“Tarshish,” mentioned in verse 7 of this psalm, represents what might as well be on the other side of the universe. For the Israelites, those non-seafaring people who turned their gaze toward Zion, ships built to go as far as nearly mythical Tarshish were impossible, even unimaginable. Asserting that such things are nonetheless subject to the sovereign ability of Israel’s God to “shatter” things was a statement of the greatest faith.
     We in the U.S., early twenty-first century, are so different from those people that Psalm 48 itself represents a sort of Tarshish, something that is on the other side of the universe from us. That strange and distant something is a belief in a holy place, a particular holy place. In this psalm Zion is that place. Having been faced with multiple claims for diverse holy places and conflicting sacred creeds, modern humanity chose, a couple centuries or so ago, “none of the above.” To some extent this withdrawal from belief in particular sanctified places and objects began with the Protestant Reformation. At any rate, while we might say that we prefer or even love a certain place, be it home or Disney World, we’re not likely to call it God’s city or God’s mountain in any exclusive sense, which is precisely what this psalm and other psalms do.
     Good for us, but how we think nowadays not only blocks us from belief in the holy specialness of this or that place, but also from believing in the one gospel of the one savior. We can’t tell the gospel story without assuming that it describes the atmosphere in which all humanity lives and moves, and such belief in the universal specialness of a particular man (Jesus) is just plain odd, just plain unbelievable in our time.
     But that, on the other hand, means that the gospel can be all the more amazing “good news” for people in our time. Explaining that fully would take more time and space than I want to give it here, so I will give you one very compressed thought-starter: The gospel of God’s love can be amazing good news because it connects with something that many of us know about ourselves but have no place for in our thinking, namely that love is basic to what we are, even more basic than opposable thumbs, language, or walking on our hind feet. Realization of the place of love in the universe, and therefore in our creation, continued existence, and redemption is like unexpectedly meeting a close friend in an empty desert or a strange city. We are amazed.
     So how do we pray or sing Psalm 48? I know of a formerly popular song or praise chorus that quotes it, particularly verse 2: “Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King” (KJV). The rhythm of those words demands that they be sung, but I don’t know what they all mean, or identify with that hill in a big, busy, and strange city on the other side of the world, or think of that city as particularly God’s hometown.
     What, then, is the special guarded place, our Zion, the place God allows us to identify with his presence? It is Jesus, particularly Jesus on the cross. We get out of step with our age by saying there has been a decisive point in time that all history, including all human biographies, is centered on. If we can call that Zion, then we have a way to sing this psalm.

• “Tarshish” may have started as the name of a real place. One of the more likely candidates is a Phoenician colony in southern Spain. The Phoenicians were great sailors and colonizers, unlike their neighbors to the south, the Israelites, for whom “Tarshish” could become a proverbial term for “way out there, where we don’t go.”
• “Realization of the place of love in the universe is like unexpectedly meeting a close friend in an empty desert or a strange city.” For more on that see my post “Love 1: The Original.”
• These posts on the Psalms are in aid of the reading of the Psalms—one a day through the first five months of 2022—by members, attenders, friends, et al. of Together Church, Wyoming, MI.