Psalm 27:9
the end is better than the beginning
Save, O Lord, thy people, and bless thy inheritance: and rule them and exalt them for ever. (Psalm 27:9 DR)
As the Psalmist began this Psalm, his prayer was for deliverance from death, from going to down to the pit. This salvation from dissolution and nothingness is predicated on his hope in the Lord; after all, the destruction that awaited him is likened unto the fate of the wicked, and thus there is a certain fittingness to God’s salvation, for it should not be said that the righteous and the wicked alike go down into the pit of death.
But since physical death is the lot of our race, the Psalmist looks prophetically past his own fate to foresee the sufferings of our Lord on the cross. The Psalmist’s prayer is therefore lifted beyond itself, as it were, and placed onto a higher plane as the physical aspect of God’s salvation in his life is transposed as it were, or rather transfigured, for the Resurrection of our Lord has both a spiritual and physical aspect. By triumphing over death our Lord defeats sin and its claim on humankind forever, releasing us from bondage to live in newness of life. Our souls are no longer needfully bound to sin in slavery but are freed to become slaves of righteousness, as St. Paul relates.
But the resurrection has more than just this spiritual component. We are body-soul composites, and thus our Lord’s victory over death affects the entire person, both body and soul. Our souls are brought back to life from their death in sin, and our bodies are pledged to be raised like our Lord’s, since we share in His life as part of His mystical body. Since Christ shared in our humanity, what pertains to His human nature in the Resurrection now pertains to those incorporated into His body. We share in His divinity (cf. 2 Peter 1:4) not by our human nature becoming a divine nature (which is impossible) but by being a part of His mystical body. The humanity of Jesus remained fully human while being united to the divine nature in the Person of the Word, yet since the Person of the Word is divine we can say of Jesus (by means of the communicatio idiomatum) that He is truly God. And since we share in His life by means of being a part of His mystical body, we are divinized by grace into a participation in the divine life. St. Thomas shows that this is (among others) an end of the Incarnation:
Now this [that is, the necessity of the Incarnation in terms of an end attained more conveniently] may be viewed with respect to our “furtherance in good.”
Fifthly, with regard to the full participation of the Divinity, which is the true bliss of man and end of human life; and this is bestowed upon us by Christ's humanity; for Augustine says in a sermon (xiii de Temp.): “God was made man, that man might be made God.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, III, Q1, A2)
The Psalmist prophetically sees this end, for the salvation he asks for goes beyond just bare survival, but includes components of blessing, rule and exaltation, which are all found in the mystical body of Christ:
Christ, the head of the Church, having been glorified, it remains that his body, the people of God, who are his peculiar inheritance, he having acquired it with his blood, should be equally glorified. Christ then says to his Father, or the prophet says to Christ, “Save thy people,” and, in order to save them, “Bless them,” by justifying them “Rule them,” by shielding, by protecting them on the road; “Exalt” them, by glorifying them by glorifying them to eternity. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 27, 9.)
For this animation I mostly wanted something bright and colorful and so I decided to go with Trapcode Mir again for more of an abstract vibe. I intentionally went with the triangulation look because I thought it looked cool, and the colors are mapped from an abstract image I found.
Enjoy.
Save, O Lord, thy people, and bless thy inheritance: and rule them and exalt them for ever.
(Psalm 27:9 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: