Violence and Vengeance
Posted by Daria Sockey in Faith on Monday, January 04, 2010 6:00 AM
“This praying the psalms idea doesn’t work for me,” a friend once told me. “I mean, parts of them are nice. Like the twenty-third psalm. And the ones that just praise God all the way through. But then you come to those parts that ask the Lord to squash your enemies like bugs. Aren’t we supposed to love our enemies? This stuff doesn’t sound very loving.”
“Squash my enemies like bugs? Which psalm says that?”
“You know what I mean.”
I do. For every Hallmark psalm-verse about the glory of creation or God’s tender love for his children, there’s another that is definitely not going to appear on a laminated bookmark with the picture of a sunrise.
“Lord, rise up in your anger, rise against the fury of my foes.” Psalm 7
“He sends fire and brimstone on the wicked; he sends a scorching wind as their lot.” Psalm 11
“Break the power of the wicked and the sinner! Punish his wickedness til nothing remains! The Lord is king forever and ever. The heathen shall perish from the land he rules.” Psalm 10
“The Lord is the stronghold of my life…When evil-doer draw near to devour my flesh, it is they, my enemies and foes, who stumble and fall.” Psalm 27
“May he send from heaven and save me and shame those who assail me.” Psalm 27
And this is just what I found flipping through week one of the four week psalter.
What are we supposed to make of all this? Something, surely. After all, this is the inspired Word of God. You can’t brush it off with, “Well, that was Old Testament. Christ gave a new commandment that we our enemies.” The Church still commands its clergy and contemplatives to pray these lines on a regular basis, and heartily recommends them to the rest of us. There must be some point to it all.
A moment’s thought will reveal any number of enemies we can legitimately ask God to punish, shame,crush, afflict with a scorching wind, etc. For starters, there’s The Enemy. The great deceiver, Satan, and all his demon horde. We are certainly permitted to wish for their utter defeat and ruin.
Other enemies we can wish vengeance on without a qualm are not demons or (specific) people, but the movements or forces for evil in the world. I can ardently pray that Planned Parenthood, for example, be confounded, defeated, and, in a phrase, squashed like a bug. I can hope that hatred of Christ and his Church be banished from the earth.
For these are surely our enemies. I can even wish that defeat, destruction, and shame come to individual people’s evil plans and activities. So it is okay, I think, pray that books like The God Delusion drop to last place on Amazon. But not okay to to wish sickness and death on the author (whose name escapes me) and his family.
And there is one more set of enemies that we can and should ask God to destroy: our own faults and sinful inclinations and habits. These are our own very worst foes. Next time you read one of these vengeful psalms, apply the curses and imprecations to your pride, laziness, lust, gluttony, or whatever.
Realizing, of course, that when God takes you up on this, it might hurt like heck. The first and brimstone mentioned in Psalm 11 might be the cleansing fire of purgatory.
I don’t have to fret for a second over whether the psalmist’s cause was always just each time he prayed for the destruction of his enemies. Not my problem.
My job is to apply God’s living word to my own situation today. And by “my” I mean not only my own little round of duties, joys, and sufferings, but those of Christ in his body, the Church.
—Senior writer Daria Sockey is a mother of seven who writes from her home in Pennsylvania.
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