Let Us Rejoice Today And Be Glad

Psalm 118 sits at the end of a small cluster of psalms, 113 through 118, that Jewish tradition calls the Hallel, from the Hebrew word for praise. These were sung at the great festivals, and above all at Passover, when families gathered round the table to remember being brought out of Egypt. So this is not a private diary entry. It is a congregation’s song, written to be sung out loud together, which is why the verse says ‘We will rejoice’, not ‘I will’. There is a real chance, though I would not press it as certain, that this is among the psalms Jesus and his disciples sang on the night before he died. Matthew 26:30 tells us they sang a hymn before going out to the Mount of Olives, and the Passover Hallel is the natural candidate. I find that thought steadies me. When the verse tells me to be glad in this day, it was first sung by people remembering rescue, and possibly last sung by my Lord as he walked towards the cross.

It is easy to read ‘This is the day that the LORD has made’ as a sunny remark about Tuesday in general. But in the flow of the psalm, the writer has just described being surrounded, pushed hard, nearly falling, and then saved. Look at verses 10 to 14, and verse 22, where the rejected stone becomes the head of the corner. The day he is rejoicing in is a particular one: the day God’s deliverance arrived. That does not cancel the everyday reading, it deepens it. What helps me is to hear both at once. Yes, every ordinary morning is a gift from God’s hand. But the verse was born out of a specific rescue, a turning point you could put a date to. So when I say the words, I am not only thanking God for the abstract fact of being alive. I am invited to name a day God actually showed up, and to let today stand in that same light.

You cannot honestly read this verse without glancing two lines up the page. Verse 22 says the stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. Jesus took that exact line and applied it to himself at the end of a parable in Matthew 21:42, and Peter does the same in Acts 4:11 and again in 1 Peter 2:7. The cry of the crowds as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, recorded in Matthew 21:9, comes straight out of verse 26 of this same psalm. So this is one of the most quoted psalms in the whole New Testament, and it clusters tightly around Christ. That changes how I hear ‘the day the LORD has made’. The early church read this song and saw resurrection in it: the great reversal where the rejected one is raised and given the highest place. I cannot prove the psalmist saw that far ahead, and I will not pretend he did. But standing where we stand, after Easter, the brightest day God ever made was the morning the tomb was found empty, and every glad day since borrows its light from that one.

Here is where it gets honest for me. The short reflection already says gladness is a decision, and it is. But I want to name how hard that decision can be. There are mornings I open my eyes and the first thing I feel is the weight of the list, or a conversation I am dreading, or just a flat greyness with no clear cause. On those days ‘We will rejoice and be glad’ can sound like being told to cheer up, which never helps anyone. What I have found is that the verse is not asking me to manufacture a feeling. It is asking me to look for what is actually there: that I woke, that there is coffee in the cupboard, that someone texted me back, that God has not stopped holding the world together overnight. I am not glad because the day is good. I am glad because the day is given, and the One who gives it is good. Some mornings I have to say the words before I feel a single thing, and the feeling, when it comes, comes second.

Some people hear ‘be glad in it’ as an order to feel cheerful at all times, and quietly count themselves failures when they cannot manage it. That is not what is being asked, and the clearest evidence is Paul. He tells the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord always, and then, as though worried they might skim past it, he says it a second time (Philippians 4:4). He wrote that under guard, not from a comfortable life. Notice where he puts the weight. He does not say rejoice in your circumstances, which would be cruel and impossible. He says rejoice in the Lord. The gladness is fastened to a person, not to the mood of the morning or the state of my nerves. On a heavy day I am not pretending the heaviness has gone, and I am not commanded to smile over the top of it. I am turning, slowly sometimes, towards the One who stays steady when I do not, and finding there is something to be glad about in him even when the day offers little.

There is a line in Lamentations that sits right beneath this verse for me. In the middle of a book that is mostly grief over a ruined city, the writer insists God’s mercies never run dry, that they are renewed with every sunrise, and that his faithfulness holds (Lamentations 3:22 to 23). Renewed with every sunrise. Not yesterday’s mercy reheated, but a fresh delivery while the house was still dark. That is the same logic running underneath Psalm 118:24. The day was made and handed to me before I was awake to ask for it. When I treat a morning as merely the next instalment of the same tired week, I miss that it came clean, that whatever I spent yesterday I have not overdrawn today. The God who made this day did not make it grudgingly. He made it new.

The verse says this is the day, and that small word ‘this’ carries more than it appears to. Most of us keep a picture of a better day somewhere ahead: when the diary clears, when the money stretches further, when the hard thing is finally behind us. We fully mean to be glad then. But the psalm does not point forward to the day we are hoping for. It points down at the one we are standing in, the real Wednesday with its real weather and its half-finished jobs. You cannot be glad in a day you are not actually living, and the better day in our heads is one we never reach: by the time we arrive, it has become today and the hope has moved on. Gladness has to be a decision precisely because the real day so rarely argues its own case. The God who made this one, not the improved version in my imagination, asks me to take what is genuinely in my hands.

I have seen this verse cross-stitched on a cushion, and I have seen it laid over a sunrise photo with nothing else attached. Neither is wicked. They just shrink the words to a mood order: cheer up, lovely day. The use that actually bothers me is quieter than that. Picture someone at a church meeting raising a hard question about how a ministry has been run, and a voice from the back offering ‘This is the day that the LORD has made’, and the room going still, because who argues with a psalm? Nothing has been answered. The complaint has simply been made to look ungrateful. This verse will not carry that job. It is a shout from people who had just been rescued, and ‘We will rejoice’ is a crowd choosing something for itself, not a line to press over somebody else’s mouth. Said about my own unremarkable morning it is obedience. Aimed at a person who has not finished being upset, it is control wearing encouragement’s clothes, and we do it to each other more often than we admit.

If I were teaching this to a room that has never read past verse 24, I would begin at verse 19 and refuse to stop at 24. At 19 somebody is standing outside asking for gates to be opened so he can go in and give thanks. Verse 20 answers him: this is the LORD’s gate. Then the reason he came (verse 21, God answered him and became his salvation), then the reversal (verse 22), then the shrug of a man who knows he did not arrange any of it, marvellous in our eyes (verse 23). Only after all that does the crowd find its voice at 24. Request, answer, testimony, response: that is a spine you could preach on a wet Sunday without dressing it up.

And the psalm does not stop where the cushions do. The next breath is ‘Save us now, we beg you, LORD’ (verse 25). I find that almost unbearably honest. The same mouths that have just shouted about the day God made are already asking him to do it again, because one rescue behind you does not settle the week in front of you. That is where the gladness of this verse actually stands, and it is where most of us live.

As a call to worship at an Easter sunrise service I would reach for this without a second’s hesitation, because on that one morning ‘this is the day’ stops being a turn of phrase. The same goes for reopening a building after the roof is finally mended, or a church anniversary, or the Sunday after a long-prayed-for thing actually happened: rooms full of people who can point at one dateable rescue and shout about it together, which is the very thing the psalm was written for.

A funeral asks for more care. If the family tell me their mother said these words at the kitchen sink every morning for forty years, I will read it and mean it, because then it is her voice choosing it and not mine imposing it. I would not open with it for someone who died suddenly, and I would not lead with it in the first meeting after a church has split. Wait until people are reaching for the gladness themselves. Offered too early, it does not comfort anyone, it just teaches them to hide how they really are.

Read Psalm 118 from the top and you will find it opens and closes on the same note, the goodness of the LORD and a loving kindness that endures forever (verses 1 and 29). The same sentence twice: once before a word of the story has been told, and once after all of it has happened. Everything in between, the being surrounded, the rescue, the rejected stone, the crowd hammering on the gate, sits inside that frame the way a room sits inside a house.

It took me years to see how practical that arrangement is. Verse 24 is the loudest thing in the psalm and it gets exactly one line. The covenant love gets both ends. So on a morning when I cannot find a scrap of gladness anywhere in myself, I am not being asked to hold this psalm up by myself. Verse 24 can sag for an hour, or a fortnight, and the walls stay where they are, because the walls were never mine to carry.

Whoever assembled this song thought the shout in the middle was worth saying once and God’s steadfast love worth saying twice, top and bottom, first thing and last. That is roughly the right proportion for a human life, and it is the exact reverse of how we use the psalm. Verse 24 goes on the cushion. Verses 1 and 29, the load-bearing ones, go nowhere at all.

There is a passage in James that reads like the photographic negative of this verse. People are saying today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, spend a year there, trade and make a profit, and James asks them what their life even is: a vapour, here for a moment and then gone (James 4:13 to 14). They are discussing days as though days were stock they held. The psalmist looks at the same twenty-four hours and calls them something God made.

I live in James’s sentence far more than the psalm’s, and I suspect you do too. My calendar is stuffed with days I have quietly assumed into existence, Thursday fortnight pencilled in as though I owned it. James’s correction is small and almost polite: say, if the Lord wills (James 4:15). Psalm 118 goes further and is far less polite about it. It does not merely concede that tomorrow might not turn up. It says the day that did turn up is his handiwork, and that the fitting response to receiving it is not a plan but a shout.

Which is a strange thing to say out loud in a kitchen at seven in the morning, and I know it. But the man singing this had just been through something that nearly finished him. He was not being poetic about the fragility of time. He had discovered, the hard way, that he was never the one issuing the days, and having lived to see another one he was not about to file it under admin.

If you grew up anywhere near a British church from the 1970s onwards, there is a fair chance you knew this verse as a song long before you met it as a psalm. This is the day, this is the day, round and round, often with actions, usually sung faster each time until the children are laughing and the adults have lost the words. Les Garrett is the name generally attached to that chorus, some time in the late 1960s, and I would want somebody to check the date before I staked anything on it. What I can tell you is that it has outlasted several complete changes of worship fashion and still turns up at family services with the same clapping.

I used to be quietly snobbish about it. I thought the chorus had worn the verse smooth, sanded off everything difficult until only the cheerful bit was left, and there is something in that. What the chorus loses is the weight: the cornerstone, the near-miss, the people who had just come out the other side of real trouble.

I am less sure of the complaint now. The chorus keeps one thing the printed page cannot, and it keeps it almost by accident: the shape. Simple words, sung by a room full of people, repeated past the point where anyone is still thinking about them, which is how they get in. I would hate it to be the only way I ever met this verse. I would also hate to have never met it that way at all, and I notice it is the version I can still sing from memory in the dark.

Put Job chapter 3 next to this verse and something uncomfortable happens. Job has lost his children, his property and his health, and after a week sitting in silence on the ground he finally opens his mouth. He does not ask why. He curses a day. Not his enemies, not the friends, not even God: a date. The day of his birth, which he wants struck off the calendar, wanting darkness to claim it and no light to find it (Job 3:1 to 10).

He takes a single day exactly as seriously as our psalmist does, and in precisely the opposite direction. One man points at a day and blesses it out loud in front of a crowd. The other points at a day and asks for it to be deleted from the register of days that ever happened. And nobody stops him. The curse stands on the page unretracted for thirty-five more chapters, and when God finally answers out of the whirlwind (Job 38:1) the answer is a torrent of questions, not a correction of that sentence.

This is what keeps me from reading Psalm 118:24 as a pleasantry. To both men a day is never a neutral stretch of hours. It can be blessed or cursed precisely because it is a made thing, God’s own work, solid enough to bear either word. The gladness of verse 24 costs something because Job 3 is a real place a person can be standing, and there have been years when I stood nearer to Job’s chapter than to the psalmist’s. Both men are in my Bible. Only one of them ever makes it onto the cushion.

Somebody is reading this on the day the results came back, or the day the marriage ended, or the anniversary of a grave. Is that day also one the LORD has made? The verse grants no exemption. It does not say this is the day, unless it is a terrible one, in which case wait for a better one and be glad in that instead. It says this, on the worst date you can name.

I do not think that is cruel. I understand completely why it can land as cruel, handed to the wrong person at the wrong hour, and I have watched it happen.

But look at the English on this page: ‘We will rejoice’. Will. Not we are glad, not we feel glad. It is a vow, and a vow points slightly ahead of where the person making it is standing, which is the whole reason anyone needs to make one. There is daylight in that little word, and I have lived in it. Mornings where I got the first sentence out and then nothing: this is the day the LORD has made, yes, all right, and then a long silence where the rejoicing was supposed to go.

I will not call that silence unbelief. Rejoicing is vowed here, not extracted under duress. Some days the honest reading is to hold the first half like a fact you have decided to trust while feeling absolutely nothing the second half describes, and to let the gladness come back when it is ready, which it may not do for a while. The verse is not waiting on your mood. It will still be true on the days you cannot reach it.

• Can I name a particular day God rescued me or someone I love, and let today stand in that same light?
• Where am I waiting for a flawless day before I let myself be thankful, and what would it cost me to stop waiting?
• The psalm says ‘We’, not ‘I’. Who could I actually say these words alongside this week, rather than carrying my gladness alone?
• If the brightest day God ever made was the morning of the resurrection, how does that change what I expect from this one?

If today feels more grey than glad, you might sit with a few more verses on thankfulness and hope or simply take the next one as it comes with the verse of the day.