1 By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
3 For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
7 Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!
Psalm 137, ESV
As I’ve written recently, “The Psalms keep us honest, legitimizing and giving voice to a whole range of human emotions.” But verse nine above certainly takes the cake.
Most of us—who even know it’s in there—feel really uncomfortable with a verse like this being associated with our faith. Yet, thankfully, most of us have also had little personal experience with the kind of radical, soul-crushing evil that this psalm recalls. The kind that does permanent damage and leaves dead bodies in its wake. The kind that leaves others still standing but dead inside, or so numb that they’re now only able to see through a haze of rage and despair. Again, gratefully, most of us know little of this kind of trauma. Maybe if we’ve watched the movie Shindler’s List or been to the Holocaust Museum, we can imagine what this kind of horror might be like from a distance. If we’ve studied (or been a victim of) some of America’s systemic racism toward Indians, African-Americans, or others maybe we know something about what it means to weep by the waters of Babylon. Or, as OT Scholar Leslie Allen wrote in 1983, “Perhaps the citizen of a European country who has experienced its invasion and destruction would be the best exegete of such a psalm.”[1] In 2023, maybe learning more about what happened or is going on with Ukraine would help us.
Again, most of us have no idea what this kind of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffering feels like but, regarding Psalm 137, we can take great encouragement in this: This psalm, especially with its inclusion of verse 9, acknowledges and gives legitimacy to the voice of trauma; what’s more, it reminds us that the God of the Bible is “the God who sees” Genesis 16).
Further, as Walter Brueggemann writes:
“It is an act of profound faith to entrust one’s most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously… God is big enough to handle our anger and vengeance. The real question is: Are we big enough to let God take them?”
Here are two other profound insights on Psalm 137 from Eugene Peterson that I’ve been meditating on:
#1: “The life of prayer carries us into difficult country, a country in which we become aware that evil is far more extensive than anything we ever guessed, where malignity has worked itself perversely and deeply into the world’s ways. As Kant said, ‘Evil is radical.’
We have been brought up, most of us, interpreting what is wrong with the world on a grid of moralism. Moralism trains us in making cool, detached judgments. Deep down the moralist suspects that there are no, or at least not very many, real victims. People get what is coming to them. In the long run, people reap what they sow. The rape victim, the unemployed, the emotionally ill, the prisoner, the refugee—if we were privy to all the details we would see that, in fact, “they asked for it.”
The Psalms will have none of this. The Psalms assume a moral structure to life, but their main work is not to train us in judgmental moralism but to grapple with evil.”[2]
#2: “It is easy to be honest before God with our hallelujahs; it is somewhat more difficult to be honest in our hurts; it is nearly impossible to be honest with God in the dark emotions of our hate. So we commonly suppress our negative emotions (unless, neurotically, we advertise them). Or when we do express them, we do it far from the presence, or what we think is the presence, of God, ashamed or embarrassed to be seen in these curse-stained bib overalls. But when we pray the Psalms, these classic prayers of God’s people, we find that that will not do. We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be. In prayer, all is not sweetness and light. The way of prayer is not cover for our unlovely emotions so they will appear respectable but expose them so they can be enlisted in the work of the kingdom. Hate, prayed, takes our lives to the bedrock where the foundations of justice are being laid.”[3]
Next week, I’ll share a few more key insights on how all of this relates to the Christian concepts of justice and forgiveness, as well as how the Church often fails victims of serious abuse and trauma.
[1] Leslie C. Allen, Word Biblical Commentary: Psalm 101-150 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 242.
[2] Faith That Matters: 365 Devotions from Classic Christian Leaders (New York: HarperOne, 2018), 252
[3] Ibid., 228.