A Commentary on the Book of Psalms: Psalm 68 — Christ in His Passion Declareth the Greatness of His Sufferings, and the Malice of His Persecutors the Jews; and Foretelleth Their Reprobation
21 It does not appear from the Scriptures that they gave him gall to eat, for St. Matthew, who mentions the gall, said it was given him to drink, and not to eat. “They gave him wine mixed with gall to drink,” which perhaps was not, properly speaking, gall at all, for it was a bitter drink; and St. Mark, relating the same, says it was wine mixed with myrrh, which possibly was the reason why St. Matthew did not quote this verse of the Psalm, as is his wont, when any passage is fulfilled by the life or doings of Christ. It is, therefore, probable that the word food is to be understood, in a spiritual sense, to signify to us the bitterness of the sins our blessed Savior had to digest in his passion. As regards the vinegar, it was not only spiritually but literally fulfilled, as is clear from John 19, where the evangelist states, that on Christ’s saying, “I thirst,” they offered him vinegar on a sponge, that the Scripture may be fulfilled, which was the passage here.
22–25 The prophet begins now, by way of imprecation, to foretell the calamities that were to fall on the Jews, by reason of their ingratitude and cruelty to Christ, who had been sent to them as a Savior and a Redeemer, and he enumerates the spiritual as well as the temporal punishments, of which we have daily instances. “Let their table become as a snare before them.” The fathers say that “their table” means the reading of the Scriptures, being the table from which pious souls are fed with God’s truths; and he calls it a table, to place it in contrast with the gall they gave him for food; as if he said, They gave me gall for my food, and you will make their food and their table a snare before them. That table is daily before the Jews, for they daily read Moses and the prophets, but it is quite a snare to them, because by false and wrong interpretations they misunderstand it, and thus the very Scriptures, which, if faithfully studied, may bring them to life everlasting, leads them to eternal perdition, keeping them, as it does, in their incredulity. The same applies to them as “a recompense” for their wickedness, for it is right that they who do not wish to see the light should remain in the dark. It is also “a stumbling block” to them; for, instead of recognizing the corner stone sent to them by God, they rather dashed up and knocked themselves against it; and hence, it has become too, as Isaias 8 says, “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” “Let their eyes be darkened that they see not.” The root of the aforesaid evils is, God’s having allowed both their understanding and their affections, to be depraved. The eyes of their soul are darkened, nay more, according to St. Paul, “There is a veil upon their heart,” and furthermore, “They are blinded,” Isaias 6, Mat. 13, John 12, Rom. 11. Their affections, too, are depraved, for they have no taste for anything but the things of this world, which is conveyed in the words, “And their back bend thou down always;” that is to say, allow them to be ungrateful, and punish them for it, that they may be always groveling and bent down, so that they may see nothing but the earth. That we may understand such blindness and perversity to be the effect of God’s anger, he now adds, “Pour out thy indignation on them;” plain language enough, which the Apostle confirms, 1 Thess. 2, “Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and the prophets, and have persecuted us, and they please not God,”
and in the next verse he adds, “for the wrath of God has come upon them to the end.” That wrath of God brought a spiritual plague on them first, and then a temporal one, for they were exiled from the land of promise, and scattered all over the world; to which the prophet alludes when he says, “Let their habitation be made desolate;” which was literally fulfilled when, by the orders of the Emperor Titus, Jerusalem was pulled down and rendered uninhabitable; it was, to be sure, afterwards rebuilt and inhabited, by gentiles, Christians, or Saracens, but not by the Jews. As far as the Jews, then, are concerned, it is still a desert, for a few only of them are allowed to live there, a thing predicted by our Lord himself, when he said, “Behold, your houses shall be left to you desolate.”
26–28 As the Jews were punished for having given gall for food to Christ, by having their own table turned into a snare for them, so the prophet says they will now be punished by adding iniquity upon their iniquity, in the same way that they heaped punishment upon punishment, and pains upon pains on Christ. But we have to explain how the Jews persecuted him whom God hath smitten, and how they added to the grief of his wounds. God does not seem to have smitten Christ, except in his allowing the Jews to smite him; and whatever he suffered seems to be from God as well as from the Jews. We are to understand, then, that Christ was smitten to a certain extent, in which the Jews had no part; and smitten, in other respects, by the Jews, with God’s permission. He was smitten by God, and the Jews had no part whatever in it, when he assumed mortal, frail, suffering flesh, subject to hunger, thirst, fatigue, heat, and cold, and many other grievances. Now, the Incarnation, that brought all those things on him, was the act of the Holy Ghost; and, in this way, God alone struck Christ, when, without any fault on his part, he was made subject to so many consequences of original sin. The Jews added to these inflictions when they wounded and persecuted Christ. For, though God advisedly meant and intended Christ so to suffer, and took advantage of the perversity of the Jews to bring it about, still, the Jews themselves, in their own malice and wickedness, persecuted and took away the life of the Redeemer. The prophet, therefore, says, “Because they have persecuted him whom thou hast smitten;” for smite him you did when you sent him into the world, “in the likeness of sinful flesh;” subject to hunger and thirst, to heat and cold, and other innumerable inconveniences; him “they persecuted,” by calumnies, reproaches, and false testimonies; “and they have added to the grief of my wounds;” to the intense grief I felt at the consideration of their sins innumerable, and which I had undertaken to heal and to cure, as if the wounds were my own, they “added” the pain of the lash, the thorns, and the nails; and, even when I was dead, they “added” the wound in my side; and even when I had risen from the grave, and would seem to have been beyond their persecution, they followed it up by wounding me through my members, by stoning and slaying my disciples. “Add thou iniquity upon their iniquity.” As they have “added to the grief of my wounds,”
so do you, O just Judge, “add iniquity upon their iniquity;” in thy justice, instead of delivering them from their first iniquity, let them accumulate iniquities. “Let them fill up the measure of their fathers,” that “upon them may come all the just blood that has been shed upon the earth.” God is said to do a thing when he permits it, and that not by chance, but by a fixed decree, to punish the sins of those who deserve so to be blinded and deserted; for no punishment is more severe than the causing one sin to be the punishment of another. “And let them not come into thy justice.” An explanation of the preceding sentence; for they who do “not enter into the justice” of God; that is, they who are not justified, who are not admitted to that justification which God gratuitously works in the vessels of mercy, they rush from sin to sin, adding sin to sin. “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” Some will have this to mean, let them be put to death; but the following sentence, “and with the just let them not be written,” altogether forbids that explanation. In the holy Scriptures nothing is more usual than for one member of a verse to be an explanation of the other; and thus, “with the just let them not be written,” is one and the same with “let them be blotted out of the book of the living,” which forbids any other interpretation of the living than those who alone have real life in them; that is, the just, the wicked being truly dead in their reins. The book of the living means that book in which the names of God’s true servants, who alone have got real justification, and who, as being children and heirs, are enrolled. For, in fact, the Jews, who were formerly God’s people, being now blotted out of the book of the living and the just, are no longer God’s people nor have they a part in the inheritance of the children of God; and, on the contrary, the gentiles, who were not God’s people, by faith in Christ came to be God’s people, and have a share in the kingdom of God. That was predicted by Ezechiel, chap. 13, “They shall not be in the council of my people, nor shall they be written in the writing of the house of Israel;” and Daniel 9, “And the people that shall deny him, shall not be his;” and Osee 1, “For you are not my people, and I will not be yours;”