Hatreds and Hope [Psalm 137 - Proper 22C]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Psalm 137
Hatreds and Hope
There are parts of the Bible that are difficult to read. There are scriptures that are difficult to
read because they are confusing or obscure.
There are passages that are difficult to read because they are nothing
more than a long list of unfamiliar, difficult-to-pronounce names. And then there is Psalm 137 – a chapter of
the Bible that is difficult to read because the writer says things in this
psalm that most of us would never otherwise utter. The writer paints a picture that is simply
too gut-wrenching to imagine, to disturbing to envision.
And it is a prayer. A prayer
that feels wrong; a prayer that causes one’s tongue to retreat from the
poetry. But not one’s mind and not one’s
soul. The soul, it seems, cannot help but
puzzle over that disturbing final verse, forcing us to wrestle with the
haunting question of why: why is this verse found in our sacred, holy scriptures.
The psalm, though, begins in sadness. “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and
wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.”
When they remembered how lonely was the once bustling city. Their city.
Now so far away. Now a heap of
rubble. Now silent with the disconcerting
silence that remains in the wake of war and violence. The silence that suffocates the cries of
children, that clears the streets of joy.
A silence whose only response is tears.
The tears burnt their cheeks, carving rivers through their
faces. Their grief, so profound, so
encompassing, and yet there was no solace in Babylon. There their grief was a joke. Their captors taunted them with requests for
happy songs. But there was not enough
joy in this new land to conjure any song but lamentation. They had hung up their harps. For now Psalm 137, this psalm, was the only
song they could sing, the only song that felt at all true. It was not a song of Zion. It was a song of slavery – a violent
collision of grief and anger. And it was
their song of resistance. A song of
survival.
Those who sang this song did so in a strange land, upon an
alien soil. They were in exile. They were the survivors. They had nothing left but their memories –
memories both painful and precious. Only
their memories kept alive all that had been destroyed. Before they were led away in chains, they
watched as their homes were burnt, their Temple demolished, their friends
killed, their relatives assaulted, their children silenced forever. They witnessed the devastation of war, the
manifestation of heartless human violence.
Their prayer was not preemptive; it was not a prayer of escalation; they
prayed only for vengeance – that their perpetrators would experience pain equal
to what they had inflicted. This psalm
is less fantasy than it is a reflection of a traumatic memory.
Those who survived carried their memories into exile. They walked on roads of mourning – quiet except
for weeping, dusty except in those places watered by tears. The road to Babylon was their Trail of Tears,
was their Middle Passage. It was a path
of loss and pain, rare in its traumatic devastation – but sadly, in human
history, not rare enough. Humans did
this to them. Other humans treated the
children of Judah so inhumanely. And it
kept happening throughout human history.
And it continues still.
By the waters of Babylon the pain came out in poetry. Prose could never convey a pain so deep, a
pain that lingered well beyond the event, a pain that became an identity. The things they lost, they could never get
back. The things they saw, they could
never un-see. The scars they wore, the emotional,
physical, and psychic scars, would live in them like a permanent brand.
And yet, as painful as those memories were, they vowed to
never forget. They enshrined the memory
of their pain in this psalm. They
preserved their grief and their anger in the poetry of prayer. When there was no happiness to be found, when
life hurt too badly, they sang this song.
They prayed this prayer.
This is the prayer these powerless exiles, heart-broken and
hurting, offered to God. They offered to
God this shockingly uncensored prayer, praying aloud feelings that most would
hide from even their most intimate friends.
Rather than feign some pious presentation, or rattle off platitudes, they
entered the presence of God with their bitter tears and their bruised hearts. It wasn’t pretty but it was honest; it was
true.
They trusted God. They
trusted that God would still love them at their realest, when prayer could no
longer be polite. Walter
Brueggemann, captures this profoundly when he writes, “It is an act of profound
faith to entrust one's most precious hatreds to God, knowing that they will be
taken seriously.”[1]
This poem, this prayer, moves from
grief to anger. From the tears by the
water to this guttural cry for vengeance.
The anger feels loaded with destruction, an expression of humankind’s
unceasing cycle of violence. But that
forgets that those praying this psalm are utterly powerless. They have no means to overthrow the
Babylonian Empire with its massive military.
One commentator notes, “There is no evidence the Psalmist acted out of
the expressed desire for revenge. Rather, it is offered to God, and apparently
left with God. The cycle of violence is actually broken by the Psalmist's
brutally honest prayer.”[2]
The anger is a natural emotional
expression, but also it is carefully crafted into poetry. The final verse is not blurted out; it is not
a slip of the tongue. It is what Austin
Channing Brown calls “creative and imaginative [anger], seeing a better world
that doesn’t yet exist.”[3] The anger in this psalm is a kind of
dangerous hope.
You see, the little ones in verse
nine are not actual Babylonian children.
This is not a call for infanticide, even though the ones who wrote the
prayer knew that kind of pain intimately.
It was a prayer of hope. The “little
ones” symbolize “the future of an oppressive empire. Part of the hope at the
end of the psalm is that the oppressive injustice of that empire will not see a
future but will end.”[4]
Not only do the people trust God
with their most precious hatreds, they also dare to trust God with their most
dangerous hopes. It takes a lot of
courage to pray honest prayers.
This psalm is hard to read, but it
is harder to pray because it is a hard thing to hand over our grief and our
anger to God. But God can and will sit
with us in our grief. And God can handle
our fiercest anger. God was strong and
tender enough to hold the bitter tears and the bruised hearts of those who sat weeping
by the waters of Babylon. God is strong
and tender enough to hold your bitter tears and your bruised heart too.
[1] The Message of the Psalms,
[3] I’m Still Here, Austin Channing Brown, 126.
[4] Psalms, Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger, Jr., 332.
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