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Catholic Commentary
The Turning Point: Illumination in the Sanctuary
17until I entered God’s sanctuary,18Surely you set them in slippery places.19How they are suddenly destroyed!20As a dream when one wakes up,
Psalms 73:17–20 describes the psalmist's spiritual breakthrough upon entering God's sanctuary, where he recognizes that the wicked, though appearing prosperous, stand on unstable ground and will be suddenly destroyed like a vanishing dream. This revelation shows that divine judgment operates invisibly until God's intervention fully manifests the true fate of the ungodly.
The wicked prosper only in appearance; the sanctuary reveals them standing on slippery ground, their glory no more solid than a dream at dawn.
Verse 20 — "As a dream when one wakes up"
This simile is among the most philosophically rich in the Psalter. The prosperity of the wicked is likened to a dream — vivid, seemingly real, possessed of emotional intensity — that vanishes entirely at the moment of waking. The "waking" is God's: beha'ir — "when you, O Lord, awake." This is anthropomorphic language for the moment of divine intervention in history, the eschatological dawn. At that moment, God "despises their image" — the tselem (image, phantom) of the wicked is treated with contempt. The word tselem also appears in Genesis 1:26–27 for the divine image in humanity: there is a dark irony here, that those who distorted the tselem Dei in themselves by their wickedness become, before God, merely phantom images — emptied of the substance they were created to bear.
Catholic tradition finds in these four verses a remarkable convergence of epistemology, liturgy, and eschatology.
The Sanctuary as the Place of Revelation: St. Augustine, in his Expositions on the Psalms (Ps. 73), meditates at length on verse 17, identifying the "sanctuary" with the Church and, ultimately, with the interior life of grace. He writes that the psalmist "entered in spirit what he could not understand carnally." Augustine argues that the finis impiorum — the end of the wicked — is grasped only through faith, not through observable history. This prefigures the Catechism's teaching that the full truth about human destiny is accessible only within the framework of faith: "Believing in the resurrection of the dead has been an essential element of the Christian faith from its beginnings" (CCC 991). The sanctuary, for Catholic exegesis, is never merely a building; it is the whole economy of liturgy and sacrament through which God communicates himself.
The Typological Reading: The Church Fathers consistently read the miqdash of this psalm as a type of the Eucharistic assembly. St. John Chrysostom connects the sanctuary-illumination to the anamnesis of the Liturgy: it is in the breaking of bread that confused disciples — like those on the road to Emmaus — suddenly "see." The sanctuary is where eschatological time breaks into present time, and where human moral confusion is reoriented by contact with the eternal.
The Dream Image and Eschatology: The Catechism teaches that "God, not man, has the last word on history" (CCC 1040). The dream-simile of verse 20 is a profound illustration of the distinction between apparentia (appearance) and veritas (truth) that runs throughout Catholic moral theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 5), notes that apparent goods — wealth, power, earthly security — are genuine but partial goods that become illusory when treated as final ends. The wicked in Psalm 73 have made apparent goods their ultimate good; at the eschatological waking, these goods are revealed as the stuff of dreams.
Contemporary Catholics live in an information environment that makes the psalmist's original crisis acutely familiar: social media, news cycles, and cultural commentary constantly present the prosperous, the powerful, and the morally compromised as the ones who "win." The temptation to cynicism — "What is the point of integrity?" — is not abstract but daily.
These verses offer a concrete and demanding spiritual discipline: take your confusion to the sanctuary before you take it to the internet. The psalmist does not arrive at clarity through better arguments or more data; he arrives through liturgical encounter. For a Catholic, this means the Mass is not merely a weekly obligation but the very hermeneutical key to reading reality correctly. The Eucharist is the sanctuary where the "end" of all things is revealed — where Christ's death and resurrection reframe every apparent victory of evil as already-defeated.
Practically, when a Catholic finds herself asking "Why does this person prosper while living wickedly?" — the prescription of Psalm 73 is startlingly simple: go to Adoration, go to Mass, go to Confession. The sanctuary restores eschatological perspective. It does not explain every particular injustice, but it relocates the reader within the true story — the one that ends not with the wicked standing, but with God awake.
Commentary
Verse 17 — "Until I entered God's sanctuary"
The Hebrew miqdeshê-El ("sanctuaries of God," likely a plural of majesty) marks the hinge of the entire psalm. Everything in verses 2–16 has been the psalmist's tortured complaint: the wicked prosper, wear pride like a necklace, scoff at heaven, and suffer no apparent punishment. The psalmist confesses he nearly lost his footing (v. 2) — and now, in a masterstroke of poetic irony, it is the wicked who are revealed to have no footing at all. The sanctuary is not merely a physical location; it is the site of revelation. The priest, the liturgy, the sacrifice, the presence of the Ark — these mediate divine wisdom. The psalmist does not arrive at understanding through reason alone; he is given understanding through encounter with the holy. The verb "entered" (avo) carries connotations of priestly approach, of drawing near to what is consecrated. Only in that drawing-near does the puzzle resolve. The "end" (acharit) of the wicked — their final destiny — is disclosed.
Verse 18 — "Surely you set them in slippery places"
The word "surely" (akh) is emphatic, a particle of strong affirmation that mirrors its earlier use in the psalm (v. 1: "Surely God is good to Israel"). The psalmist has moved from a crisis of that "surely" to its vindication. The image of "slippery places" (chalaqot) is precise and vivid: these are not merely difficult paths but smooth, treacherous surfaces — the slopes of an icy rock face. The wicked, who appeared so stable in their prosperity, are revealed to have been walking on ice all along. God himself is the agent: "you set them" — this is not passive fate but active divine governance of history. The psalmist now reads providence where before he saw only injustice.
Verse 19 — "How they are suddenly destroyed!"
The adverb "suddenly" (rega) is theologically charged throughout the Old Testament — it describes the unexpected, irreversible breaking-in of divine judgment (cf. Num 6:9; Prov 6:15). The prosperity of the wicked, which seemed so permanent, is revealed as radically contingent. The exclamation "How!" (eykh) is a lament particle — the same used in the Book of Lamentations. Here it expresses not mourning but astonishment: the complete and utter reversal of appearances. "They are swept away, utterly consumed with terrors" — the verb safah (to sweep away) evokes flood imagery, complete annihilation without remainder.