Speaking of Vengeance

Lent 3 Text: Psalm 94

It’s been a while since we’ve read this Psalm as part of our Sunday morning liturgy. In fact most likely we’ve NEVER read that Psalm publicly … and if we happened on it in our personal devotions, chances are, we’d give it a pass. Why? Because good Christians don’t talk that way! Not only does it offend our sensibilities, it contradicts the call of the Gospel to “love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you.” So we mostly ignore Psalms like this one, or edit out the nasty bits that are there in our more favourite ones.
In the Psalm collection in the back of our hymn book, for example, we have Psalm 90, 91, 92, 93 and then 95, 96. No 94.  You want to put your finger on the hateful Psalms, have a look at the ones that don’t make the list. But you can be fooled there too. Take for example Psalm 139. We often return to it:
“O Lord you have searched me and known me; you know when I sit down, when I rise up … you discern my thoughts from afar ... where can I go to flee from your presence … you knit me together in my mother’s womb …” You know that one? It’s there in our hymn book collection except for this bit toward the end. After celebrating “how precious to me are your thoughts O God … how vast is the sum of them” the Psalm continues with:

O that you would slay the wicked, O God
And that the bloodthirsty would depart from me --
those who speak of you maliciously,
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.

Interesting how that part of the Psalm got left out in our hymn book
so that instead we skip right to the end with …

Search me O God, and know my heart.
Test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead my in the way everlasting.

If we didn’t think it was right to say “O that you would slay the wicked” far be it from us to sing --not just once but twice: “the Lord our God will annihilate them” !! And yet here we are this morning … wading in where we’re not so inclined to go, into the Jewish-ness that is part of our tradition.

Perhaps this is just as good a time as any to flag that notion that surfaces now and again -- we may have even heard it coming out of our own mouths --this notion that Christianity and the New Testament is more evolved, superior to Old Testament Jewishness. It comes out in phrases like “our God is a God of Love, unlike the God of the Old Testament.” It’s always spoken of in reference to the violence that we find so offensive in the Hebrew Scriptures … as though Christianity has outgrown it … as though the word vengeance never arises in the New Testament.

One of the marks of Jewishness that is so evident in the Psalms is its uncensored, unfiltered candid speech. The Jewish way is to say what is thought or felt, without the need to be polite about it. There’s no need to be anything but candid and passionate in the presence of God from whom no secrets are hid. We see it especially in the articulation of anger, hatred and rage. Life is known to be conflicted, endangered, unjust. When there is such a thing as an enemy who is on the prowl, whose intent is to devour, (whether it’s a person, a sickness, a fear) there’s no need to soften or sweeten the description of reality. Not only is there this candid expression of anger and hatred about the enemy. Equally, there is this no-holes-barred interaction with God, often times insisting that God enter the fray.

Of all the textures of Jewish prayer that we find in the Psalms, the one we find most troublesome is likely that of vengeance. Even knowing something about Jewish candidness, even while we appreciate that the Psalms give voice to the entire breath and depth of human experience, even though it would be strange if vengeance wasn’t part of that wide gamut and so it shouldn’t surprise us to find it there, it doesn’t make it any less problematic to come upon it.

So what do we do with it?
For a start, I’ve discovered, through this foray into the Psalms this season, that we would do well to let it be there … not work around it or skip over it, delete it or explain it away, for we would miss out on what it has to offer us. For this yearning for vengeance is not simply there in the Psalm. It is here, among us … within us. Not only there in the Psalm but in the human heart, the human community. If we’ve never wished someone dead or maimed … if we’ve never wanted to “get even” on account of some hurt to ourselves or someone or some place we love, chances are we’ve been asleep or cut off somehow from the horrific. More likely we’ve felt at some point, or many, that burning rage or hatred.

Meanwhile, with Psalms like this one today we realize this capacity for hatred, the desire for vengeance, is part what it is to be human, regardless of how faithful we might be. And rather than judging ourselves harshly for it, the Psalm in a sense offers us a model for what to do with such negative, destructive yearnings … that instead of swallowing them, suppressing them in some way, they are given expression.

I get it that we’ve all been to exposed to vengeful hateful speech in recent times. We have learned that words are not just words but have power to incite violence, to stir up fear and suspicion and hatred that lie beneath the surface. So it’s important to notice that the Psalms don’t just give us license to foam at the mouth … it’s important to notice that the words of the Psalms are cried out to God … not to the enemy, not tweeted to the nation, or the world -- but expressed to God. What we’re seeing in the Psalms is how vengeance is transferred from the heart of the speaker to the heart of God. There is, in a sense, this giving it to God. You can imagine it, can’t you? … when the feelings are allowed to rise from deep down, and given free and full expression with all the power and intensity they carry … how there’s a kind of liberation that happens … a clearing, a cleansing. It is then for God to take it and do with it what God will.

So while we might have thought “good Christians don’t talk that way,” it turns out that giving expression to our hatred or anger or resentment safeguards us from becoming ugly people, when instead of harbouring or repressing those thoughts and feelings we pray them, we release them to the heart of God.

And vengeance isn’t the only theme in this prayer that is Psalm 94.

It’s there at the very beginning and at the very end. And in between there is this passionate outcry on behalf of a suffering people … “It’s time O God you did something …for your own dear people are being hammered.”
This is the voice of someone who is reaching deep into that formative story when God heard the cry of a suffering people and came to their aid.
This is the voice of someone who knows God to be responsive, trusts God to care.
This is the voice of someone who knows the foolishness of any tyrant who thinks they will get away with their brutality.
This is the voice of someone who lives and breathes and is rooted in that dynamic of covenant that takes seriously God’s promise “I shall be your God, and you shall be my people, close to my heart.”

Do you know that voice from within your own dear self?
Who are the people, what are their stories for whom you would cry out for justice, for mercy on their behalf?

You see this too is the gift of a Psalm like this one …to let those words be on our lips, to pray those words is to widen our awareness. It is to alert us to us to the bruised & broken and ground down people in our midst, to hear their cry, to deepen our empathy, to stir us to care, to connect, to be the agents of God’s mercy, God’s justice.

Who are the people, what are their stories for whom you would cry out for justice, for mercy on their behalf?

So an election is coming up … for 10 years now the social assistance rate hasn’t effectively budged a cent. And here we are celebrating a huge surplus in the provincial coffers … while people like Shaun can’t afford to pay his rent, and government sponsored refugees who arrived a year ago are now in the same boat.

Who are the people, what are their stories for whom you would cry out for justice, for mercy on their behalf?

It would be too easy to let our cynicism carry the day … to decide ahead of time it’s already settled … that there’s no hope of real change. But that would be to forget our heritage. And isn’t that what the tyrants want? And so the first to be silenced are the poets, the prophets, the singers who give voice to their prayer.

Meanwhile we have this resilient songbook of the Psalms … it has survived for thousands of years … it has evoked and cultivated resilience in the lives of those who have prayed these Psalms.

If one of the marks of Jewishness is that uncensored, unfiltered speech, another mark equally evident and wild at times, is Israel’s passion for hope. “Elie Weisel, that most remarkable story-teller from the holocaust, has said that what makes a Jew a Jew is this inability to quit hoping. Jewishness consists in ‘going on,’ in persisting, in hoping. … It is characteristically Jewish to hope for newness from God, who is a giver of newness.” [1]

As Christians, this is our heritage too. This ever-creating, covenant making, justice seeking, steadfast loving God is our God too.
And so it is for us, in these times, to dig deep … to get connected … that we might know God’s mercy and be resilient bearers of hope.

Praying the Psalms, singing the Psalms is a great way to begin!

Thanks to Walter Brueggemann for his reflections on Jewishness in Praying the Psalms, and The Pslams and the Life of Faith, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995 

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, St. Mary’s Press, Winona, MN, 1986, p. 61