A Song of Ascents
Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! Psalm 133:1
After the grandeur of Psalm 132 — the double oath, the covenant sworn to David, the LORD declaring his eternal resting place — Psalm 133 arrives with the simplicity of an exclamation. Behold. Look at this. See what is in front of you.
What is in front of the pilgrim, finally arrived at Zion, is not a theological system or a liturgical programme. It is people. Brothers — the Hebrew achim, which carries the full warmth of kinship — dwelling together in unity. After the long road from Meshech, after the keeping and the contempt and the flood and the depths and the weaning, the collection turns its eyes on the gathered community and says: this. This is what the journey was for. Not the destination alone. The people who arrived together.
The psalm is three verses long. It has almost no theology in the expository sense — no Hebrew vocabulary to unpack in the manner of the psalms that preceded it, no complex argument to trace. What it has instead is two images of such extravagant sensory richness that they carry the theological weight without needing to explain it. Oil running down a beard. Dew falling from a mountain. Both images are excessive by design. Both are trying to say something about unity that propositional language cannot quite reach.
The collection is nearly complete. One psalm remains after this. And here, in the penultimate position, the ascent pauses to look at what has gathered at Zion — and breaks into wonder.
The word yachad — unity, togetherness, being-as-one — is the psalm’s theological centre, though it sits quietly in the opening verse without fanfare. Yachad in Hebrew carries more than agreement or cooperation. It names a quality of shared life in which the boundaries between persons do not disappear but the persons are genuinely, organically connected — as branches to a vine, as members to a body. It is not uniformity. It is the particular richness that comes when genuinely different people are genuinely held together.
The first image — the precious oil on Aaron’s head — is deliberately excessive. The anointing oil of Exodus 30 was a carefully prescribed mixture of myrrh, cinnamon, cane, and cassia — rare, costly, fragrant. When poured on Aaron at his consecration, it ran down his beard and onto the collar of his robes. The psalm takes this image and does not tidy it up. The oil does not stop at a theologically appropriate point. It keeps running. Down the beard, down to the collar, saturating everything it touches. This is anointing as abundance — the priestly consecration that cannot be contained, that overflows its intended boundaries, that makes the whole garment fragrant.
The anointing of Aaron is the moment when the priestly community is constituted — when the one who will stand between God and the people is set apart for that standing. Psalm 133 takes that image and applies it to the gathered community in yachad. When brothers dwell in unity, something of that priestly anointing is present among them. The community in yachad is a priestly community — set apart, consecrated, fragrant with what has been poured over it. And the anointing, like the oil, cannot be contained. It runs beyond the head, beyond the beard, beyond any boundary the community might draw around itself.
The second image — the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion — is geographically impossible and theologically precise. Hermon is in the far north, the snow-capped peak whose dew and melt-water feed the Jordan and the whole land. Zion is in the south, a limestone hill in the Judean highlands that receives very little dew. Hermon’s dew does not fall on Zion. The geography is wrong.
But that is precisely the point. The psalm is not making a meteorological claim. It is saying that the dew which belongs to the abundant north — the life-giving moisture of Hermon — falls, by divine command, on the dry south. The blessing migrates. The abundance of one place becomes the refreshment of another. And the mechanism of that migration is yachad — the unity of the community. When brothers dwell together in unity, what belongs to one becomes available to all. The dew of Hermon falls on Zion because the community that holds them together holds their resources together too.
The psalm’s final line closes the theological circuit: for there the LORD has commanded the blessing, life forevermore. The word there — sham — is doing enormous work. There, in the place of yachad. There, where the oil runs and the dew falls. There, in the gathered community. Not in the individual, however devout. Not in the institution, however ancient. In the yachad — the living togetherness of those who have made the ascent and arrived at the same place.
The blessing is not offered. It is commanded — tsivvah, the same verb used for God’s commands throughout the Torah. The LORD commands the blessing into the community in yachad with the same authority with which he commanded the creation. This is not a suggestion or an encouragement. It is a declaration of how reality works: where genuine unity is present, the LORD’s blessing is commanded there. Life. Chayyim. The fullness of what it means to be alive in the presence of the living God.
The connection to Psalm 132 is immediate and deliberate. There the LORD commanded his menuha — his resting place — at Zion. Here he commands his blessing at the place of yachad. The two commands are one reality: where God rests, he blesses. Where the community gathers in unity, God is at rest among them. The menuha of Psalm 132 and the yachad of Psalm 133 are two descriptions of the same event — the LORD dwelling among his people in the fullness of covenant life.
Jesus sang this psalm on the final ascent to Jerusalem, knowing that the yachad he had spent three years trying to create was about to be shattered by his arrest and the disciples’ scattering. He sang it knowing that the oil would have to flow from his own anointing — his death and resurrection — before the community could be constituted in genuine yachad. And on the night before he died, he prayed John 17: that they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you. The yachad of Psalm 133 becomes, in Jesus’s mouth, participation in the Trinitarian life of God. The unity he prays for is not organisational coherence. It is the overflowing of the divine yachad into the human community — the dew of Hermon, impossibly, falling on Zion.
At Pentecost the oil ran. The Spirit poured out on the gathered community — 120 people in yachad, Acts 1:14 — and the anointing overflowed its boundaries immediately: three thousand added in a day, the nations hearing in their own languages, the dew of Hermon falling on every hill. Psalm 133 is the Old Testament grammar of Pentecost. The LORD commanded the blessing there. In the yachad. And it ran.
I have spent a ministry trying to create the conditions for yachad in places where unity seemed impossible.
Not the unity of agreement — that has never been the goal and was never realistic. The unity of yachad: the particular, organic togetherness of people who have genuinely different histories and genuinely different positions who are nonetheless held together by something that runs deeper than their differences. The incarcerated parent and the child separated by a system that did not consult either of them. The family on the outside holding together what the sentence threatened to dissolve. The community of people who gather around these families not because they share a theology or a politics but because they share a conviction that the fracture is not acceptable and the presence matters.
That is yachad. It is not comfortable. It does not resolve the differences or erase the history or make the complexity simple. It simply — stubbornly, persistently — holds people together in the same room.
The yachad of the community does not arrive without cost. Early in my ministry at Risdon Vale — the church that neighbours the prison — I was able to arrange for prisoners to join us occasionally for Sunday services. One elderly man came regularly. He had been sentenced for a serious offence, and yet he found in that congregation something he had not expected: acceptance, safety, a place where he was received rather than processed. Gradually, over time, something shifted in him.
Around the same time a family began attending — a man, his wife, their young children. Good people. Generous people. With both adults tithing they were a significant addition to a small congregation that needed every resource it could find. After some months the man came to me. He was a Federal Police Officer. He had used his access to find details of the prisoner’s offence, and he was struggling — genuinely struggling — to sit in the same room as someone who had done what this man had done.
I met with them. I listened. I understood. And I told him what my dream for that church was: a place where a policeman and a prisoner could sit together, where a correctional officer and the person they had once supervised could be in fellowship. Not because the offence didn’t matter. But because the room had to be large enough for both of them, or it wasn’t large enough for the gospel.
I helped the family find another church. Shortly after, the officer’s employment took him interstate.
It was a loss. I knew it was a loss when it happened. A small congregation cannot easily absorb the departure of a tithing family, and I did not pretend otherwise. There were Sundays after they left when the empty chairs were simply empty. The ledger was shorter. The elderly man was still there, still finding his place of safety, still slowly becoming something different from what he had been — but the congregation was smaller and the practical weight of that was real. I sat with the vacancy. There was no quick resolution, no immediate sign that the choice had been right. Just the open room and the question of whether it would ever be filled with what I had dreamed of.
But the room had to stay open. The dream had to stay larger than the comfort.
Subsequently a number of other prisoners went on to join us on Sundays — men and women, still in the custody of the prison, permitted to worship in the congregation next door. And then the thing I had held the space for: correctional officers and prisoners in fellowship together, in the same room, on the same Sunday. The yachad I had dreamed of, filling the room I had kept open for it. The oil ran there. The LORD commanded the blessing in that place — not because the community was comfortable, but because it had chosen, at cost, to remain in the same room.
I think of the Kids Days — the days when the children came into the prison in numbers, and the visiting room became something it was not designed to be. Not a controlled environment for supervised contact. A community. Children running. Parents laughing. The noise of people who belong to each other, temporarily released from the logic of separation into something that looked, for a few hours, like yachad. The oil ran in those rooms. I saw it. Not metaphorically — in the specific faces of specific people who had not been in the same space for months, suddenly together, suddenly themselves again in the presence of the people who knew them best.
The dew of Hermon falling on Zion. The abundance that belongs to one place mysteriously present in another. The blessing commanded there — in the visiting room, in the homework session, in the game of Concentration played over a prison table — because the yachad was present and the LORD commands his blessing where the yachad is.
After the cardiac event I understood this differently. The unity I had been trying to build — the yachad of the community around the Foundation’s work — was not mine to manufacture. It was the LORD’s to command. My work was to create the conditions, to hold the space, to refuse the logic of separation. His work was to pour the oil. And the oil, when it ran, ran further than I had planned — down the beard, down the collar, saturating things I had not expected to be touched. That is the nature of the commanded blessing. It does not respect the boundaries of the programme. It runs where it runs.
The John 17 prayer has been my prayer for this work longer than I have had words for it. That they all may be one. Not that they all agree. Not that they all arrive at the same position or share the same history or inhabit the same circumstances. But that the yachad — the deep, organic, life-giving togetherness — would be commanded there. In the visiting room. In the family that stayed together. In the community that refused to let the system’s logic of severance be the final word.
The oil is still running. The dew is still falling. The LORD has commanded the blessing there — in the places where people who have every reason to be separated are choosing, stubbornly, to remain in the same room.
Sit with this:
Where is the yachad in your life — the unity that is not manufactured but commanded, not convenient but organic? And where have you seen the oil run further than you expected, saturating things you did not plan for the blessing to reach?
The LORD commands the blessing in the place of unity. Not after the unity is perfected. Not when the differences have been resolved. There. In the room where people who belong to each other are choosing to stay together. The oil runs from that choosing. Life forevermore flows from that place.
Behold. How good and pleasant it is.
Psalm 133 belongs to the fifteen Songs of Ascent; the full road is traced in Songs for the Road.