Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The psalms teach us to pray, “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!” (Psalm 137:8-9, NRSV)
How do we reconcile Jesus’ command to love and forgive our enemies with the imprecatory psalms? The book of Psalms is filled with language calling for the judgment, death, and destruction of our enemies. Is this not at odds with the basic teachings of Jesus?
I remember the first time I truly paid attention to the words of Psalm 137. My initial reaction was relief. No, I was not relieved to hear about babies being dashed against rocks! But I was relieved to see and hear raw, human honesty in prayer. As I grew up in the church I had come to believe that most Godly people have their thoughts and emotions under control. If the Bible said to do something, they just did it without a second thought. Or, if they could not manage it, they faked it. There seemed little room for acknowledgement of sinful thoughts, feelings, and actions among the people of God.
Yet here in this psalm we read an unapologetic display of hatred. The psalmist deeply hated the Babylonians and Edomites. There is no other word to describe what is revealed in this psalm other than “hate”. Forget for a moment how we reconcile this hate with the command of Jesus to love. Appreciate the honesty of the psalmist to name hate for hate. He does not “churchify” his words or language. He does not scold himself for sinful thoughts or feelings. He speaks exactly what is in his heart and he speaks it in prayer to God. I find Psalm 137 a relief because it teaches us to give voice to what is actually true about us and not what we want to be true about us. Euguene Peterson says, “We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be.”* Jesus may teach us to love our enemies, but the truth is that for an enemy to be an enemy, there is a hatred that first has to be acknowledged and prayed.
On September 11th, 2001, few Americans saw the twin towers fall only to think: I love the people who did this! As much as we would like to have the assumed response of a saint and respond to every act of injustice with love, we often respond to evil with anger and even hatred. This is understandable. It even speaks to something good about us: we care about evil and injustice. We are not apathetic to the suffering of others. Before we can love an enemy, we have to be able to name them as an enemy.
When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is not speaking in the abstract. In his context, he was speaking of the Romans who were oppressing his people. Enemies have names and faces. They have done things to harm us. We cannot rightly call them “enemies” if our feelings toward them are affection and gratitude.
Perhaps the imprecatory psalms can be thought of as a primer, a necessary first step to loving our enemies. Before we can love our enemies, we first have to name our enemies. Once we name our enemies we then have to acknowledge our hatred of them. We must voice our rage. Yet this is not an act of self-expression so much as an act of offering. We pray the imprecatory psalms with the intent of giving our rage to God.
The Christian response when confronted with an enemy is to love them. Because this is not our initial response, we begin with prayer. Instead of taking our rage out on our enemies on the one hand, or bottling it inside ourselves on the other, the imprecatory psalms give us an opportunity to present it before God so that he can heal it. Oftentimes when we pray to God about someone else (whether for their healing or judgment), we want God to do something for or to that other person or people. But when we pray we discover that we are often the one whom God wants to heal and judge.
We come to God in rage over what someone else has done, and this is good. It is a necessary first step for healing. But then rather than addressing our enemies, God addresses us. God receives our rage and cools it with his love and grace. God reminds us of our own sins that need to be confessed, forgiven, and healed. God deals with us in prayer rather than our enemies. And in praying out our hatred, God receives it and gives it back to us as love.
We cannot love our enemies, if they are truly enemies, without the sanctifying grace of God. Only when we pray our hatred can God transform our hatred into love. The imprecatory psalms are thus not at odds with the words of Jesus, but are given to us to help us honestly attain Jesus’ calling and the command he gives us. “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19, CEB).
* Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 100.
The Local Pastor 
Brilliant, Andrew. Good thinking and good writing. Well done.
Psalm 137 has long been a favorite of mine, largely for the reasons you describe so well.
A couple of additional thoughts. In Israel’s use of the Psalms, they were prayed in series. One, two, three through to 150. No jumping around. No praying the nice ones and ignoring the nasty ones, like 137. With that in mind, notice 136 and 138. One thirty six has a chorus, every other line is “God’s love never quits.” One thirty eight is also a prayer of praise, focused on our Lord. That’s the Psalm-text context for 137.
The psalms are perhaps the Bible’s most-edited book. The editors knew what they were doing. They were geniuses.
The second thought is to remember the psalms are prayers, not instructions. They are not proscriptive, telling us what to do, they are descriptive, telling our listening God what we feel, experience, think–our best and our worst, with openness and honesty and sometimes gritty truth.
You caught that in your comments. I really like what you wrote and they way you invite us to feel free to pray our lives, with all the mess that our lives usually (always?) are or hold, including unpleasant and ugly things like hate.
Thank you, Andrew. Thank you.
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