Catechesis Notes for the Week — Psalm 74—The Prayer of the Church During Pestilence and When Persecutors Seek to Destroy Her—Psalm 74 is a prayer against those who attack the Church and try to destroy the sanctuary of the Lord where His people gather to worship. How strangely and eerily appropriate this psalm is for our current crisis. On the one hand, the civil authorities are trying to protect the population from the spread of disease; on the other hand, enemies of the Gospel would like to use the crisis to destroy the Church. The psalm begins with the questions, “O God, why have You cast us off forever? Why does Your anger smoke against the sheep of Your pasture? Remember Your congregation, which You have purchased of old…” Psalm 74 is an example of how the circumstances of life provide the proper interpretation of the psalm: “The enemy has damaged everything in the sanctuary. Your enemies roar in the midst of Your meeting place…They said in their hearts, ‘Let us destroy them altogether.’ They have burned up all the meeting places of God in the land.”  This devastating description of the Church under siege is quickly followed by our cry to the Lord to take action and remember His promises for the sake of His congregation: “The day is Yours, the night also is Yours; You have prepared the light and the sun. You have set all the borders of the earth; You have made summer and winter. Remember this, that the enemy has reproached, O Lord…Oh, do not deliver the life of Your turtledove to the wild beast! … Arise, O God, plead Your own cause…”  Sometimes we are prone to imagine that the Church has never endured the kinds of distress that we experience in the world today. It is not true. At times like these, we commend ourselves and the world to the mercy of God in Christ, take up God’s Word daily, and pray the psalms most fervently.CP240825