Catholic Commentary
God's Past Deliverance Recalled
6“I removed his shoulder from the burden. His hands were freed from the basket.7You called in trouble, and I delivered you. I answered you in the secret place of thunder. I tested you at the waters of Meribah.” Selah.
Psalms 81:6–7 records God's direct address to Israel, recalling His liberation of the people from Egyptian slavery and their desperate cry for help during times of trouble. God describes removing the physical burden of forced labor from Israel's shoulders and delivering them from distress through His power, establishing the foundation for a covenant relationship based on His unilateral acts of salvation.
God breaks into His own prayer to remind His people: I freed your shoulders from slavery, and I answered your cry in the storm—and I still do.
Psalms 81:6 — "I removed his shoulder from the burden"
The shift in person from the opening praise sections of Psalm 81 is striking: God Himself now speaks (debar Elohim, the divine oracle), issuing what scholars recognize as a covenant lawsuit or rib form — God addressing Israel directly, recalling what He has done and laying the groundwork for what He expects in return. The image of the "shoulder from the burden" is viscerally concrete: it evokes the enslaved Israelite stooped under the weight of Egyptian forced labor (cf. Exodus 1:11–14), where the Hebrew word siblah (burden, load) describes the crushing corvée labor imposed by Pharaoh. God is not speaking in abstractions here; He recalls the bodily oppression of slavery — aching backs, broken postures, the animal degradation of a people made to haul bricks and stone. The relief described is equally physical: the shoulder straightens, the spine lifts, the load is gone.
The phrase "his shoulder" uses the third person (Hebrew shikmo) even as the oracle is addressed in the second person — a grammatical intimacy and distance simultaneously at play. Commentators like St. Augustine note that this oscillation reflects the prophetic voice recalling communal history while speaking personally to each soul within the covenant people. The singular "shoulder" suggests that Israel's burden was shared as one body, and the liberation equally corporate.
Psalms 81:7 — "You called in trouble, and I delivered you"
God now moves from the image of physical burden to the cry of prayer. The Hebrew tzarah (trouble, distress) is one of the most emotionally charged words in the Psalter, used throughout to describe mortal peril, anguish, and the extremity of human helplessness. God heard not a formal liturgical petition but a raw, involuntary cry — and He answered. The verb achalatzcha (I delivered you, literally "I drew you out") carries the same semantic field as the rescue of a man from a pit, a body from a snare. It is a rescue that requires effort from the Rescuer.
The verse then adds a detail of immense interpretive richness: "I answered you in the secret place of thunder." This phrase points almost certainly to the theophany at Sinai (Exodus 19–20), where God spoke from the darkness of the storm cloud, where thunder and lightning terrified the people but also revealed divine presence. God answered Israel's cry not in comfortable silence but in the terrifying and majestic medium of storm — a reminder that divine rescue does not always feel gentle but is always real.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers read this passage as a prophetic type (figura) of Baptism and Christian redemption. The liberation of the shoulder from the Egyptian burden prefigures liberation from the burden of sin, which St. Paul describes as a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1). Just as God acted unilaterally to free Israel — they did not earn it, they only cried out — so the grace of Baptism is pure gift. The "secret place of thunder" was read by Origen and later by St. Ambrose as an image of divine revelation given through the apparent obscurity of Scripture and Sacrament: God speaks in what seems opaque and overwhelming to the senses, but delivers salvation within it.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with particular depth through its insistence on the unity of salvation history — that God's acts in the Old Covenant are not merely historical curiosities but living anticipations of the New. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the economy of the Old Testament was deliberately so oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ" (CCC 122). Psalm 81:6–7 is a paradigm case: God's removal of the shoulder-burden foreshadows Christ, who in Matthew 11:28–30 explicitly invites those who are "burdened" to come to Him, promising a yoke that is "easy" and a burden that is "light."
St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, interprets the "shoulder from the burden" as an image of the liberation from the law's condemnation worked by Christ's grace. The shoulder, for Augustine, is a symbol of the soul's operative capacity — what we use to carry our responsibilities — and its liberation signifies the restoration of the will freed from the compulsion of sin.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (2010), emphasized that the divine speech in the Psalms (the oracles of God embedded in Israel's prayer) reveals that Scripture is not merely humanity speaking about God but God speaking to humanity. Psalm 81:6–7 is precisely such a moment: God's first-person voice breaks in, and the Church hears in it the voice of the Eternal Word who delivers still. The answer from the "secret place of thunder" resonates with the theology of divine hiddenness (deus absconditus) developed by the Tradition: God is most savingly present where He seems most hidden — in the cross, in the sacraments, in suffering borne in faith.
For the contemporary Catholic, Psalm 81:6–7 offers a corrective to two common spiritual errors: the amnesia of prosperity and the despair of suffering. When life is comfortable, we forget that our "unburdened shoulder" is a gift — that the ease we enjoy in faith, family, and freedom rests on a history of divine rescue we did not earn. The psalm calls us to active remembrance, which in Catholic practice takes the form of the Liturgy of the Hours, regular Eucharist, and the Examen prayer — habits that recall God's past fidelity and resist spiritual forgetfulness.
In seasons of acute suffering, verse 7 speaks with urgent directness: call out. Not polished prayer, not earned petition — the raw cry is enough. God answered Israel from the storm, not from a sanctuary of calm. The Catholic who cries out in illness, grief, moral failure, or desolation need not clean up their prayer first. The Tradition of the saints — from Job to Teresa of Ávila in her dark years at Ávila — confirms: the desperate cry is itself a form of faith. Name your burden. God hears from the thunder.
Commentary