Raw and Brutal Emotions

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Friday, June 27, 2014

 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
 There on the poplars we hung our harps,
 for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

 they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” 

 How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?
 If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.
 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you,

 if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy. 

Remember, LORD, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried, “tear it down to its foundations!”
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
                                             Psalm 137:1-9 (NIV2011)

 

Like all the Psalms this is a prayer, a song, a poem.   It is not doctrine from which our left brains gather information about theological propositions.   Instead it is a poem of and for a grieving people who ache, are angry, hurting, alienated, suppressed, defeated.   Israel has been leveled by Babylon and Israel’s best and brightest have been deported to Babylon where worship of God has been turned to grieving. 

Have you ever felt this way?   The bad guys seem to be winning, life is patently unfair and you have no hope for you future.   I have often been reminded how easy it is for suburbanites like me to be critical of the Psalm’s last line, when I and others like me have not suffered at the hands of Babylon or Stalin or Hitler or Mao or the rapist who has taken the life of a daughter.   Anger and bitterness are not only understandable but also demanded in the aftermath of wanton evil.   Jesus taught us to return good for evil, but prior to that decision are the emotions. 

Perhaps absence of anger is a more alarming symptom of falling away than desire for revenge.   At least we know that evil is evil and that for good to flourish, the bad inflection must be gotten rid of.    It must be killed.  The tooth must come out.   Revenge is a sin and to pursue it puts us in league with the perpetrators.   Yet the emotion that leads to the desire for revenge, rightly directed, is a sign of health.

“Lord, deliver me from the evil of revenge, but deliver me also from the temptation to accept evil as if it is simply inevitable, ordinary and easily forgivable without the terrible judgment and justice accomplished on the cross. Amen” 

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