Catholic Commentary
Prayer for Zion and the Restoration of Right Worship
18Do well in your good pleasure to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem.19Then you will delight in the sacrifices of righteousness, in burnt offerings and in whole burnt offerings. Then they will offer bulls on your altar.
Psalms 51:18–19 describes David's prayer for God to restore Zion's walls and accept sacrifices offered in righteousness. The passage connects physical restoration of the covenant community with authentic worship, emphasizing that God delights in sacrifice only when accompanied by genuine repentance and justice.
David moves from confessing his own sin to interceding for the whole city because he knows personal repentance reaches its fullness only when the community is healed and its worship restored.
Typologically, these verses are fulfilled in the New Covenant sacrifice of Christ. The "walls of Jerusalem" are rebuilt not in stone but in the living stones of the Church (1 Pet 2:5); the "sacrifice of righteousness" is the one perfect oblation of Calvary made perpetually present in the Eucharist. The individual's conversion (vv. 1–17) and the community's renewal (vv. 18–19) together point to what the Mass accomplishes: the penitent sinner, incorporated into Christ's Body, offers through Him the sacrifice that is always pleasing to the Father.
Catholic tradition reads Psalm 51 as the pre-eminent psalm of penance, and its closing verses as the necessary ecclesial and liturgical horizon of all personal conversion. St. Augustine, in his Expositions on the Psalms, insists that the prayer for Zion is not a later editorial addition but integral to the psalm's unity: the soul that has been healed cannot rest content with private reconciliation but longs for the building up of the whole Body. "He who loves God loves also the Church," Augustine writes — and the rebuilt walls of Jerusalem are the image of that love made concrete.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1350–1354) teaches that the Eucharistic sacrifice is the "sacrifice of righteousness" in its fullest sense: Christ, the eternal High Priest, offers Himself — body, blood, soul, and divinity — as the complete and unrepeatable oblation, which is made sacramentally present at every Mass. The "whole burnt offering" of verse 19 foreshadows this total self-giving. Origen and the Alexandrian tradition see the "young bulls" not as crude animal sacrifice but as a figure of the energies of passion and will, now tamed and consecrated, laid upon the altar of a purified heart and a purified Church.
Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium (§10) describes the Eucharist as "the source and summit of the Christian life" — precisely what Psalm 51:18–19 anticipates: a worship that is not ritualism but the expression of a community genuinely transformed. The "walls" God is asked to rebuild are, in the New Covenant, the sacramental and moral structures of the Church that make authentic sacrifice possible.
For a Catholic today, these verses challenge a privatized understanding of repentance. The sacrament of Confession is not merely a spiritual transaction between the individual and God — it is an act with ecclesial weight. When a Catholic approaches the confessional, they are, in the logic of Psalm 51, also praying "do well to Zion": their reconciliation strengthens the walls of the whole Church. This is why the Rite of Penance explicitly names the ecclesial dimension of sin and forgiveness.
Practically, these verses invite the penitent to move beyond self-preoccupation in their spiritual life. After examining conscience and receiving absolution, ask: How does my renewed life contribute to the community of faith? Am I participating in the "sacrifice of righteousness" — the Mass — not as a private devotion but as a member of the Body? The prayer for Zion concretely means: praying for one's parish, investing in the community's holiness, and recognizing that the Eucharist I offer is only fully "pleasing" when I bring to the altar a life directed toward justice, reconciliation, and love of neighbor.
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Commentary
Psalms 51:18 — "Do well in your good pleasure to Zion; build up the walls of Jerusalem."
The Hebrew rāṣāh — translated "good pleasure" or "favor" — is the same root used in verse 19 for God's "delight" in sacrifice. David thus frames the entire closing movement of the psalm around divine pleasure: what pleases God is not a transaction but a relationship of restored wholeness. Having spent seventeen verses confessing his personal sin and begging for interior renewal, David suddenly widens his gaze to the city and its walls. This is not a non sequitur but a profound theological logic: the psalmist understands that his individual sin has wounded the community. The king's corruption affects the kingdom; the sinner's reconciliation must ripple outward. The phrase "build up the walls of Jerusalem" carries both literal and metaphorical force. Literally, it may anticipate the exile — some scholars see this verse as a later addition reflecting the destruction of Jerusalem — or it may simply invoke the city's perennial vulnerability. Metaphorically, the walls represent the integrity of the covenant community: a people whose communal life is sound enough to enclose and protect holy worship. The prayer is that God would act (do well, in the sense of "deal bountifully" — Hebrew heṭîḇāh) not because the city has merited it, but out of pure divine good pleasure and mercy, the very ḥesed that has animated the entire psalm from its opening cry.
Psalms 51:19 — "Then you will delight in the sacrifices of righteousness, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then they will offer young bulls on your altar."
The logic of "then" ('āz) is critical. Verse 17 has just declared that God does not desire sacrifice and burnt offerings when they mask an uncontrite heart. Now verse 19 reverses the apparent contradiction: God will delight in sacrifice — but only then, after Zion is restored and rightly ordered. This is not an abandonment of the prophetic critique of empty ritual; it is its fulfillment. "Sacrifices of righteousness" (ziḇḥê ṣeḏeq) are offerings accompanied by — indeed, flowing from — a life and community aligned with justice and covenant fidelity. The triple accumulation — "sacrifices of righteousness, burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings" — underscores the completeness and totality of the worship being envisioned. The "whole burnt offering" (kālîl), in which the entire animal is consumed, images the total self-offering of a people who hold nothing back from God.