Within the Psalter, there is a group of Psalms 120-134 known as the
"Psalms of Ascent" or the "Gradual Psalms."
Concise little hymns, they were traditionally sung by pilgrims who
were "going up" to Jerusalem for the great religious festivals on the
Jewish calendar. Their brevity made them easy to memorize; their regular
meter made them easy to sing.
While we do not know when the Child Jesus
began to accompany His parents on their yearly pilgrimage to the Holy
City for the Feast of the Passover, we can be sure that He heard these
pilgrim songs from an early age and joined His fellow travelers in
singing them. It is moving to think of the Incarnate Word chanting Psalm
122, the wonder-filled song of generations of Jewish pilgrims, as He
entered the Holy City for the great feasts:
And now our feet are
standing within your gates, 0 Jerusalem.
Was our Lord alluding to
this psalm's summons —
For the peace of Jerusalem pray — as He wept
over the city doomed to destruction because it rejected Him? Would that
even today you knew the things that make for peace!
Luke 19:42

Our Lord would return to the Upper Room in
Jerusalem after His Resurrection, and His greeting to those gathered
there would be: Peace! His prayer for the peace of Jerusalem
and for all nations continues down the centuries, as saints of every age
take up the pilgrim refrain of Psalm 122, and work to be counted among
the blessed peacemakers of His Kingdom.
Christ entrusted a very particular mission of
peace to St. Francis of Assisi. Humanly speaking, it seems incongruous
that God would choose a wealthy, worldly, would-be knight to be His
herald of peace. But that only proves that God's ways are not our ways!
In Francis, zeal and gentleness, courage and courtesy provided the good
soil in which the seed of peace could take root and flourish. His
biographer wrote:
In all of his preaching, before he presented the
Word of God to the assembly, Francis prayed for peace saying:
May the Lord give you His peace. He always proclaimed this to
men and women, to those he met and to those who met him.
FIRST LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS by Friar Thomas of
Celano
St. Francis declared in his Testament that it
was the Lord [who] revealed to me that we should say: May
the Lord give you peace. So Francis lived peace,
proclaimed peace, and promoted peace wherever he went. The Little Poor
Man made his own the psalmist's ardent prayer for peace. He asked his
friars to do likewise, citing the Gospel text which echoes Psalm 122:
Into whatever house [the friars] enter, let them first say:
Peace be to this house!
RULE OF 1223, (cf. Luke 10:5)
Every Christian is called to be a pilgrim in
this world, going up with Christ to the heavenly Jerusalem. How much
would change if Psalm 122 became our "song of ascent,"
if we, too, could
proclaim to all our fellow pilgrims on the road of life a heartfelt: Peace upon you!
HOME
BACK
FORWARD


Psalm 122
I rejoiced when I heard them say:
"Let us go to God's house."
And now our feet are
standing
within your gates, O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is built as a city
strongly compact.
It is there that the tribes
go up,
the tribes of the Lord.
For Israel's law it is,
there to praise the Lord's name.
There were set the thrones of judgment
of the house of David.
For the peace of Jerusalem pray:
"Peace be to your homes!
May peace reign in your
walls,
in your palaces, peace!"
For love of my brethren and friends
I say: "Peace upon you!"
For love
of the house
of the Lord
I will ask
for your good.
A Pilgrim of Peace
PART 5