The sting in the Psalms,Part 1

Fangs dripping with honey: poetry creating ethics in the Psalms

We often go to the Psalms for the honey: for comfort, for poetic and musical words that will reassure us in times of pain. But what we also find there is fangs, fangs that grip us, chew us up, and spit us out. Psalm 94: ‘May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in their tents.’ Or 69: ‘Let burning coals fall on them! Let them be flung into pits, no more to rise!’ Or, to be really clear, 139: ‘O that you would kill the wicked.’ The Psalms are red in tooth and claw.

What do these violent poems have to do with ethics? The Psalms are poetry, and their poetry makes a unique contribution to ethics because it performs moral correction on us as we perform it. As the words come out of our mouth, we are yoked to moral principles and concerns that come from beyond us. We are pulled along by God’s yoke, ploughing a furrow of truth that not only can’t we navigate alone but also we can’t escape.

One night on a lonely business trip I was ambushed by a poem. I had been trying by sheer force of will to make things happen on a big project. The poem went something like this: ‘And suddenly I found myself all alone, with my body that can’t love me, and my will that can’t save me.’ I sobbed. Until I read this line I had no idea that I had been attempting to do everything by myself. My need for God and others was exposed. But this single line did more than just remind me that on my own I could accomplish nothing. The line became my confession – to God – in the instant I read it.

My husband John and I had a similar experience with a project my daughter and son-in-law have taken on as their lifetime work, related to the attempted genocide of the people of Darfur. The International Criminal Court has convicted the leader of Sudan, the UN has made resolutions, several US presidents have said ‘not on my watch’. I have spent countless hours trying to figure out a way to get just one Darfur refugee girl to school in Uganda. I failed. For ten years no progress at all has been made in remedying these people’s situation. Eventually we decided to pray the Psalms for Darfur. Of course not every psalm fits their circumstances. Some speak of sin when the genocide does not arise from the sins of the Darfuri. But because of the way the poetry works in the Psalms we became aware of and acknowledged our sin as members of the nations who let this situation persist. We entered a world where history and the Darfuri were in God’s hands. As we read we were petitioning the only actor that could do something about the situation. The Psalms’ poetry moved us from despair to confession to praising God.

What follows will be a look at how the poetry of the Psalter calls on us when we think we are calling on it, how it ‘yokes’ us with the truth, and how it resets our moral compass as we sing.

The poetry of the Psalter calls us

First, the Psalter’s poetry actually calls on us when we think we are calling on it. I use the word ‘call’ partly because the Hebrew word for ‘read’, qara’, means ‘call’. It denotes reading out loud, or, in the case of the Psalms, singing. Psalms call on us because they evoke a particular emotional atmosphere. This setting is provocative and terrifyingly familiar. We are among bones shaking with terror in Psalm 6, trembling mountains and roaring seas in Psalm 46, a devouring fire and mighty tempest in Psalm 50, about to drown, with deep waters up to our neck, in Psalm 69. We enter these places and it is there that God speaks to us. The divine voice in Psalm 46 says, ‘Be still and know that I am God!’ and after this command we hear that ‘the God of Jacob is our refuge’. The psalm leads us not just intellectually but emotionally to make a turn, a turn of which the psalm itself is in control. This emotional atmosphere relates to ethics because the world of the Psalms is an ethical place, a place of truth, one that defines the unfairness, instability and despair of the world in which we live.

The Psalms call on us in an emotional atmosphere by means of their poetic devices. One device is the use of imagery in simile, metaphor and symbol to describe an ideal or a tumultuous environment. Poetry also omits the syntactical and grammatical aids to understanding on which the reader’s rational hemisphere usually relies. Because of poetry’s density and the ambiguity created by fewer explanatory expressions, the creative hemisphere is forced to engage in the process of interpretation. Further, the poetry of the Psalms uses the device of the bicolon: the short sentences that form most lines divide into two parts in which the second part repeats, intensifies, clarifies, contrasts or completes the first part. The result is an enriched or highlighted meaning.

Besides creating an emotional atmosphere, psalms use poetic devices to create a particularly unambiguous view of justice. We even call it ‘poetic justice.’ The first line of Psalm 1 is, ‘Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread.’ It’s nice and clear. But next comes, ‘or sit in the seat of scoffers’, which may bring us up short as readers. The psalm goes on to reassure us that ‘the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish’. By that point in the poem I am convicted and want to repent.

Psalm 1 defines poetic justice (you get what you deserve) and sets the tone for the entire Psalter. When you sing a psalm you are reinforcing this world of poetic justice, because you hear it, other people hear it, and God hears it as God’s truth. In the place that the psalm portrays God’s justice thrives. Evildoers may seem to flourish but they are doomed. It is acknowledged that suffering really is going on too long, but the righteous eventually flourish in God’s courts. The Lord’s righteousness and steadfast love endure forever. The wise are happy in their fear of the Lord. The foundations of the world are safely in God’s hands. The true sovereign and judge is the Lord, who will always maintain the cause of the poor, the needy, aliens, orphans, widows. All creation praises the Lord. Zion is built up and restored to glory, and Israel is God’s faithful servant. God keeps promises and we are always met with grace and mercy.

This world informs us of our God-given rights. If we take its affirmation seriously we look around and protest that this is not what is happening. It is not what we are experiencing. We want what we hear and see in the Psalms. They evoke what it’s like to have a real home, a place where we live under real justice. The ‘place’ of the Psalms is a world where God has searched us and knows us. We desire what they promise and this promise is what provokes us emotionally, makes us vulnerable. Once we take poetic justice seriously as the truth, we see the contrast between the empirical world and what is in another sense the real world, a place where it is safe to tell the truth because it is an ethical place. ² The refugees in Darfur had no idea that they had any human rights. Once they found out they were not only excited but also frustrated and angry. Insofar as poetic justice is not the world as people experience it, from the psalms we can hear a voice condemning us: ‘The way things are is not fair!’ We cannot escape our own guilt, which stings especially when there is little we can do to change the situation. The psalms make our appeal to God to change life for the Darfuri and others like them.

Once we enter the poet’s world, we have lost control. As Dylan Thomas put it, ‘the world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it’. ³ Our recognition or rejection of what we are singing is either a response or a reaction to the psalm, but we are no longer in charge of what is going on. This is why poetry is particularly suited to revolution. The truth is told and poets are sometimes the first to be arrested in a rebellion. But once the poem – the truth – is out, the arrest of the poet is counter-productive. ⁴ The poetry carries us into its own conclusion.

The poetry ‘yokes’ us with the truth

Second, the poetry ‘yokes’ us with the truth. It reverses roles and hinders redress.

A student in Fuller Seminary chapel in March 2014 described taking a walk one evening. After a block or so, his danger radar went up. He sensed that a police cruiser he had passed was stalking him. He was guilty of ‘walking while black’. He said his ‘prayer pilot light’ stoked up to high. The officers stopped him and yelled for all within earshot to hear, ‘Stop resisting the police!’ Twisting his wrist behind his back they brought him to the ground. As he was hassled by them, he yelled out, but no neighbours gathered round.

A psalm came to his rescue, a psalm he knew by heart. I believe there is a rabbinic saying to the effect that a piece of Scripture is written on your heart so that it can fall in when your heart breaks. For this man it was Psalm 27: ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?’ It goes on: ‘Now my head is lifted up, above my enemies all around me’, and it pleads, ‘Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence … Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.’ The psalm’s place of strength and light, of lack of fear and of patience, brought the man relief, but it did more. He waited and found the capacity for forgiveness. He said to the officer who dislocated his shoulder, ‘I forgive you, but you will have to go to your own priest for penitence.’ He responded, not reacted, with peace and dignity to the injustice that was dealt him. Retelling the facts to the newspaper or the court might not have served him in the same way the psalm did.

We cannot know when a crisis will arise and we will need an automatic touchstone in order to prevent psycho-spiritual annihilation. Poetry repeated over and over, even if we are sometimes numb to the meaning of the phrases, is written on our heart. We can’t always summon our own words or an entire narrative but rote poetry is always there to call on us. God’s songs are there to embrace us.

Someone in a situation such as this student-pastor’s might later be angry. If I was his wife I certainly would have been upset and wanting to seek redress. We may come to the Psalter in resentment and anger or even rage. Sometimes when we go to the Psalms, it is to be reassured that poetic justice works, or rightly to express frustration at persecution or sickness, or simply to cry out in despair: help, help, help. There are at least sixty prayers in the Psalms that ask for relief from enemies or sickness. They crack us open with their emotional atmosphere, and in them we find that our own God-given emotions are expressed.

Do the Psalms mean to encourage the red in fang and claw they depict? In Psalm 94 we sing, ‘O Lord, you God of vengeance, you God of vengeance, shine forth!’ and we mean it. ‘Rise up, O judge of the earth; give to the proud what they deserve!’ We may be able to think of someone we want that plea to apply to, but we also don’t want it to be us ourselves who are ‘repaid for their iniquity’. How do psalms help us validate and actualize our unruly emotions without our becoming the perpetrator? The most extreme example of this expression of emotion is Psalm 137, which ends, ‘O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!’ We may feel this strongly about our enemy but we are appalled at the idea of killing babies. The psalm indicates how God knows us. The poem has used shock to split us open and show us the truth of what we are really thinking. It has made us vulnerable and exposed our raw emotions as dangerous. We are deep into the poem before we know what role we are playing. The dynamic contrasts with the process in a court of law where we come prepared to make our case. The psalm sneaks up on us. Once we have entered, it makes its case about our own bully-tinged emotions, yet it remains unyielding in its ethic of poetic justice: ‘they’ deserve it!

God forbid that someone might take us up on our rebuke. Cursing (and for that matter also blessing) outside the context of God’s being the administrator of justice is fearfully dangerous. ⁵ We can see in the baby-bashing Psalm 137 what horror can result from the powerless despair of the defeated. We have to face what turns us into perpetrators. Yet we don’t want to see ourselves in that role and we don’t want to be in that role. So what to do with that vicious anger, with our self-righteousness? The psalm has provided the outlet. By reading the psalm we have given our anger expression and validation, and also turned the injustice over to the one who can take action. This action opens up a way to real justice. It prevents us from committing the crime, by convicting us and turning us back to God as the prosecutor, judge and executor of justice. God knows us and saves us before we can commit the crime. The format of cursing by means of psalms assures that we do not forget to include God, and to hold God accountable, as the administrator of that justice. When we meet our enemies we can threaten them: ‘Have I got a psalm for you.’

Psalm 55 is an example. It ends, ‘But you, O God, will cast them down into the lowest pit; the bloodthirsty and treacherous shall not live out half their days. But I will trust in you.’ In the Psalms we learn from the inside out that there is no healing without healing the perpetrator, because the perpetrator is both us and them. We can trust that a psalm will call on us in our greatest need, before we get on the wrong side of justice.

The poetry of the Psalms resets our moral compass

Third, the poetry of the Psalms resets our moral compass. The Psalms do more than report ‘what is’ or ‘what happened’ or ‘what should be’. In the singing of a psalm, the psalm achieves its purpose: Yahweh is crowned your ruler (Ps. 99), God is petitioned (Ps. 22), the Lord is challenged to act (Ps. 31), you find your place in history (Pss. 78, 115), your heart is centred on gratitude for the Lord (Ps. 103).

The poetry of the Psalms is thus performative; speaking one out loud does the thing that the psalm is intending, and does so immediately. The Psalms rely on methods different from those of court cases or morality tales. These act on us from outside; we are looking in at the scene, which is set up to convince us or to convict us. But there is the possibility of a step between their action and our response or reaction, even if it is only a split second. Because of the performative nature and emotional atmosphere of psalms, they are intimate and able to sneak up on us as we sing. Formative words about our situation and beliefs are out of our mouths before we can react. We are yoked with God’s ethical truths which shape us instantly from inside. This dynamic also applies to the case where the psalm ‘calls’ on us. Embedded in our memory, it waits to be activated by the Spirit when needed, to save us in moments of weakness.

We are thus not the same person as we were before we sang the psalm. Neuroscience helps us understand the dynamic. A psalm does more than express something; it can create the mode of practice – turning justice over to God. Human formation is a process that involves the transformation of day-to-day patterns of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving. Formative practices such as singing the Psalms change our neurons and create the capacity to embrace a new world-view. ⁶

The Psalms move us to see new sets of questions that we might not think of otherwise. Am I a perpetrator? Yes, I am. But they also reassure us that love reigns in God’s court. In a sense, in saying the Psalms we are shutting up and letting God’s words speak. Through the Psalms God tells us that which we can’t think of and blesses us with what we have no right to claim. Promises are made to us, covenants are sealed. If the poet could sleep under extreme duress, can I sleep too? Psalm 4 reassures me that I can: ‘I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.’ Faith and trust are not dependent on outside circumstances but continue for the singer in the face of desperation. As we sing these same expressions of faith and trust, they calm us. God speaks to us when we cannot find the words. God sings us a divine lullaby.

Conclusion

‘O Lord, you have searched me and know me … Even before a word is on my tongue’ (Ps. 139). There is danger in depending on our own will to prepare our own personally tailored prayer. Like the student pastor accosted by the police, or a mother who has lost a child, or a people bombed from their home, we can be in such a state of trauma or crisis that our will and our creative analysis of the situation is no good to us. But what is stored in our memory can be used by the Spirit to reach parts of us that are unable to act on our behalf. The Psalter is evidence of the point that Psalm 139 makes, that God knows us.

In the Psalter as an entire book we enter the world of poetic justice, find our own conviction, confess, experience God’s nature, see the fate of the evil and of the righteous, and in the end, as we sing the last song (Ps. 150), come out praising the Lord. A reading of the Psalter takes us through the entire cycle of life, of both individual and community. Poetic justice at Psalm 1 is bracketed at Psalm 150 with praise and thanksgiving, without skipping the full range of real-life punches in between. Using the entire Psalter we are bold in the way of the Lord. God allows wandering in the desert, but only for so long.