Psalm 117 is unique as a call to praise. Most of the time, the Psalms call upon Israel to praise the Lord. But Psalm 117 calls all nations and peoples to the praise and worship of God:
Praise the Lord, all nations!
Glorify him, all peoples!
There is a dance here between the particular and the universal. God calls a particular people--Israel--but gives this people a universal vocation.
My next book is scheduled to come out this spring. Titled The Book of Love: A Better Way to Read the Bible, it has a chapter on this dialectic between the particular and the universal. One of the points I make is how love gets distorted when it is pulled too far in either direction.
On the one hand, there is the particular. We are not called to love generically or abstractly. I am called to love the particular people God has put within the scope of my care. My family, my friends, my church, my city. I am called to love a particular people at a particular place. And yet, this love of mine can become insular, xenophobic, and ethnonationalistic.
This was precisely the temptation Israel faced. We see that play out in Acts 10, where the Holy Spirit has to nudge the Jewish followers of Jesus toward the goyim, away from the particular and toward the universal. As Peter declares at the end of his hard lesson, "God has shown me that I must not call any person impure or unclean."
So, love is universal. As Psalm 117 declares, Israel wasn't just to love herself. She existed to love the nations. And yet, a universalized love has its own temptations. Can you love the entire world without that love become generic, abstract, and disengaged? That is to say, we can love the world in principle but, as I point out in Stranger God, in practice love is local, a face to face interaction. Far too often we love the world at a digital distance via expressions of social media solidarity. Love becomes a meme. Loving everyone universally tends to mean loving no one in particular.
This is a crude contrast, but conservatives tend to make love too particular, with all the attendant temptations. Liberals, by contrast, tend to make love too universal, and suffer their own temptations in that direction. Psalm 117 places us in the middle. A particular people are reminded of a universal calling and concern.
