Catholic Commentary
Opening Cry to God
1For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. A Psalm by David. Answer me when I call, God of my righteousness. Give me relief from my distress. Have mercy on me, and hear my prayer.
Psalms 4:1 presents a confident petition in which the psalmist appeals to God as the guarantor of his vindication, anchoring the request in covenantal relationship and prior experience of divine deliverance from distress. The verse establishes that true prayer rests not on self-righteousness but on God's sworn commitment and the remembered mercy of liberation from spiritual and social constraint.
God becomes your righteousness only when you stop defending yourself and let Him defend you — this verse teaches you how to cry out for vindication without arrogance.
Catholic tradition reads this verse on multiple levels, all mutually reinforcing.
The Christological reading is foundational. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, identifies the speaker of Psalm 4 as Christ Himself — the Head speaking on behalf of His Body, the Church. The cry "God of my righteousness" becomes Christ's cry from within His Passion, appealing to the Father as the one who will vindicate Him through the Resurrection. In this reading, every time the Church or the baptized Christian prays this verse, they pray in Christ and with Christ, united to His intercessory voice. This is entirely consistent with the Catechism's teaching that Christ is "the great pray-er" and that Christian prayer is always participation in His own prayer to the Father (CCC 2616, 2740).
The theology of petitionary prayer receives important illumination here. The Catechism teaches that petition is the most fundamental form of prayer because it expresses our dependence upon God and our recognition that He alone can save (CCC 2629). But Psalm 4:1 shows that genuine petition is not passive begging — it is an act of covenantal reasoning, grounding the request in God's own revealed fidelity. This is precisely what Augustine means when he says, "Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" (Confessions I.1): the soul cries out because it knows, by faith, where rest is to be found.
The name "God of my righteousness" anticipates the Pauline doctrine of imputed and imparted righteousness (Romans 3:21–26). Catholic theology affirms that the righteousness by which the justified person stands before God is a real, infused righteousness — a genuine transformation of the soul by grace — yet its origin is always and entirely from God (Council of Trent, Session VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 7). The psalmist's address to God as his righteousness thus prefigures the baptized Christian's identity: one who can approach God boldly not because of personal moral achievement but because divine righteousness has been graciously communicated to him.
Psalm 4 was traditionally prayed at Compline — the final prayer of the Church's Liturgy of the Hours before sleep — and this verse's opening cry is deliberately placed at the threshold of rest and darkness. For a Catholic today, this liturgical placement offers a concrete discipline: before the day ends, bring its unresolved tensions, its injustices, its anxieties, directly to God with the same bold confidence the psalmist models. Do not merely recite the words; invoke the God of your righteousness — the one who has already acted for you in Baptism, in the Eucharist, in every grace received.
More practically, this verse challenges the modern tendency to pray apologetically or tentatively, as if God must first be persuaded to care. The psalmist does not hedge. He commands: answer me. This is not irreverence; it is the fruit of deep faith in a God who has pledged Himself. Catholics navigating situations of injustice, false accusation, professional or personal crisis, can take up this verse as a prayer of righteous boldness — not trusting in their own case, but in the God who vindicates.
Commentary
Psalms 4:1 — "Answer me when I call, God of my righteousness"
The Hebrew imperative ʿănēnî ("answer me") is direct and urgent — not a timid request but a confident demand rooted in relationship. This is not presumption; it is the language of covenant intimacy. The psalmist does not approach a stranger. He approaches the God who has bound Himself by promise.
The phrase ʾĕlōhê ṣidqî — literally "God of my righteousness" or "God of my right" — is theologically dense. It does not mean God approves of the psalmist's moral record; rather, it identifies God as the source and guarantor of the speaker's vindication. In the ancient Near Eastern legal context, righteousness (ṣedeq) frequently carries forensic connotations: to be declared "righteous" is to be acquitted, vindicated before accusers. The psalmist, beset by enemies (see vv. 2–3), calls upon God not because he is innocent by his own merit, but because God has covenantally pledged to be his defender. This is a crucial distinction: it is not self-righteousness but theocentric confidence.
The second half of the verse — "You gave me room when I was in distress" (often rendered "You have relieved me in my distress") — functions as the warrant for the petition. The Hebrew hir·ḥab·tā lî baṣṣār literally means "You have enlarged me in my narrowness" or "You have set me free in my constraint." The spatial metaphor of ṣārâ (narrowness, tightness, distress) versus rāḥab (to make wide, spacious, free) is deeply embedded in Hebrew spiritual vocabulary — salvation itself is often imagined as being brought from a confined, crushing place into wide-open space (cf. Ps 18:19; 31:8). The psalmist has experienced this enlarging before. This remembered mercy is precisely what fuels his boldness in the present.
The closing petitions — "Have mercy on me and hear my prayer" — intensify the appeal through ḥānan (to be gracious, to show mercy). This term belongs to the vocabulary of covenant love and grace. The psalmist layers two appeals: hear my prayer (cognitive, receptive) and have mercy on me (active, relational). Together they capture the full scope of what the petitioner needs: to be acknowledged and to be helped.
Taken as a whole, this verse is a compressed theology of prayer: the soul in distress addresses God by His covenant identity, recalls His past acts of liberation, and petitions for continued grace. It is not wishful thinking — it is faith reasoning from promise to petition.