13 O my God, make them like whirling dust,
like chaff before the wind.
14 As fire consumes the forest,
as the flame sets the mountains ablaze,
15 so may you pursue them with your tempest
and terrify them with your hurricane!
16 Fill their faces with shame,
that they may seek your name, O Lord.
17 Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever;
let them perish in disgrace,
18 that they may know that you alone,
whose name is the Lord,
are the Most High over all the earth.
(Psalm 83)
The rhetoric of Psalm 83 is precisely the kind of language and imagery that has given the Old Testament a bad reputation. This unrestrained venting of loathing and hatred dressed up as prayer follows on the heels of a long list of neighboring nations that Israel asks God to humiliate, terrify, and reduce nearly to nothing. I admit that I cringed a little as I read it and almost immediately went into apologetic mode, thinking of how I might explain this psalm away to Scripture’s many cultured despisers.
After setting aside these initial reactions, however, I began to let the text offend me. I let its passions and animated imagery swirl around me without resistance and I just observed. In this moment of utter submission to Israel’s survival instincts and her rhetoric of war in which I simply let the Bible be the Bible and not some domesticated lap dog I had trained to do my bidding, speak only when spoken to, and say only what I wanted to hear, two thoughts came to the forefront of my mind.
The first were the words of Elie Wiesel from a 1986 interview that appeared in US News and World Report. He said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” As I thought about his words, I was ashamed to discover that in my embarrassment over the psalmist’s passionate rampage, I preferred indifference. How do I know that this prayer was not squeezed out by severe oppression? How can I think that I would not say or do things just as shocking had I ever suffered as they had suffered?
I am beginning to realize that Scripture is far more and is doing far more than I ever imagined. The Bible is not simply divine instructions for how to live a good life, or religious training for how to avoid offending a persnickety deity, or a road map to heaven. It is a witness to suffering. It may in fact be the only truly honest witness to suffering. God alone, in Scripture, bears unbiased witness to the suffering of God’s creation. God alone sees it as it really is and God alone inspired some human beings to voice this testimony within the limits of human language. He doesn’t care if I’m offended. The truth must be told and I must be shaken from the slumber of my indifference and complacency. Would more restrained rhetoric do the trick? I doubt it.
The second thought that occurred to me was the explicit goal of the psalmist’s rampage: “that they may seek your name, O YHWH . . . . that they may know that you alone, whose name is YHWH, are the Most High over all the earth.” Certainly, I know that to the sensibilities of the insulated modern western mind, even such a lofty goal does not excuse such heated invective. In fact, it may only make it worse as it appears to be the worst kind of religious manipulation – coerced conversion, cowing others into submission by sheer terror. I think this misses the point. What I hear the psalmist saying is “Do whatever it takes to convince them that life and meaning and peace and true community and sustainable relationships are possible only through a knowledge of you.” The twelve steps teach us that we do not really begin to seek God and deliverance from our chaotic ways of life until we hit bottom. Perhaps the psalmist is merely asking God to hasten the nations’ crash with the bottom since nothing short of this will arrest the havoc they are currently wreaking on earth.
Father,
I confess that such raw anger as the psalmist expresses here makes me uncomfortable. I think, however, this is because I have hidden from suffering rather than faced it. I have numbed my own pain and I have numbed myself to the pain of others by banal amusements and distractions and the strong medicine of your Spirit and your word makes it impossible for me to settle for such an anesthetized existence any longer. Forgive me for running from so many implications of the cross. Forgive me for settling for ceasefires, accommodations, and placations of suffering rather than insisting on its defeat at your hands. Lord Jesus, thank you for your uncompromising resistance to evil, suffering, and death. I praise you that you never fled before the specter of suffering nor did you numb yourself to its tortures. Holy Spirit, take these passionate, angry petitions and with them stir my heart. Awaken in me the courage to face pain and suffering and by facing them, defeat them by the power of Christ’s resurrection and everlasting life.
AMEN