The humanity of the Psalms

Today's texts: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10 (but for those of you paying attention to these details, I cheated a bit today and took a text from a different track in the lectionary)

Psalm 137 is both beautiful and horrifying. Those with a naive or misguided understanding of what the Bible is will point at verse 9 -- “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” -- and wonder what kind of God would say such a thing. It’s certainly a terrible thing for anyone to think, but context goes a long way to understanding the horror of these words.

This Psalm is filled with anguish, with the pain of the Israelites in exile in Babylon. They are enslaved; their faith is mocked; they have no access to their temple or their places of worship. In fact, the words of verse 9 appear to be an echo of the horrible things their captors did to the children of Israel. That doesn’t make those words any less shocking to our ears, but it reflects the mindset of the day, which sought retributive justice: an eye for an eye, your children for our children.

This side of the cross, retributive justice is no longer the way we see things. But the Psalms don’t necessarily express propositional truth, as if killing Babylonian babies is a good thing. The beauty of this Psalm, and the other Psalms as well, is that they express truth of a different sort: that of the human condition and emotion, which experiences both joy and anguish, devotion and doubt, thankfulness and anger, all of which are modelled in these prayers to God. Psalm 137, therefore, is a Psalm of honestly expressed and passionate grief and anger.

* * *

This week's texts: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c; Psalm 111; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19.