God's Way, God's Saving Health
V. Let thy way be known upon earth;
R. Thy saving health among all nations.
This, the fifth of the suffrages in Morning and Evening Prayer, was new to the 1979 Prayer Book. As Marion Hatchett points out in his commentary, it introduces a missionary element. It is a prayer that the Word of God be known all over the world, in every nation. But interestingly, it does not say “Word.”
It is, in fact, a Psalm verse, here quoted in the traditional version of the Coverdale Psalter that was used in all the Prayer Books prior to 1979. Psalm 67, a lovely short psalm, opens with a request for God’s mercy, then states the result: “That thy way may be known upon earth, * thy saving health among all nations.” It strikes me as a brilliant addition to the daily Suffrages. It also shows the care with which our current, contemporary Psalter was written. In the 1979 Psalter this verse is: “Let your ways be known upon earth, * your saving health among all nations.” (But in Morning and Evening Prayer, Rite II, this suffrage has the singular “way.” I do not know why our Psalter makes it plural.) Note that the modern version preserves almost all of the older translation. It doesn’t, for instance, try to substitute something easier to understand for “saving health,” nor does it dumb down the poetry.
It is good every day to pray that God’s Word would be known to everyone. It is worth pondering, however, how the point of missionary teaching could be God’s “way” and that its substance could be “saving health.”
There is a “way” that pertains to God, and it runs throughout the Old Testament. One sees it early on, when God tells Abram to walk before him and be perfect. God wants to see how Abram walks; there is, presumably, a way to walk when one is in God’s presence (which, of course, one always is). Israel herself, the people who come from Abraham, has a special place in teaching the nations what it means to walk in God’s “way,” the point of Psalm 67 (which broadly is about Israel’s missionary purpose in the face of all nations upon earth). Ultimately the “way” of God is given full visibility in Jesus, who called himself “the Way” and whose followers were called, early on, followers of “the Way.”
What is a Way? It is, first, a path, a prepared road or trail for one to walk on, a path that takes one to a destination—not forgetting that how one gets there is at least as important as the fact of getting there! We know that there are certain paths which, if you take a shortcut, you will not reach your destination. (If you cheat on your homework you might get a good grade but you won’t become learned or wise.)
Which is to say, second, that a Way is a manner of life; indeed we speak of just that, “a way of life.” This is found in Jesus but also, of course, laid out in the Old Testament: a way of trust in God, a way of fidelity, a way of loving one’s neighbor and God.
When the suffrage asks that God’s “way be known upon earth,” it is a lovely image of the spread of the Gospel. The Way of Jesus is to be “known” all over the earth, but it is not known as an external thing (as one knows a fact, for instance that Tuesday comes before Wednesday). It is known by the whole person—the person who walks in the way.
In the response, the people speak of God’s “saving health.” There’s a Latin word we might think of here, namely “salus,” which can be translated as health or salvation. “Saving health” makes us see that to be saved is to be a healthy human being—you might say, to be saved is to have a healthy soul. This is obvious when you think about it: a hateful person is clearly sick “inside,” where as a person full of God’s “saving health” is robustly human. What God offers to those who follow his way is always nothing more than, and nothing less than, full and complete humanity. He offers health, and health is what you have when you have been saved.
A final word about “among all nations.” The previous suffrage asked God to “keep this nation under thy care.” Once again, the Bible does not think of individuals as isolated from governed societies, “nations.” We frequently have to pray, at one and the same time, both for individuals and nations. We not only want individuals to follow in God’s way. We want ourselves, our nation, to walk in “the way of justice and truth.” And in this fifth suffrage, we ask something similar for all the nations of earth.
May it be so!
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Out & About. The Good Books & Good Talk seminars resume in Dallas on Sunday, September 14, with Nicolas Diat, A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life. This is an amazing book that has helped me understand what holy dying might be. I recommend it to everyone for summer reading -- regardless of whether you're able to join the seminar (though I hope you will!).