When you read the psalms what can hit you in the face is their sheer violence at times. Psalm 109, for instance, is a famous cursing psalm in which the intense hatred of the psalmist for his enemy is like the heat of a blast furnace. Christians, knowing the Golden Rule–and their gleeful enemies knowing it too–have an interesting back and forth on texts like this. Christians feel embarrassed by it. Skeptics love to point to it as the archetype of religious malignancy. Squaring it with the Sermon on the Mount is… steady work.
For me, I find the text most useful, as C.S. Lewis did, not as some kind of mysterious, hidden coded recommendation for “spiritual wrath” in some Pickwickian sense that lets us get away with “holy anger”, but as a perfectly human portrait of anger in its wild and even “innocent” state. The anger of a child who has really and truly been wronged–and wronged gravely.
Years ago, a friend of mine, a historian of Eastern Europe in the 20th century was having a conversation with his little girl about World War II and Hitler. She told him that she would have told Hitler to be good. When he replied that he didn’t think he would have listened to her, she said, “Then I would have poked his eyes out and cut his head off.” Spit spot! Problem solved.
This is what I mean about innocent anger. There is a purity and simplicity in this approach to good and evil that is not hypocritical. She knows perfectly well that Hitler should have been good and, knowing nothing of her own capacity for evil, she has a simple solution for people like him. Kill ’em.
The psalmist has a similarly simple cry to God for his enemies and I think it proceeds from a similar simplicity. I cannot, of course, pray as he does against my enemies without incurring grave sin.; But what I can do–and should do–is hear in that prayer the rage, frustration, fury, and anguish of every poor and powerless victim who has ever walked the earth. Because the terrifying witness of the New Testament is that inasmuch as I have caused the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the widow, the orphan, the blind, the lame, and the destitute to cry out those curses at me, I may well hear those curses brought in evidence against me at the Last Judgment.
The striking thing about the Psalms and their curses is the remarkable way in which they combine them with pleas for God to judge the psalmist. So Psalm 139 says (after remarking on how God knows everything about the psalmist, inside and out):
O that you would slay the wicked,
O God, and that men of blood would depart from me,
men who maliciously defy you,
who lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate them that hate you,
O LORD? And do I not loathe them that rise up against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any wicked
way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Ps 139:19–24)The lack of self-awareness is almost funny. And yet, it is coupled with something all too rare in many of us: the awareness of his lack of awareness. He really can’t see his own violent hatred of his enemies, but he also really can see that there are things about himself, really ugly things, that God can see. So he does the only sensible thing a person can do in such a situation: he asks God to purify him since it is impossible for him to do it in his blindness.
I think about that as I contemplate my own situation.
I have never known Christ to hold me accountable for things I genuinely couldn’t see.
I have never known him to not hold me accountable for things I dishonestly wouldn’t see.
And, in my experience, only he has known the difference and, even in the latter case, has been extraordinarily gentle in opening my eyes to what I was afraid to see. He works to soften hearts, not to break wills.
So when hte great Quaker William Penn asked George Fox how much longer he would be permitted to wear a sword (as gentlemen were expected to do in his day), Fox did not rail at him or order him on pain of hellfire to take off his sword.
Instead, he simply replied, “As long as you can.”
Not long after, Penn took off his sword and never put it on again.
The soul compelled by force but not by truth is never really won. The soul won by love is bound by a power stronger than steel.
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One Response
Over the years, I’ve run into a couple of descriptions of the Psalms.
1. “Bad poetry.”
2. “Cries from the heart to God.”
I say, yes to both! 🙂
As St. John Newman said, “Cor ad cor loquitur” – “heart speaks to heart”
That is how we communicate to God and how God communicates to us .