Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please pray with me.
God of mercy, you promised never to break your covenant with us.
Amid all the changing words of our generation, may we hear your eternal word that does not change.
Then may we respond to your gracious promises with faithful and obedient lives through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our first reading comes from Matthew 5:38, 45.
You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other. Also you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who. Who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Our second reading is from Psalm 137.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept. When we remembered Zion on the willows, there we hung up our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth. If I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy, remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem's fall, How they said, tear it down, tear it down, down to its foundations.
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.
This is the word of the Lord.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Congratulations.
You have just heard the words of what is likely the most visceral and and vehement verse in the entire Bible.
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.
Well, the anger is raw, the vengefulness is unsparing, and the grief is incomprehensible.
John Calvin, of whom we will hear more later on, was fond of calling the book of Psalms an anatomy of all parts of the soul, because he believed that every possible human emotion was represented there as. As in a mirror.
As we unpack this psalm, I suspect we'll see something of what Calvin meant.
Psalm 137 is a hard text, no doubt about it.
I'm going to focus on two things that this psalm can do for us.
First, it gives voice to the human experience of love and loss, as well as trauma, grief and anger, all of which are part of life both for us and in the biblical world.
Second, when we read this psalm in light of the words of Jesus, it poses a problem, a problem that has disturbed theologians for at least 18 centuries. How.
How can we put the words of the psalm and the words of Jesus together?
This is a problem that has not gone away.
Well, let me start by noting that Psalm 137 has got three parts.
The first verses briefly narrate the experience of the exile back in 586 BC when many inhabitants of Jerusalem were taken as slaves to Babylon.
It shows the Israelite captives sitting by the river there as we actually sang, weeping as they absorb just how much they have lost and how far they are from home.
An incomprehensible grief that grinds only deeper when their captors begin to taunt them. Hey you, give us a song.
But how can you possibly sing a song of your homeland when that home has been ripped from your hands with your city and its temple Destroyed?
So Psalm 137 is a Psalm of lament. And in our series of on the Psalms this fall, we've considered other psalms of lament, but this one becomes something more than that.
It starts as a lament, culminating in verse four. How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? But it abruptly changes to what we call imprecation, which means to make a vow or a curse in the name of God.
So at verse five, the psalmist prays that if he forgets Jerusalem and all that it stands for, may he be cursed with a withered hand and the loss of speech.
That's a serious vow, but it reveals his deep love for the holy city, and it reveals his broken heart.
The psalmist then calls on God directly, asking God to remember the Edomites complicity in the destruction of Jerusalem.
But in verse seven, remember really means remember to punish them.
What the psalmist really wants is divine vengeance, O Lord, pay them back for what they did to us.
So he goes on and brings us to the most shocking verse in the entire Bible. Happy shall they be who take your little ones, your babies, your toddlers, and dash them against the rock.
Okay, for us it is utterly barbaric to call for vengeance against children.
But I think it is likely that the accent in the way we read that last sentence shouldn't be on little ones, but on the word your happy shall they be who take your little ones and do to them what you did to ours.
Exile.
It was a forced march of 900 miles.
It would not have been a pretty picture.
Many, surely would have died along the way.
Many, including many children, may have been slain as a matter of their captors convenience or on a whim, or even for sport.
So this verse may actually be a variation on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Now we've come to regard that as rather barbaric too. And yet in its day, and even though Jesus criticizes this Old Testament precept, in its day it was seen as a way of limiting retaliation. It was a legal innovation, something to de escalate a cycle of violence that could so easily begin.
But it's still not a pretty picture.
I wish I could not picture the scene in my mind.
I wish I could never have read the closing verse of this psalm.
But the Bible invites us to look closely at the cruelty of these captors and the cruelty of of those who were taken captive.
I wish these cruelties were truly incomprehensible. But they are not.
They are real.
The atrocities of war and violence, whether ancient or modern, are exactly like this. The little ones suffer most often obscenely so, in Ukraine, in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, in school shootings, in racist outrages.
It's a long list and it's in our faces every single day.
We might wish these atrocities were incomprehensible, but they're not. They're real. The Bible knows this, God knows this, Jesus knows this.
And we have no reason to pretend otherwise.
So Psalm 37 is a heart cry that still rings true.
And that is why it's still a problem for us.
For centuries, the book of Psalms has been regarded as the prayer book of the church. But how can that psalm be our prayer if we take Jesus seriously about loving our enemies?
And of course, maybe we should take the words of Jesus with a grain of salt as a lovely sentiment, a fine ideal, a little exaggerated, perhaps we might even imagine. Well, sure, we would love an enemy as long as that enemy remains distant or imaginary.
But what happens when the enemy becomes real?
When I was in high school, only a few years ago, one of my history teachers said that a crucial cultural difference between Americans and Europeans is that Americans have never wept in their ashes, that is to say, in the wake of a scorched earth foreign invasion.
That changed, however, after the 911 attacks. Now, 25 years ago, our national enemies were no longer over there.
They were here. And they were very real.
One of my Colleagues at Fuller told me how it went at his church on the Sunday after 9 11.
Understandably, there was a time for congregational prayer and he stood up to say these words.
We need to pray for the people who hate us enough to have done this.
His sanctuary fell very silent.
Pray for real enemies.
Do you not know what they did?
Why would we even dream of anything but vengeance?
Doesn't God care about this injustice?
There's the problem.
If we take both these texts seriously at face value, there is a fierce tug of war between them, between the vehement anger of the psalmist and the almost unrealistic idealism of Jesus.
How can these texts live side by side in the same Bible? Why doesn't the binding split apart at night? Sometime you'll see it the next morning.
Is Psalm 137 a good template for prayers against our enemies?
Or do the words of Jesus erase Psalm 137 and we should just set it aside?
Well, some would say we should.
For hundreds of years, churches have used lectionaries, lists of specified passages that guide what is read in church and try to cover a fair selection of the whole Bible.
But lectionaries are interesting documents. They often skip some verses. They. They have to skip some.
But Psalm 137 disappears from a surprising number of lectionaries. Or if it is there. Funny thing, these last verses are gone.
A little bit of censorship, but of course there's. There are obvious reasons listeners find these lines upsetting.
Pastors don't want to give anyone in their church an excuse to take revenge on their enemies.
And as we've seen, the psalmist's hatred flies in the face of what Jesus and Paul later said about loving our enemies.
We know that Christian readers as early as the third century were struggling with how to deal with Psalm 137. They knew Jesus wants us to turn the other cheek, but they still couldn't discard this Psalm because they believed that if something is in the Bible, it must be there for a reason. And it must be there because God wants us to learn something from it.
But how could they salvage Psalm 137 as a prayer if they take Jesus seriously about loving one's enemies?
Well, I want to take a couple minutes to consult with two important figures from our Christian past, two writers who are important for our Presbyterian tradition as we remember Reformation Sunday today. One of these writers, of course, is John Calvin. But first we will look at Augustine goes way back. Now, I know Augustine was not a Protestant, much less a Presbyterian, but at his death in the year 430, he was the most prolific Christian writer of the Roman Empire. And he shaped not just Roman Catholicism and its theology, but also the Protestant Reformation, not least of all Martin Luther and John Calvin.
Augustine believed that every psalm should be read as manifesting something of Jesus Christ.
So some psalms will foretell his role as king or his role as our suffering Messiah. Some psalms teach us about Christ, or sometimes they teach about Christ's people, the Church.
So in the case of Psalm 137, Augustine wrestles with the tension between the psalms cry for vengeance and Jesus command to love our enemies.
And he resolved it by spiritualizing the problem.
He wanted to see these enemies as he thought Jesus would see them.
Namely, the enemies Christians should fear aren't our physical enemies, but rather our spiritual enemies. Enemies?
Why? Well, answer was obvious. For him, spiritual enemies wound not the body. They harm our eternal souls.
And so for Augustine, these enemies were often our own vices and sins, though they could be spiritual threats like heretics or maybe the devil himself.
So Psalm 137 becomes a tale of our own captivity at the hands of the Tempter and his angels.
And so here's what Augustine said to his congregation.
Who are the little ones of Babylon?
Our own newly born desires.
Some of you, of course, struggle against desires that are full grown.
So when a desire is born before evil habits give it strength against you.
When your desire is still little, don't let it grow up to become a habit while it's still little. Dash it.
But are you afraid that though you've dashed it, it still won't die? Well then dash it against the rock.
And the rock is Jesus Christ.
Okay, you haven't heard that interpretation before, have you?
For Augustine, the Babylonian enemies are an allegory for our own enslaving sins.
And he could have had a disclaimer for the sermon. No literal babies were harmed in the writing of this psalm.
Well, there's nothing wrong with uttering a curse against sin, because sin is our enemy and it's even Christ's enemy as well. So for Augustine, the song doesn't quite mean what it seems to say.
But there's still the question, what if the enemy you encounter is a flesh and blood enemy of Christ, say, a persecutor of the Church?
No person in Augustine's day could possibly have forgotten the time when the Roman Empire was putting Christians to death. It was a recent memory for them.
Nonetheless, Augustine said the only vengeance Christians should ever seek consists in their enemies conversion, not their destruction.
Well, it must be said that Augustine has somewhat sanitized the psalm. He mostly ignores its origins as a lament, but he does recognize how the laments and curses capture the spiritual grief that accompanies persecution.
But while Christians may have real enemies in this life, for Augustine, they are rarely our earthly opponents. The real threats are to our eternal souls or maybe to the survival of the church. Either way, vengeance in any usual sense is reserved for God alone.
All right, that's one trajectory. Now we come to Calvin.
Calvin thought Psalm 137 means exactly what it says.
For him, spiritualized readings like that of Augustine were too often a way to make the Bible avoid saying what it plainly does say. So for Calvin, the psalm retains all of its harshness, but that gives him the problem of having to wrestle with nonetheless. How is it going to work? How do these prayers for revenge stand in the Scriptures?
Now, Calvin's answer, I think, has something to commend it. And. And trust me, I do not always agree with John Calvin.
His answer is that not just anyone is permitted to pray such a prayer.
To do so requires three things.
You need a special calling or office.
You need purity of character.
You need genuine spiritual discernment.
Well, Calvin takes his cue from David, the King of Israel, who's credited with writing fully half the Psalms.
David's calls for vengeance were lawful, Calvin says, because not only was he king and judge of Israel, and so he represents Christ, but also because David, and I'm quoting here, cherished in his heart pure and holy affections, neither indulging his own angry spirit, nor speaking from an impulse of the flesh.
Honestly, that's a rather rosy view of David.
And if you've never read the Old Testament, you could believe everything Calvin says.
I am not sure David really lived up to Calvin's demands for purity of character or even spiritual discernment.
But, you know, maybe that is the. That's the point. To retain Calvin's demands raise the bar very high for anyone who wants to curse an enemy in the name of God. Is your character pure?
Are you spiritually discerning?
Are you truly called to utter such harsh pronouncements in the name of God?
The answer to any one of those three questions is probably.
Well, not so much.
It's not like Calvin had no enemies to worry about, especially when Catholic authorities in France were killing Protestants and crushing their churches. But he knows that cries for vengeance can lead to unbridled and endless bloodshed.
So he wants to take those prayers and curses, and he wants to take them and put them on an extremely High shelf, out of reach of almost everyone.
At the same time, he says, texts like Psalm 137 need to be retained.
They remind us that God does care for believers who suffer. They remind us that God's justice will come. In Romans 12, as Calvin knows, Paul echoes Jesus saying that we should do good to our enemies and not seek revenge. But Paul reminds us that vengeance does belong to God, and that's important.
By proclaiming vengeance against the ungodly, the Bible wants to restrain our desire for payback. But by reminding us of God's outrage at the world's injustice, Scripture also imparts comfort to us in our sorrow.
Our duty, then, says Calvin, is to pray for all who trouble us, to desire the salvation of all, and to care for the welfare of everyone.
Now, that doesn't mean that we can't also pray that God will act against aggressors on behalf of those who suffer.
All right, Calvin's reading of the Psalms of revenge.
Like Psalm 137, it's not without some problems. But he ought to get some credit for trying to keep love and justice yoked together, for proclaiming hope and justice to a wounded and persecuted church, and for trying to restrain the wounded who need comfort to restrain them from becoming vigilantes.
So where does that leave us?
I suppose you could say I'm sorry for the slight pun here, but we're between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, in its graphic depiction of killing children as payback for the murder of one's own children, the cry for vengeance in Psalm 137 ought to be regarded as inconceivably horrific.
Except in our own day and throughout history, such atrocities have ever been real.
And for anyone, including anyone in this congregation, who may have suffered such an atrocity, Psalm 137 probably doesn't even scratch the surface of rage and payback and grief.
On the other hand, the call from Jesus to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.
If you think about it, that too is incomprehensible.
Jesus isn't directing us to pray for the person ahead of us in line who brought 17 items to the 10 items or less checkout line.
He's not directing us to pray for toy enemies, but for the real ones and for victims of modern warfare and modern violence. This ask is not just incomprehensible, it's nigh unto impossible.
Now, before we end, there's a question or two you should have been asking by now.
Of course, I only just thought of it, but nonetheless.
When Jesus told us to love our enemies, who did he have in mind?
Do you yourself have enemies? Who are they?
Have you noticed this today?
Our culture and society have become infected with a virus.
We are constantly being invited to split the world, to split the nation, even to split churches, to split families into us and them, and to name them as enemies.
It's often about the politics of identity.
Now you may disagree with Republicans or with the Democrats, but does that make them our enemies?
If you listen to the political ads, you'd want to say yes, but perhaps you shouldn't listen to them.
Are immigrants our enemies?
Try this one. If you wander around social media, you will soon find that someone in the comments is identifying you or your type of person as an enemy, probably also as a fool.
But does that mean that the person making that comment becomes your enemy?
The virus is everywhere, including in our churches.
No wonder there are many Christians today who have set aside the words of Jesus along with his call to humility and self denial. That is the report of Russell Moore, who was essentially driven out of part of the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention for speaking out against how his church was handling their sexual abuse crisis and against their tolerance for white nationalism.
In an interview with NPR three years ago, he said he had heard from many pastors whose sermons quoted the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek, only to have someone in the congregation come up afterwards and say, well, where did you get those liberal talking points?
Most of the time when the pastor would say I'm literally quoting Jesus, the response wasn't oh, oh, I apologize. No, the response was yeah, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak and that's the church.
I don't know if the call to love our enemies has ever worked, but I don't think that was ever the point.
In most cases, real enemies are unlikely to care if we are praying for them.
To them we simply do not matter, but to Jesus we do.
And so do they.
The call to love our enemies is an incomprehensible and impossible ask, but in Jesus it has become real.
He wasn't kidding when he said follow me as he so often did. You have to remember that his path led to crucifixion.
Loving our enemies, going against the grain of culture to be kind, to listen, to extend understanding, care and empathy despite disagreement. This is an incomprehensible, but it's a non negotiable guidepost for living the Christian life.
And when you Think about it. God taking on human flesh.
That's also an incomprehensible notion. And yet in Jesus Christ, it has become real.
Christ suffered and died to bring us both forgiveness and a new life, indeed to make us ambassadors of reconciliation.
If he died for us while we were still hostile to God, how much more should we pray and work that every one of the world's oppressors might likewise be drawn to repentance so that they might become God's friends and our own?
Alright, everywhere today there are people wanting to make others our enemies.
And there are even people who want to be our enemies.
That's their reality.
It's the inconceivably good news of Jesus Christ that their reality, much less their rhetoric, need not be our own.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
