Today’s scripture: Psalm 137 (NRSV) (The Message) (KJV) What might God be saying to me?
My thoughts (Bradley Compton):
The psalm on which we meditate today is popular in a variety of cultures’ music, poetry, speeches, and Jewish commemorative recitation. I find it morally and emotionally complicated. I also find my reaction to it ambiguous and vacillating between opposite extremes. For me, this psalm is a nuanced lesson in empathy.
Having had a relatively sheltered life, it’s difficult for me to imagine what Judeans experienced in the brutal razing of their community and exile at the hands of the Babylonians. No one should minimize the suffering of Americans in the completely avoidable atrocities of recent decades: sex trafficking, hate crimes, gang violence, sporadic terrorist attacks, mass shootings, police brutality, brutality against police, wars our troops fight overseas — individuals who endure these phenomena know how much greater the measure of human cruelty is, and how much further the limits of human suffering stretch than most of us can even imagine. Moreover, the majority of us in this nation cannot know what it is like to have our homes, businesses, and places of worship destroyed, or to be forcibly displaced to a foreign country. This is the first lesson in empathy (or at least sympathy): a sadness shared with these Judeans from ancient history whose sorrow was so great that they couldn’t praise God in song, not because they didn’t love God, but because they didn’t feel at home.
The second lesson in empathy concerns the Judeans’ desire for vengeance against Babylon. It’s natural to want retribution for the besieging of your homeland, murder and rape of your citizens, and destruction of your residences and sacred spaces. The centrality of Christ’s self-sacrifice, proclamation to love one’s enemies, and challenge to the worth of love for only those who love one back (Matthew 5:46-48) bear witness to the natural tendency for retribution. So, right or wrong, the the psalmist expressing desire for vengeance in verse 8 for what the Babylonians did to the Judeans is at least understandable.
Verse 9 brings us to the third lesson in empathy. It’s like an elephant sitting on the entire psalm making it almost irredeemable. Regardless of your views on biblical inerrancy, there is no context wherein it’s acceptable to celebrate, hope for, or fantasize with pleasure the smashing of anyone’s children against rocks in the centrifuge of war as the psalmist does in this verse. It transgresses both Moses’s proclamation not to kill the innocent (Exodus 23:7) and Christ’s imperative to “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). In addition to the moral wrongheadedness of verse 9, President Kennedy’s Secretary of State, the late Robert McNamara, insisted that empathy with one’s enemy is even an effective military strategy in that it humanizes them and helps one anticipate what the enemy thinks and feels, thereby affording both tactical advantages and greater opportunity for diplomacy. For example, McNamara held that the insight of Llewellyn Thompson, U.S. Ambassador to the USSR at the time, into Soviet Leader Khrushchev’s temperament and intellect de-escalated the Cuban Missile Crisis which ended just before the brink of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse.
Such a dramatic example seems necessary for such a dramatically despicable verse, but what lesson does this psalm as a whole hold for us in our daily lives and local communities? I think the general themes are easy enough to understand, so I’ll be forthright with a shameful, deeply personal example from my own life. Just today, I browsed through the social media profile of an ex- of mine. We knew each other for a long time before sharing a brief romantic spell that I ended because it was evident to us both that my feelings and level of commitment were stronger. Since then, this person got married, had a child, and seems happy. I expressed happiness for this in our communication, but carried bitterness over it from time to time. When I saw that this person was no longer married, I experienced pleasure. I don’t think that I really want this person to go through loss or pain, but I don’t want to feel like I’m alone and that there’s something wrong with me. If I had the kind of empathy described in this devotional, my heart would be heavy for someone I care about hurting rather than having a lift in spirits over what I perceived to be an affirmation that my level of dysfunction is somewhat even with that of someone who rejected me.
Prayer for the day: Don’t let my tormentors silence my praise for you. Please, help me to forgive them, because, like me, they might not know what harm they do.
*A targum [pron.: tahr-goom] is a “. . . translation or paraphrase of a portion of the Old Testament” (Merriam-Webster).
We encourage you to include a time of prayer with this reading. If you need a place to get started, consider the suggestions on the How to Pray page.