative that all the delights and desires of this world pale in comparison and become as nothing, much like inebriation in the natural sense dulls the senses to the world around it. Yet since sin darkens the mind, clouding it from the truth and the seeking after of virtue—much like drunkenness impairs one’s faculties—so in the drinking from this goodly cup there is also a sobriety, in that the soul is cleansed from sin, delights in the truth and is able to pursue virtue and receive God’s grace.

It is a thus a paradoxical state that again inverts the order of this world, and this sober intoxication brings the mind to the spiritual wisdom that St. Paul spoke of:

The inebriation of the cup and of the blood of the Lord is not like the inebriation coming from worldly wine, since the Holy Spirit says in the Psalm, “Your cup that inebriates,” and adds, “how excellent it is,” because the cup of the Lord inebriates in such a way that it makes people sober, that it brings minds to spiritual wisdom, that from the taste for this world each one returns to the knowledge of God. And, as the mind is relaxed by that ordinary wine and the soul is eased and all sadness set aside, so when the blood of the Lord and the lifegiving cup have been drunk, the memory of the old man is set aside, and there is induced forgetfulness of former, worldly behavior, and the sorrowful sad heart, which was formerly pressed down with distressing sins, is now eased by the joy of the divine mercy. This can delight the one who drinks in the Church of the Lord, but only if what is drunk keeps to the truth of the Lord. (St. Cyprian, Letter 63.11., ACCS.)

There is an interesting distinction between the Vulgate and most copies of the Septuagint here. The Vulgate (and St. Jerome’s Hebrew translation) render this as calix meus or “my chalice,” whereas the majority of Septuagint copies read ποτήριόν σου, or “your chalice.” The Old Latin tends to follow the Septuagint, and in St. Augustine’s Expositions we read poculum tuum, “your chalice” or “your cup.”

However, one need not see a discrepancy here but rather the robustness of sacramental theology. The cup of the Lord in the Eucharist is the cup that He drank (cf. Matthew 20:22, Matthew 26:39) in His Passion and Death. In this manner the Psalmist speaks prophetically of this very cup, prefiguring our Lord’s Holy Sacrifice. On the other hand, since this cup in the Eucharist also contains Him truly and wholly present, body, blood, soul and divinity, when we as members of His mystical Body partake of the Eucharist we truly have communion with Him. Thus His cup becomes—in the blessed sacrament—our cup as well, as we are united to Him in His sufferings (cf. 1 Peter 4:13) and through the sacraments are infused with grace. Without the real Presence of the Lord in the Eucharist, “my cup” becomes merely the sum of my faith and intellectual ability to comprehend God, rather than the actual infusion of grace into the soul by means of the sacramental grace in the true and real communion with our Lord’s body and blood.

In this manner this chalice truly is superlative, as the Psalmist says: “how goodly is it!, an English archaism which is difficult to say without asking a question or sounding ironic. “Goodly” in the Vulgate is præclarus, which literally means very clear or very bright, but in the figurative sense generally means noble, beautiful, honorable, excellent. There is a fittingness in that this chalice clears away the darkness of the mind and inebriates it with the goodness and grace of the Lord, thus enlightening the soul with the light of God’s beauty and truth.

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For this animation I wanted to somewhat abstract the image of anointing, and so I found this image of a person with arms outstretched and isolated it in Photoshop. I also found a nice waterfall image and precomped it in After Effects and applied a couple masks and then loopFlow to make the waterfall move.

I then found an abstract image and applied Stretch to it to make another type of waterfall in the background, but adjusted the speed to have them going at different rates.

I then precomped the person and applied Stretch and played around with the settings and masks to get the pixel melt that ascends from the person’s arms.

I placed the text and applied some wiggle hold to the position and rotation and then created a duplicate of “anointed” and placed it behind as a shadow.

I finally added some textures, noise and color correction.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: