“Bring On Your Wrecking Ball”: Psalm 73 and Public Witness

On Labor Day, 2012 I went with my husband and some friends to Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia to hear Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on their “Wrecking Ball” tour. While I enjoy Springsteen, I am no devotee. Like many of my generation who came of age in the 1980s, I know the album Born to Run and a few other singles throughout the decades. By contrast, it seemed that the congregation of 30,000 was the faithful. I do not use the term “faithful” lightly, because as the evening wore on it became clear that almost everyone was singing along to all the songs, including the hand gestures that went with them. They even knew when to stand and when it was okay to sit down. Bruce had a stage presence akin to many black preachers, and at various moments he worked the crowd with call and response, at one point shouting out, “Can you feel the Spirit?” The crowd clearly knew this liturgy and responded enthusiastically, in body and soul. Drawing on deep memories from adolescence, my spouse and I performed the responses stored away in the recesses of the mind—those memories that one so rarely accesses that they surprise by their continued existence—or we just watched mutely, moved by the experience. As my husband said, we were like newcomers without a prayer book. It was clear that we were in church.

On his latest album, Wrecking Ball, Springsteen laments the devastation that the “robber barons” have waged on the American people. The album is not a lament—that is much too decorous a genre for this strafing burst of raw anger and despair with only half-tones of hope. Profiteers are rapacious in razing small-town America, as he sings in “Death to My Hometown”. ¹ Here he tells how the “marauders” tore through town in the darkness and brought a noiseless death. And what of America's promise to “take care of [its] own”? The refrain of this song (“We Take Care Of Our Own”) is sung with a soul-searing irony as the empty response of cant to the question,

Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?

We take care of our own

Wherever this flag is flown

Springsteen’s earlier work (e.g., Born to Run) had themes of rebellion and resistance, of course, but not this pitch of despair. The politicians and the wealthy steamroll whomever they can for their own gain by whatever means at their disposal—by the use of wealth itself, and by the manipulation of words, and the twisting of ideals.

In some ways one could insert Psalm 73 into the liner notes of Wrecking Ball and, with a bit of squinting at the psalmic language gap of a few thousand years, think that Bruce had another hit on his hands. It too is not a lament; it defies categorization. ² In the first part of the psalm, the speaker describes his envy of the “wicked,” who are wealthy (v. 12), have beautiful bodies (v. 4), and are untroubled by the travails of regular human beings (v. 5). Furthermore, the sleek souls trample everyone else without remorse:

Therefore pride adorns their necks;

violence covers them like a garment.

Their eyes are puffed up from fat;

lavish delusions run rampant.

They scoff and speak with malicious intent;

from their lofty heights they plan oppression.

They set their mouths against heaven,

and their tongues range over the earth. (Ps 73:6–9) ³

In this last verse, the psalmist complains that these scoffers not only show contempt for the people in the community, but for God as well—no one is above their disdain. If only the speaker could see them brought low! It is painful beyond words that they get away with their schemes. Instead of their selfish plans being crushed by God, as they should be, these evildoers succeed and prosper in their oppression, in their relentless violence and malevolent speech. Even death does not bring pain to them, as it does to regular folks (v. 4). They die peaceful deaths! The psalmist envies these people, who are both wealthy and adept in the use of words, and wishes she could be one of them, spitting on the covenantal life God has set before God’s people and embracing a life of ease (vv. 2–3).

She has not lived this way, of course. The psalmist has lived faithfully, keeping the covenant. But to what end?

It was for nothing that I kept my heart clean

and washed my hands in innocence,

for I have been struck down all day long,

and every morning brings my reproof. (vv. 13–14)

The psalmist’s complaint is not simply that the life of faith does not lead to prosperity such as the “wicked” enjoy. It is that the life of faith for the psalmist has led to a life of reproof and brokenness, of being struck down. The speaker has been mowed down by the scoffers, by life, by God. Living faithfully does not just restrict you to some neutral zone, while the faithless rapaciously range over the earth (v.9). No, it seems to crush you. Those who are opposed to God flourish, and the faithful are struck down. The logic of such a world is unfathomable, as the psalmist acknowledges (v. 16). In many ways the world of the psalmist and the world Bruce Springsteen evokes are not so dissimilar.

The psalmist finds herself both envious of the profiteers and despairingly baffled and frustrated by their success, a frustration expressed in Springsteen’s lyrics as well. The psalmist reflects on her own temptation and ultimate integrity, as well as on her effort to understand the apparent success of the evildoers.

Had I decided to say these things [i.e., joined in with evildoers],

I should have been false to the circle of your followers.

So I applied myself to understand this,

but it seemed a hopeless task

till I entered God’s sanctuary and I discerned their fate. (vv. 15–17; JPS trans., modified)

This last line brings us to the turning point in the psalm: the psalmist’s entrance into the sanctuary. The outside reality has not changed presumably; the profiteers are still behaving as they do, but the psalmist’s perception of them changes when she is inside the sanctuary. Now the psalmist perceives that these oppressors are “surrounded by flattery” (v. 18) and are “swept away by terrors” (v. 19); their very existence is ephemeral (v. 20). Their condition in life appears desirable superficially, but in reality it is not desirable at all because they are tormented by their fears, and these evildoers themselves have no genuine substance (the distinction between ephemerality and substance being a significant one in wisdom imagery). ⁴ Once in the sanctuary—likely in the context of worship—the psalmist experiences this radical reorientation to the true nature of evildoers.

It is only in the context of the sanctuary, of worship, that the psalmist comes to the realization that his previous envy of the unrighteous was misguided: “I was stupid. I did not understand. I was a beast [lit. “beasts”] with you” (v. 22). Now he can confess that God had always been present with him, and his praise is without condition: “Whom do I have in heaven but you? And with you, I do not desire anything else on the earth” (v. 25). Body and the inner self (lebab—“heart”) will come to completion (though the wicked still have the beautiful bodies and seem to have less pain in death [v. 4]—this has not changed by the end of the psalm!), God is the rock of our inner self (lebab), our portion, forever (v. 27). The psalm ends in a final burst of praise: “It is good for me to be near to God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works” (v. 28). A public act of praise and witness to all that God has done for the psalmist, for Israel, and for the world, is the final word in this psalm. This public witness—both in the sanctuary, and now embedded in the Psalter forever—testifies to the goodness of God, and against the wicked—they are fleeting and will not endure, despite appearances. And it came to the psalmist because he was in worship.

It is worth reflecting on the nature of Springsteen’s appeal to his fans, who come out thirty-thousand strong night after night, knowing all the songs and the “liturgy.” As noted above, I am no Springsteen scholar or even fan of longstanding, but a couple of observations suggest themselves. Something about this experience of “liturgy” is authentic for a lot of people. In part it is Springsteen’s evocation of real memories and events. He interweaves his songs with stories from his past that link with the songs, and connect with his audience. At the concert I attended, for example, he recounted how, when he was a child, his grandmother’s house in Freehold, New Jersey, was bulldozed to make a church parking lot. (“Another reason to hate Catholicism,” he laughed, and the congregation roared its approval of his remark. “But”—he added—“once you’re in, you’re in.”) He does not just talk about resistance in the abstract, but concretizes it through his own stories, memories, and, of course, songs. In this way, he personalizes the performance so that the performance itself, or rather, his personalizing of the performance, becomes the first instance of a larger posture of resistance to the forces that seek to crush the human spirit. Thus the first opportunity to stand up to the profiteers is now, both for the “preacher” and for the “congregation.” As he tells these stories, Springsteen’s memories touch other memories among those who are listening; his grief touches our grief. And so it makes public what was private, turns personal pain into a shared grief, and transforms individual despair into a solidarity of resistance. That first opportunity to stand up funds other opportunities.

Springsteen is not, of course, offering up only a despairing defiance—he would not have an audience for long if he did. But one does not find much in the way of explicit lyrics of hope, certainly not in the way one did in his earlier work (e.g., the youthful optimism and bravado of “Baby, we were born to run”). Wherein lies the power of his music, then? Though it is not hope, per se, the answer may lie in his lyrics:

Shackled and drawn, shackled and drawn

Pick up the rock, son, carry it on

What’s a poor boy to do but keep singing his song?

And in “Death to My Hometown,” he sings,

Be ready when they come

For they’ll be returning

Sure as the rising sun

Now get yourself a song to sing

And sing it ‘til you’re done

Sing it hard and sing it well

Send the robber barons straight to hell

In words commonly attributed to Maya Angelou, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song,” or, as David Fricke notes more pugnaciously in his review of Wrecking Ball, “In a righteous fight, music is still good ammo.” ⁵

Part of Springsteen’s power lies precisely in his uncanny ability to concretize and personalize injustice through story and evoked memory. The psalmist, too, is not without his arts in concretizing, including, very likely, the intentional positioning of Psalms 72 and 73. ⁶ Psalm 72 is a psalm “for Solomon,” and it is about justice, beginning, “O God, your justice to a king give, and your righteousness to a king’s son” (72:1). More specifically, the psalm evokes the connection between the prosperity the king is to channel for the people and the justice and the righteousness that the king is to uphold. As Brueggemann and Miller suggest, the superscription “for Solomon” has deeply ironic overtones in light of what we know in 1 Kings of Solomon’s incapacity to hold together justice with glory and abundance. He had profited at the expense of his people, oppressing them by extortion, forced labor, unfair taxes, and so forth. The inability to hold together justice and abundance was the reason given for the end of the United Monarchy in 1 Kings. ⁷ Psalm 72, the last psalm in Book II, and so the last of the first half of the psalter, ends on a chill note of reproof and reproach.

Then Psalm 73, the first psalm in Book III of the psalter, and so the beginning of the second half of the Book of Psalms, begins with a reiteration of torah piety (“Truly God is good to Israel, to those pure of heart”), ⁸ similar to the way Psalm 1 begins the whole Psalter. According to Brueggemann and Miller’s reading, Psalm 73 provides an “alternative ‘script’ for monarchy,” in which the royal establishment “turns” away from the path of injustice that Solomon had followed, and instead, in the second half of the psalm, chooses again the path of justice and covenantal faithfulness. ⁹ On this reading of the two psalms, Psalms 72 and 73 concretize injustice, and resistance to it, within Israel’s memory and story. The psalmist’s hearers can call upon their own collective experience in order to understand how Psalm 73 sets the stage for a new beginning of justice and resistance to the injustice that is still pervasive in the land. ¹⁰

Springsteen concerts are not orthodox Christian worship, of course. But they offer elements of public witness that are suggestive for thinking about the Christian life. What does it mean to keep on singing when it looks like the profiteers have it all? Springsteen’s fans are mostly middle-aged now, on the verge of getting their AARP cards, but they come out time after time to the ballpark–cathedral (where he creates a “catholic” body) because this is where he channels their once youthful rebellion and institutionalizes it through memory and song into a permanent posture of resistance, one in which the aging body of the “congregation” finds a new strength and vitality. For them, the answer is to keep on singing, which is the first instance of taking a stand, just as Bruce’s own performance and music embodies resistance.

In her own way the psalmist is working with similar issues: how does one keep on being faithful to God and God’s covenant when, all around, the wicked seem to flourish? The answer for the psalmist, finally, lies in the sanctuary where she can offer her praise to God for what God has done for her, for the larger community of Israel, and for the world. Why? Because it is a public witness in the face of those who oppose God: “It is good for me to be near to God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works” (v. 28). This is her first instance of resisting the oppressors, and it becomes such for all those who take up her psalm after her. Good ammo in a righteous fight.