Catholic Commentary
God's Hidden Path and the Shepherding of His People
19Your way was through the sea, your paths through the great waters. Your footsteps were not known.20You led your people like a flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
Psalms 77:19–20 describes God leading Israel through the Red Sea with invisible guidance and cosmic power, then as a shepherd guiding the people through Moses and Aaron. The passage contrasts God's transcendent, untraceable method of salvation with His intimate pastoral care mediated through human instruments.
God's saving power leaves no footprints, yet His hand on your life is utterly real—like a shepherd who leads through chaos itself, not around it.
Critically, verse 20 introduces "the hand of Moses and Aaron" — a theologically rich phrase. God's shepherding is mediated through human instruments. Moses and Aaron are not replacements for God's guidance but its chosen vessels. This establishes the biblical pattern of mediated salvation that runs from the Exodus through the prophets and finds its fullness in Jesus Christ and, in the Catholic understanding, in the ordained ministry of the Church. God leads His flock, but He does so through human hands He has consecrated for that purpose.
The Typological Sense
The Church Fathers were unanimous in reading the Red Sea crossing as a type of Baptism (cf. 1 Cor 10:1–2). The water that destroyed Pharaoh's army is the same water through which Israel passed to freedom — a death and resurrection pattern that St. Paul explicitly identifies with Christian initiation. The "unseen footprints" take on new resonance here: the grace of Baptism, which delivers the soul from slavery to sin, operates invisibly, sacramentally, through water. The divine path through chaos cannot be measured by the senses, yet it is utterly real and utterly saving.
The Shepherd imagery (v. 20) reaches its fulfillment in Jesus, who declares Himself the Good Shepherd (John 10:11, 14) — the one who does not merely guide the flock alongside the perilous waters but lays down His life to make a way through death itself.
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses at several distinctive levels.
The theology of divine hiddenness and Providence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God's ways are not our ways" and that divine Providence "makes use of secondary causes" (CCC 306–308). Verse 19's "unseen footprints" is perhaps the most poetic expression in all of Scripture of what the CCC calls the mystery of Providence: God works powerfully and truly, but through means that are not always visible or comprehensible to us. St. John of the Cross developed this insight most profoundly in the Catholic mystical tradition, teaching that the soul must learn to trust God precisely when His path is most hidden — what John calls the noche oscura, the dark night. Psalm 77 as a whole has the structure of a dark night: anguish (vv. 1–9), memory (vv. 10–15), contemplation of the Exodus (vv. 16–20). The resolution is not rational explanation but deeper remembrance of God's saving acts.
Mediated shepherding and apostolic ministry. "The hand of Moses and Aaron" (v. 20) is a cornerstone text for Catholic reflection on ordained ministry. Moses and Aaron were both prophet and priest — figures the Church understands as prefiguring Christ and, derivatively, the ordained priesthood. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium (§21) describes bishops as successors to the apostles who continue the shepherding office of Christ. The pattern is consistent from Exodus to the New Covenant: God guides His flock through chosen, consecrated human mediators.
Baptismal typology. The Fathers — including St. Ambrose (De Mysteriis), St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Mystagogical Catecheses), and Tertullian (De Baptismo) — consistently read the Red Sea crossing as a type of Baptism. The Roman Rite preserves this reading in the Easter Vigil's Exsultet and in the seventh Old Testament reading (Exod 14), which is sung precisely before the blessing of baptismal water. The "unseen footprints" of God through the sea thus become a meditation on sacramental grace: invisible to the eye of the flesh, wholly real to the eye of faith.
Catholics today frequently encounter the "unseen footprints" of verse 19 in the most disorienting seasons of life: illness, the loss of a child, the collapse of a vocation, the silence of God in prayer. The temptation is to conclude from God's invisibility that God is absent. Psalm 77 offers a counter-practice: anamnesis, active, disciplined remembrance of God's past faithfulness. When you cannot feel God's presence, recall His concrete saving acts — in Scripture, in your own history, in the sacraments you have received. The Eucharist is itself the supreme act of remembrance (anamnesis; cf. 1 Cor 11:24–25) that re-presents the saving act of Christ.
Practically: when you face a situation with no visible way forward — a relationship that seems broken beyond repair, a moral crisis with no clean solution — verse 19 invites you to trust that God's path may run through the very thing that frightens you most, not around it. And verse 20 reminds you that God rarely leads His flock in isolation: He provides Moses and Aaron figures — confessors, spiritual directors, trusted pastors — through whose hands His guidance comes. Seek them out.
Commentary
Psalms 77:19 — "Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen."
The verse unfolds with deliberate poetic tension. "Your way was through the sea" is an unmistakable reference to the Exodus crossing of the Red Sea (Exod 14), the defining saving act of the Old Covenant. The Hebrew derek (way/path) carries both a spatial and moral-theological sense: God has a way of acting in history, a characteristic manner of intervention. Here, that way runs straight through the most terrifying obstacle imaginable — the sea, which in ancient Near Eastern cosmology represented chaos, death, and the hostile unknown.
The second half of the verse intensifies the mystery: "yet your footprints were unseen." The Hebrew 'aqvoteka lo' noda'u literally renders, "your tracks were not known." This is not an absence of God's action — the very next verse confirms He acted as Shepherd — but an absence of traceable divine mechanics. The waters parted; the people crossed; but God left no visible marks on the seafloor. His method of salvation is real but inscrutable. This is a deliberate theological statement: the same God who commands the cosmos does not leave Himself open to being mapped, calculated, or controlled by human inquiry. The psalmist, who began Psalm 77 in anguish (vv. 1–9) asking why God seemed absent, arrives here at a hard-won peace: not because he has solved the mystery, but because he has remembered that God's ways are intrinsically beyond tracing.
The pairing of sea and great waters (mayim rabbim) is itself a merism for the totality of threatening reality. The "great waters" echo throughout Scripture as symbols of death (Ps 18:16; 69:1–2; Jonah 2:3) and primordial chaos (Gen 1:2). That God's path runs through them, not around them, is theologically crucial: the God of the Bible does not detour around suffering and death but enters and traverses them, making a way where there was none.
Psalms 77:20 — "You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron."
The transition from verse 19 to verse 20 is breathtaking. From the cosmic — God striding through primordial waters — we move to the pastoral: God as Shepherd guiding a flock. The Hebrew nakhita (you led) is the same vocabulary used of a shepherd conducting sheep to pasture and water. The image deliberately softens what precedes it: the God of untraceable power acts with intimate, attentive care toward His people. They are not spectators of a cosmic drama; they are sheep in the care of a Shepherd who knows each one.