Catholic Commentary
The Apparent Prosperity of the Wicked (Part 2)
12Behold, these are the wicked. Being always at ease, they increase in riches.
Psalms 73:12 marks the climax of the psalmist Asaph's lament about the prosperity of the wicked, using the Hebrew word "behold" to demand that God witness the scandal of injustice in the world. The verse presents the wicked as undeniably secure and wealthy, forcing the psalmist to confront the apparent contradiction between God's justice and observable reality before experiencing spiritual transformation.
In his darkest moment, the psalmist points at the wicked and says "behold"—not to judge their souls, but to bring the scandal into God's presence where it can be healed.
Catholic tradition reads Psalm 73 as a profound meditation on the interior life of faith under trial, and verse 12 in particular as a moment of what the tradition calls the "dark night of the intellect" — the crisis that precedes illumination. St. Augustine, in his Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), treats this psalm at length, noting that Asaph speaks not only for himself but for the whole Body of Christ — the Church in her members who are scandalized by injustice in the world. For Augustine, the psalmist's crisis is resolved not by a philosophical argument but by entering the sanctuary, which Augustine reads as entry into the life of the Church and her sacraments, where eternal perspective is restored.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on the Psalms, observes that the psalmist's designation of the wicked here is a form of prudential judgment, not uncharitable condemnation. The Church's tradition distinguishes between judging the eternal state of a soul — which belongs to God alone — and recognizing objectively wicked behavior, which wisdom and justice demand (cf. CCC 1861, on grave sin as something recognizable in its effects).
The Catechism's teaching on Divine Providence is directly relevant here. CCC 309–314 addresses the question of why evil and suffering seem to go unpunished: "God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil... In time, we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil." The psalmist's "behold" is the moment before that discovery. Verse 12 also resonates with the Church's social teaching: Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and subsequent documents acknowledge that the unjust accumulation of wealth by the powerful at the expense of the weak is a genuine moral disorder — the psalmist's anger is not merely personal but prophetically just.
A contemporary Catholic living in a media-saturated world regularly confronts the equivalent of Psalm 73:12: influencers who mock religion while amassing followers and wealth; corporate executives who defraud workers and retire to luxury; politicians who contradict every Gospel value yet appear to flourish. The temptation is real — to grow cynical about faith's "return on investment," to feel that integrity is for suckers. Verse 12, in its blunt candor, gives the Catholic permission to name this experience honestly before God rather than suppressing it beneath pious platitudes. The tradition does not ask us to pretend the scandal isn't real.
But the verse also calls for spiritual discipline: to "behold" the wicked is not to fix one's gaze there permanently, nursing resentment. The Ignatian tradition counsels indifference — not apathy, but freedom from being spiritually enslaved to outcomes we cannot control. The Catholic is invited to bring the "behold" of verse 12 into prayer, lay it before the Blessed Sacrament, and wait — like Asaph — for the sanctuary perspective that transforms bitterness into trust.
Commentary
Psalm 73, attributed to Asaph, is one of the great wisdom psalms of the Psalter and one of the most psychologically honest pieces of scripture. It wrestles unflinchingly with the problem of theodicy — the apparent injustice of a world where the righteous suffer and the wicked thrive. By verse 12, Asaph has already described the wicked in devastating detail: their bodies are healthy, they are free from the burdens that afflict ordinary people (v.5), they wear pride like a necklace and violence like a garment (v.6), their eyes bulge with fatness (v.7), they mock and speak with malice (v.8–9), and they claim that God neither knows nor cares (v.11).
Verse 12 is a sudden, stark pause — a moment of pointing. The Hebrew word הִנֵּה (hinneh), translated "behold," is an exclamatory particle used throughout the Old Testament to arrest attention, to demand that the listener truly look at something. Its force is not merely descriptive but prosecutorial: "See them! Look at these people!" Asaph is not simply making a theological observation; he is presenting evidence to God, almost as a complaint. The phrase "these are the wicked" (אֵלֶּה רְשָׁעִים) uses the plural demonstrative pronoun with force — it singles out a known, observable class of people whose identity has become undeniable to the psalmist.
What makes this verse so theologically charged is what follows in the second half of the verse (which many translations render as part of v.12): "always at ease, they increase in riches." The wicked are not merely identified — they are permanently comfortable (שַׁאֲנַנֵּי עוֹלָם, "at ease forever" or "perpetually secure"), and their wealth is not static but ever-growing. The word עוֹלָם (olam), meaning "forever" or "age-long," is devastating in context: it seems to mock the covenant promises given to the faithful. The eternity language that belongs to God and to His people seems, in the psalmist's tortured perspective, to have been usurped by the impious.
Spiritually, verse 12 represents the nadir of the psalmist's crisis — the point of maximum scandal, just before the great turning point at verse 17, where entrance into "the sanctuary of God" will transform everything. The verse functions literarily as the pivot point: the psalmist has completed his case against God's governance of the world, has named the problem as clearly as language allows, and has nowhere left to go but into the presence of the Lord. In the typological sense, this pointing finger at the wicked anticipates all of Scripture's unmasking of false security — from the prophets' oracles against the nations to Christ's woes against the Pharisees in Matthew 23. The psalmist's "behold" is an act of faith dressed as despair: he brings the scandal to God rather than walking away from God.