Catholic Commentary
Universal Call to Praise God's Steadfast Love
1Praise Yahweh, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!2For his loving kindness is great toward us. Yahweh’s faithfulness endures forever. Praise Yah!
Psalms 117:1–2 calls all nations and peoples to praise Yahweh with joyful proclamation because God's covenantal love and faithfulness toward Israel have been shown to be triumphant and enduring. The psalm announces that God's particular blessing of Israel is ultimately for the redemption of all peoples, making Israel's election and God's fidelity to it a reason for universal worship.
God's covenant love breaks out of tribal boundaries—the nations exist to praise Him not for what He gives them, but for what He chose to do through Israel.
Psalms 117:1 — "Praise Yahweh, all you nations!"
The Hebrew verb hālal (from which hallelu-YAH derives) means not merely to acknowledge but to boast, to declare publicly with joy. The imperative is directed not to Israel alone but to the goyim — the Gentile nations, the peoples outside the covenant. This is extraordinary within the psalter. While many psalms invite all creation to praise, here the address is pointedly ethnic and political: every nation, every foreign people, is summoned to the worship of Israel's God. The parallel imperative in the second half of verse 1, "extol him, all you peoples," reinforces the universality through poetic repetition (synonymous parallelism), using šābaḥ, a verb meaning to laud or commend with high praise.
The word "Yahweh" — the personal, covenantal name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14) — is significant. The nations are not called to praise a generic deity but the specific God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is no vague religious pluralism; it is a call to recognize the one true God by his revealed name.
Psalms 117:2 — "For his loving kindness is great toward us"
The kî ("for") introduces the theological reason for the universal summons: the display of God's chesed toward Israel. Chesed is one of the richest words in the Hebrew Bible — variously translated "loving-kindness," "steadfast love," "mercy," or "covenant fidelity." It names the loyal, persistent, self-giving love that God has committed to his covenant people. "Great toward us" translates gābar — to prevail, to be mighty, to overcome — suggesting not merely that God's love is large in quantity but that it has proved victorious, triumphant, even in the face of Israel's repeated failures.
The second line, "his faithfulness endures forever," introduces 'emet — truth, fidelity, reliability. Where chesed is the warmth of love, 'emet is its backbone: the unbreakable truthfulness of God's character. Together, the two words form a merism capturing the totality of God's covenantal character — love that is not only tender but permanent.
The logical paradox: Why should Gentile nations praise God for his kindness to Israel?
This is the psalm's deepest interpretive puzzle, and it is precisely here that the typological sense blazes open. St. Augustine notes that the nations are called to praise God for benefits shown to Israel because Israel's election and redemption is ultimately for the nations. What God does for Israel becomes the channel through which all peoples receive salvation. The particular is the vehicle of the universal. The covenant with Abraham — "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3) — is the hermeneutical key. The nations praise God for what he did through Israel, culminating in the Incarnation of the Son of God from the stock of David.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates Psalm 117 at several levels.
St. Paul's Apostolic Exegesis. In Romans 15:11, Paul quotes Psalm 117:1 directly as one of four Old Testament prooftexts demonstrating that Gentile inclusion in salvation was always part of God's design: "And again, 'Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him.'" For Paul, this verse is not merely a prediction; it is a program — the very rationale of his apostolic mission. The Church's universal mission thus has a psalmic foundation.
St. Augustine (Expositions on the Psalms) reads the psalm Christologically: the nations praise God because in Christ — born of Israel, crucified under Gentile authority, raised for all — the chesed shown to Israel overflows to every people. The psalm is, for Augustine, the Church singing its reason for existence.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the covenant with Israel is irrevocable (CCC 839) and that the promises to Abraham reach their fullness in the Church gathered from every nation (CCC 60). Psalm 117 lives in that theological space.
Liturgical Theology. The Roman Rite assigns Psalm 117 to Sunday Vespers and to the Easter Octave — placing it at the heart of Paschal celebration. The Church has understood that the definitive act of chesed — Christ's death and resurrection — is the event for which all nations are finally invited to praise God. The shortest psalm becomes the summary of the Gospel.
The chesed-Incarnation link. The Fathers consistently connect God's chesed/'emet to John 1:14 ("full of grace and truth"), where charis and alētheia directly translate the Hebrew pair. The Word made flesh is the embodied chesed of God.
For contemporary Catholics, Psalm 117 issues a practical challenge wrapped inside its brevity. It is easy to experience the faith as a private, culturally enclosed affair — "our religion," practiced among people who look and think like us. This psalm explodes that instinct. The nations — all of them — are summoned to praise, precisely because the love of God cannot be domesticated within one tribe or tradition.
Concretely, this psalm should reshape how Catholics pray for and engage with missionary work, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue. Every Mass, which echoes this universal summons in the Gloria and Ite, missa est, is an act of cosmic praise in which the Catholic joins the chorus the psalm anticipates.
On a personal level, the word chesed invites an examination of whether we actually trust that God's love toward us is not fragile but gābar — prevailing, mighty, overcoming. When prayer feels dry, when faith is shaken, when failures pile up, this verse is a two-line creed: God's love has prevailed over worse than this, and his faithfulness will not expire. Praying this psalm slowly — even just twice — before a difficult day reorients the soul toward the God who keeps covenant.
Commentary