Yes and No

Yes and No

August 27, 2020

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

I have a confession to make. I’ve never been much into the Psalms. I wrote about them in Liberating the Bible, but I discuss there only a few of them and don’t say all that much.[1] I’ve always loved Psalm 139, or at least most of it. More about that anon. I carried a copy of most of it in the front of my class notebook all the way through seminary. I suppose I memorized Psalm 23 in Sunday School like so many of us did. Still, I never paid a whole lot of attention to the Psalms, that is I haven’t until recently. As I have been idled by the coronavirus pandemic as so many people have I have started to use the daily lectionary from the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship Daily Prayer.[2] In that lectionary there are four Psalms or passages from Psalms for each day, two for use in the morning and two for use in the evening. I’ve been reading all of them. I’ve written up ideas that have come to me from some of them. Those writings are on this blog. As I have been spending more time with the Psalms than I ever have before something about the Psalms that I actually did know before has struck me anew. The Psalms contain magnificent, moving, inspiring, and compelling expressions of faith. To those passages I say an enthusiastic yes. But the Psalms also contain passages to which I can only say simply no. I want to wrestle with that truth in this piece. Here are some examples.

I was reminded of this truth recently as I read Psalm 143 from the daily lectionary I’ve been using. It starts out nicely:

Hear my prayer, O Lord;

       give ear to my supplications in

              your faithfulness;

       answer me in your

              righteousness.

Do not enter into judgment with

              your servant,

       for no one is righteous

              before you. Psalm 143:1-2.

Then, however, it does what so many Psalms do. It starts going on about the psalmist’s “enemy:”

For the enemy has pursued

              me,

       crushing my life to the ground,

       making me sit in darkness like

              those long dead. Psalm 143:5.

This Psalm has some other very nice lines in it:

I stretch out my hands to you;

       my soul thirsts for you like a

              parched land. Psalm 143:6.

And:

Let me hear of your steadfast

              love in the morning,

       for in you I put my trust.

Teach me to do your will,

       for you are my God.

Let your good spirit lead me

       on a level path. Psalm 143:10.

Very nice indeed. But then we come to verse 12:

In your steadfast love cut off my

              enemies,

       and destroy all of my adversaries,

       for I am your servant. Psalm 143:12.

That’s how the Psalm ends, with a plea to God to destroy some of God’s people whom the psalmist considers his enemies. That’s something I find very troubling indeed.

Then there’s my favorite Psalm that I mentioned above, Psalm 139. What I loved about this Psalm when I was in seminary was mostly how it begins:

O Lord, you have searched me

              and known me.

You know when I sit down and

              when I rise up;

       you discern my thoughts from

              far away.

You search out my path and my

              lying down,

       and are acquainted with all

              my ways. Psalm 139:1-3.

Psalm 139 is also about how God is with us no matter what, and I love that part of the Psalm too. Even if we try to get away from God, God is still with us:

Where can I go from your spirit?

       Or where can I flee from your

              presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are

              there;

       if I make my bed in Sheol, you

              are there.

If I take the wings of the

              morning,

       and settle at the furthest limits

              of the sea,

even there your hand shall

              lead me,

       and your right hand shall hold

              me fast. Psalm 139:7-10.

Verse 18b reads:

I come to the end—I am still

       with you.

I love this Psalm because I know that earlier in my life God knew me far better than I knew myself. I also love it because I know that I need reassurance that God is always with me no matter what. These are for me among the most reassuring verses in the Bible. I loved them when I was in seminary. I love them still.

But them we come to verses 19 to 22. They read:

O that you would kill 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 up against you?

I hate them with perfect hatred;

       I count them my enemies.

After this paean to hatred and death Psalm 139 ends on a much better note:

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 me in the way

              everlasting. Psalm 139:23-24.

So in Psalm 139 we get some of the most beautiful and reassuring verses in the Bible, and we get some of the verses I and many people most dislike and cannot accept.

In Psalm 137 gets worse than those unfortunate lines of Psalm 139. That Psalm begins as a moving cry of despair by the Jews who have been hauled off to exile in Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem:

By the rivers of Babylon—

       there we sat down and there

              we wept

       when we remembered Zion. Psalm 137:1.

The psalmist cries:

How could we sing the Lord’s

              song

       in a foreign land? Psalm 137:4.

He vows never to forget Jerusalem. Psalm 137:5-6. Up to this point we sympathize with the grief and despair of the Hebrew exiles.

But then the Psalm changes its tune altogether:

O daughter Babylon, you

              devastator!

       Happy shall they be who pay

              you back

       what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take

              your little ones

       and dash them against the rock! Psalm 137:8-9.

Really? It would be a good thing if someone would kill Babylonian children by dashing them against a rock? I sure don’t think so. Even if we exulted in the destruction of Babylon like the prophet Nahum exulted in the destruction of Nineveh, which I would not, how can there be anything good about killing children by dashing them against a rock? There can’t, but Psalm 137 sure seems to think there would be. That’s how brutal, how primitive, the Psalms can become.

What are to make of this schizophrenic nature of so many of the Psalms? How can people of faith write verse of deep and insightful faith on the one hand, then turn and extol hatred and infanticide on the other? As king Mongkut of Siam says in “The King and I,” “’Tis a puzzlement.” Here’s the best I can do to resolve that puzzlement.

Like is true of everything in the Bible the Psalms are human creations. They come from a world far different from ours. Of course our world can be horribly violent. The world of the ancient Psalms was no less violent. Everyone just expected that rulers would engage in violence. They would kill their opponents. They would go to war. I don’t mean to suggest that more recent rulers were different in that regard, but that kind of violence was endemic in the ancient world. True, ancient war wasn’t nearly as destructive as modern war. The ancients didn’t have the immensely creative, expensive, and destructive weapons that we have. Still, war was endemic in the ancient world. Ancient history isn’t only a history of wars by any means, but any study of the ancient past must deal with an awful lot of them.

Human life can be treated as awfully cheap in our world, but it was if anything even cheaper in the ancient world. Those in power thought nothing of causing the deaths of large numbers of people for their own purposes, never mind that Hitler, Stalin, and others put them to shame in that regard in much more recent times. Ancient people could even imagine God ordering a king to kill every living thing among another people as a much delayed act of vengeance. See 1 Samuel 15:1-3. When we read texts from the ancient world we must try to understand how violent life in that world could be and how much less individual human lives were valued then than we value them now.

It is then less surprising than we may think that ancient writers would express approval of hatred, killing, and even infanticide. Those things were if anything more common and more widely expected if not approved in that world than in ours. We don’t know when most of the Psalms were written, Psalm 137 actually being an exception to that rule. We do know that ancient Israel could express profound and powerful truth about God and human spirituality. Just as clearly however ancient Israel had not yet outgrown the ancient practice of attributing very human thoughts and emotions to God including the most base of them. (Some people still make that mistake today, but never mind.) The ancient Hebrews could still believe that God shared and approved human emotions like hatred and actions like revenge. Few if any Jews (except maybe the most radically conservative of them) believe that today, but today’s Jews didn’t write the Psalms. Ancient Jews did. So we find there great spiritual falsehood alongside great spiritual wisdom. We might wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t.

The Psalms are human creations from an ancient world So with the Psalms as with everything else in the Bible we cannot simply accept everything we read there as divine truth. Some of what we find there is divine truth, but some of it very clearly isn’t. To some of it we can say a heartfelt “Yes!” To some of it we must say an equally heartfelt “No!” The discernment of what to accept and what to reject is ours. We can’t avoid it. We can and should ask God for guidance in our discernment. We Christians can and should look to Jesus as giving us the standard for our discernment, the standard of love. Many faithful Jewish people actually apply the same standard, for the rabbis of all times teach that everything in the Bible is about love. The one thing we cannot do is not discern the true from the false in the Bible. May God help you, and me, as we do that sacred work.

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[1] See Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume 2, The Old Testament (Briarwood, NY: Coffee Press, 2019) 227-239.

[2] Book of Common Worship Daily Prayer (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).