Psalm 37:1-9 Commentary

We can probably describe Psalm 37 as taking the long look.  Although the Revised Common Lectionary gives us just shy of a quarter of the longer psalm, the first 9 verses do deliver a good capsule summary of the rest of the song as well.  The basic message is simple: don’t fret when evil people seem to get away with it.  There is a longer look to be had here and a longer cosmic run to take into consideration.  And in that longer look and run God will make sure that the books of justice balance out in the end.

It is true that wicked folks seem to profit from their nasty ways.  And it’s properly galling to witness.  So much so that the temptation is to take matters into our own hands.  We will ensure that evil actions receive their due consequences, that the ones we know are guilty will be punished.  Call it the pursuit of justice, call it fighting fire with fire, or call it whatever you like.  But in the absence of anybody else doing something (God included), we will tend to these wicked folks ourselves.

To that line of thought Psalm 37 says, “No.”  The counsel seems to be “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”  But it’s vital to see the rationale behind this seemingly passive posture.  What needs to precede our not swinging into action ourselves is a whole-hearted placement of trust in God alone.  “God’s got this thing” the psalmist as good as conveys.  Our not taking matters into our own hands is not a sign that we don’t care about justice or seeing the wicked put down.  We care passionately about it in fact but we have to leave this to God because on our own, there is far too much danger that in attacking people in the name of a higher justice, we end up behaving too much like those very people ourselves.

The problem with fighting fire with fire is that we are as a matter of fact guilty of starting fires ourselves and no matter how noble our motivations may be, we get tainted in the process.  Our taking on wicked folks “only leads to evil” as Psalm 37:8 says.

But when we take this longer look, it’s not just that God will deal with rotten people.  The flipside of that long-look coin is that God will reward the righteous handsomely.  The desires of our hearts will be granted.  We will be led to a good and settled life, basking in the presence of our loving God in Christ.  If we see rotten people getting ahead and honest, hardworking people falling behind and if we say in response, “That’s not right,” God agrees.  So he will make it right in the end by not only dealing with those who deserve to be thwarted and punished but by blessing richly the people on the other side of this spectrum.

Let’s be clear: none of this is easy.  It is nauseating to see people succeed who clearly are badly motivated, who are racist, sexist, and cruel.  What’s more, it’s galling to see such people being cheered on and adored by people who are either a lot like the rotten folks in the world or who wish they could succeed at being that rotten themselves.  Crowds will cheer and applaud the most appalling things, and the rest of us who know what is what find ourselves becoming sick and angry at the same time.

And so Psalm 37’s counsel to wait it out is hard.  But it need not mean that we don’t witness to what is right and point out what is wrong.  It’s just that if and when that seems to accomplish very little, we don’t then take the next steps to enter the wicked fray ourselves.  Again, not easy.  In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., is the most impassioned when addressing the advice being doled out to black people (including from King’s fellow members of the clergy) to “Wait.”  King made it clear they could not wait for the coming of racial equality for all.  Even so, King of course refrained from returning evil for evil, violence for violence and that much is surely in keeping with Psalm 37.  But he still advocated to his dying day for a more just and fair society in the United States.

Psalm 37 contains a fair number of quite lyric verses.  And when you read it, you know the psalmist is right.  But hidden behind the lyric phrases and standing right next to our sense that the psalmist is correct there is the difficult fact that this is hard to do.  But that is why it is finally a matter of having faith and putting our trust in the God who, although he may appear blind to what is going on all around us in this fractured world, sees everything with perfect moral clarity.  If our Triune God is who we Christians believe God to be, then we know God is holy and will not in the end let all that is unholy stand.  To quote from another song that maybe is taking into consideration some of the same unhappy facts of life as Psalm 37, we can recall The Beatles line from the song “Let It Be”: “When the brokenhearted people living in this world agree, there will be an answer.  Let it be.”

Or as the psalmist put it in verse 7, “Be still before the Lord, wait patiently for him.”

Illustration Idea

In a recent podcast I did with the scholar John Goldingay, I noted that in his commentaries on the Psalms he prefers not to use the term “lament” but instead talks about Psalms of Protest.  I asked why he made that choice and Goldingay said that anyone can lament.  You don’t need to be a person of faith, much less specifically be Jewish or Christian, to lament bad circumstances.  You don’t need to believe in God to lament.  But protest is different.  Because when you protest, you protest to someone and in the case of the psalms, such protests are made to God.

Psalm 37 is of course a long way from a Psalm of Protest or Lament.  However, it does reflect the reality of those many other psalms that do engage in protesting before God because what we protest is the very fact that Psalm 37 lays out: bad people often prosper.  Psalm 37 counsels us to trust in God to take care of these incidents of injustice and it tells us to avoid taking matters into our own hands.   But this psalmist knew as well as the psalmists of protest that when something is not right, we tell God about it and plead with God to make all things right in the end.