The line “bidden or not bidden, God is present” appears in the oddest of places. It is believed to have been given by the Oracle of Delphi to the Lacedaemonians, aka Spartans, when they considered going to war against Athens around the fifth century BCE. The Latin form was included among one of Desiderius Erasmus’s works in the 16th century. In the 20th, influential psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung encountered the phrase in Erasmus and was deeply moved by it. He had it inscribed above the doorway of his home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, and on his tombstone. This sturdy little sentence keeps chugging along through millennia, across cultures, informing, edifying, and inspiriting all manner of folks.
The author of Psalm 34, whoever he or she or they might have been, knew the truth of it. The psalmists—all of them—were folks besotted with God. No need to look for God in a given situation. This was something more than just a credal statement; they knew that God was present with them everywhere and at any time. They knew that they could and should express the full range of human emotion—glee, joy, calm, sorrow, grief, anger, even rage—to God. Everything they thought and felt was ripe fodder for communication with God, for prayer. Without editing or airbrushing and without apology.
Although our psalmist begins on a rather extravagant note with endless blessing and praise, even inviting the community to join in the celebration, they also pause to remember and claim the time before the praise. The recall of that time is vague, but there may be a clue to be found in a part of the psalm that we ordinarily omit. In most modern English translations, just above verse 1, a single notation informs the reader that this psalm is “of David, when he feigned madness before Abimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.” This recalls a threatening incident in David’s life, as told in 1 Samuel 21:12–15, though the threat is in fact from Achish, not Abimelech.
