The uncomfortable and disturbing psalm 137

Pentecost XX - Psalm 137

The psalm appointed for today, Psalm 137, is a psalm of lament and curse.

It’s an uncomfortable psalm,

with some of the of the most disturbing verses in the Old Testament.

We have a problem with it because we all learn at an early age

that wrath is one of the 7 deadly sins

and that Jesus said very clearly that we should never ever ever

take revenge against our enemies…

So at a first reading this psalm goes against anything we believe is good christian behavior.

And we have to wonder why it was included in the Psalter

and therefore in our Christian lectionary.

Yet, just as all desire is not necessarily lust, or all gourmets gluttons,

all anger is not sin and maybe we can find some grace even in the psalmist’s curse.

More about this later. First let’s put these words in their context.

Psalm 137 is dated during the Babylonian exile of 587-539 BCE,

also known as the Babylonian Captivity.

During the 7 and 6 centuries, the Near East witnessed an extraordinary political upheaval

with the rise and fall of superpowers.  

The Assyrian empire, Babylon, Egypt were fighting each other for land and power

and the smaller kingdoms, like Judah, had to change masters and allies very rapidly.

In 597 BCE (this is before Jesus so we have to count backward)...

In 597 BCE, Judah, the southern Kingdom of Israel, miscalculated the strength and power of Egypt, picked the wrong ally, and revolted against Babylon.  

That started a complex chain of events that I will keep short by telling you that

in 586 Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, after a long siege,

• razed the walls of Jerusalem
• devastated the Temple, the place of YHWH’s assured presence, together with the houses of the most important citizens,
• blinded and took to Babylon king Zedekiah, thus nullifying the Davidic dynasty
• and the once independent kingdom of Judah became a Babylonian province.

All of the elite, the teachers, business leaders, landowners, artists,

all of the prominent people were taken to Babylon.

The peasant classes were left behind, where they commingled with other tribes in the region, and by all means and purposes disappeared from the official, normative history of Israel.

Now this is history.

Theologically, according to Scripture,

this disaster of epic proportion happened because the people of Judah

had stopped living according to the Covenant.

Exile from the land of milk and honey was punishment for these unreliable,

unresponsive, and disobedient people

who had chosen to believe the words of false prophets

and ignore and ridicule the true ones,

sent by YHWH to warn them again and again and again.

Enter our psalmist.

The people of Judah are on the banks of the rivers of Babylon -

the Euphrates, and the Tigris -

and they have nothing left but their tears and their curses.

This language is not their language. This food is not their food.

The stories told to their children are not their stories.

The values put on family and community are not their values.

And worst of all, these gods are not their one Lord God YHWH.

They have no idea how long it would be before they could return to their beloved homeland.

And I know this is hard for us to understand,

but exile for the people of Judah had worse implications than for anybody else,

because Jerusalem was not just any city,

but the place where God had promised to dwell in the Temple,

so displacement meant not only degradation and loss of identity as a people,

but also being removed from the presence of YHWH.

In captivity they had lost all that identified them

as the chosen nation under God’s holy rule.

No wonder this uncomfortable, disturbing psalm

is also one of the most inspirational in the psalter

and its images have been put into music and song and arias.

These words are among the best ever used to describe the feeling

of utter alienation and despair

experienced by those who are forced to leave their homeland.

This is the cry of the Pilgrims, of the Kurds, of the Native Americans, of the Tutsis

and of all those who desperately try to make a life in refugee camps all over the world.

Garret Keizer in his book The Enigma of Anger

describes anger as an expression of unresolved loss.

He maintains that often we grow infuriated at one thing because we are not done

- or perhaps we haven’t started - mourning another.

So in a way, we could say that many of our angry outbursts

are the result of grief that never comes to sobbing.

Well, here is your example.

The psalmist mourns the loss of Jerusalem and everything she represents.

And his intolerable pain explodes in the last 2 verses

in merciless resentment against the Babylonian overlords.

This doesn’t make the last verses any easier to digest.

And it doesn’t stop us from wondering how this song of lament and curse

made it in the canon of Christian Scripture

Walter Brueggeman, the famous theologian,

in his Conversations among Exiles

says that From Israel the church (us, the body of Christ)

can learn a better way to deal with grief and rage.

It can learn to address these emotions to God…

Ancient Israel broke the pattern of denial by engaging

in speeches of complaint and lamentation

that dared to say how overwhelming was the loss, how great the anxiety,

how deep the consequent fear and, I add, the consequent rage and desire for revenge.

Quoting Bruggeman again,

Such cathartic utterances are also an honest and courageous practice of prayer.

They offer an opportunity for turning brutalizing loss into an act of faith

that may in turn issue into positive energy.

These speech practices give us a way to vent our rage at loss

without letting it escalate into actions that will hurt our neighbors.

The point is that the Psalms are not only about how we ought to feel

or what we wish we believed. They are about who we really are.

And we, created by God in God’s image yet limited in our humanity,

have plenty of angry thoughts and feelings especially when we are in pain.

The Psalms address not only our individual but also our collective pain,

our collective rage, the cry for justice of all human beings who are oppressed,

and of all human beings who come face to face with their limitations.

Maybe we have never experienced what the psalmist does,

but we can recognize his cry and own it,

and use his very words to express our lament, to confess our rage,

and to ask for forgiveness.

Italians have Dante, who as an exile himself, put all his enemies in hell.

The first verses of the Divine Comedy we all effortly remember from High School

are Dante’s bitter yet colorful imprecations against his enemies,

his only possible retaliation against their cruelty.

But both in the Comedy and in the psalm we find a promise of grace.

As the psalmist candidly confesses his anger, he is still ready to submit to YHWH.

He is not proposing to kill the children of Babylon himself.

Revenge is mine, says the Lord and the psalmist’s revenge is indeed left

into YHWH’s capable hands. There is no real violence here.

The circle of violence is actually broken because the desired brutal response is left to God.

It’s as if the psalmist were saying:

“This is what I wish for my enemies, o Lord, yet not my will but thy will be done.”

We may wish that God would damn our enemies to eternal fire and brimstone,

or send the pox to them,

but the moment we honestly confess that to our God,

we are submitting to God’s will, which is forgiveness and love.

In his Nabucco Giuseppe Verdi puts psalm 137 into amazing music,

the world famous aria is called Va pensiero,

but Solera who wrote the libretto changed the ending;

instead of wishing death and destruction upon the children of Babylon,

the exiles explicitly turn to God asking to be inspired to a new song,

“a harmony of voices which may instill virtue to suffering.”

Yet again, In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm, attempting to stir Macduff

against the tyrant who has slaughtered his wife and children urges him to

“dispute it like a man” to which Macduff replies

“I shall do so, but I must also feel it as a man”.

My brothers and sisters, our emotions are human.

And we can’t help but feel what we feel.

Grief, anger, even at times a violent desire to hit, to burn, to destroy.

Have no fear to put words to it and then let it go;

leave it to our loving, celestial parent.

Christ’s power, Christ’s love can redeem all that too.

Amen