Psalm 69:7-10, (11-15), 16-18 Commentary

The Year A Lectionary has carved out the precise center of Psalm 69, joining the psalm’s action after the first 6 verses that set the stage for a beleaguered psalmist crying for help and then stopping short of a string of verses that call down harsh judgment on the poet’s enemies before the song concludes with vows to praise and thank God for the very deliverance most of the psalm pleads for.

Throughout this psalm the posture of the psalmist is curious.  On the one hand in verse 5 the psalmist acknowledges some degree of personal folly and says God knows the guilt he rightly has accrued.  But then starting in verse 7 the psalmist paints himself as someone who is the target of a lot of scorn precisely because of his clear connection to God.  When people insult God, the insult is felt by the psalmist.  When the psalmist laments or puts on sackcloth or does other acts of piety, he is derided by his apparent legion of enemies.  His own family seems not to understand him and so is estranged from him.  All in all, this psalm paints a very bleak picture.

So the writer continues to cry out to God, pleading for mercy, for understanding, and for deliverance above all.  And it is all premised on the reality of how many foes and enemies he has.  And as mentioned above, there is a whole section of Psalm 69 that calls for those enemies to themselves suffer shame and a reversal of fortune.  The writer wants their eyes to be darkened, for God’s wrath to be poured out on them, for them to be charged with crime upon crime, for them to have no share in salvation and indeed to be blotted from God’s Book of Life.

This man seriously loathes and hates these people!

And just there is the rub for us now as New Testament believers in (and followers of) Jesus Christ the Lord.  Jesus acknowledged in his teachings that the Old Testament / the Jewish Scriptures contained “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” language of vengeance and retribution but he also made it clear he had come to rise above and transcend all that and to usher in a Kingdom of God that would not be characterized by people smacking their lips over the prospect of bad people getting their due comeuppance.  We are to pray for enemies, forgive foes, be deferential to those unkind to us, and just generally hope they arrive at a better place in their own lives.  It is all that “You have heard it said . . .  but I say to you” stuff in places like the Sermon on the Mount.

So what do we do with Psalm 69 (and yes, I realize the Lectionary technically would us avert our eyes from the calling down of judgement but we cannot pretend it’s not a major part of this psalm and anyway all of that is an extension of the part we are looking at where the reality of the psalmist’s enemies are detailed).  Well, we can at the very least see reflected in the many psalms that include such imprecatory language that this is a tacit acknowledgement that we can and do all feel this way toward crooked and twisted people in our lives.  The darker wishes of this psalmist where his enemies are concerned occur to us too and let’s not pretend otherwise.  Feeling this way happens to us all so then the question is: What do we do with that fact?

The answer has to include our allowing Jesus to temper those gut reactions so that we do not actually follow through on them either in what we ask God to do to these rotten folks or what we ourselves actively do to them in rash deeds of revenge much less of violence.

Of course, there is a difference between wanting to see vengeance and wanting to see justice.  We can and should hope that in the long run of the cosmos that God will see to the balancing out of the books, to yielding an opinion on what has all along been upright and what has all along been corrupt and evil and twisted.  What’s more, we trust God to do what is right and if in the end that means God treats those who have committed crimes and acts of wickedness differently than we might have wished, then once again our posture should be one of trust in God and his vastly greater sense for what constitutes justice compared to our own ideas.

Life is difficult.  Other people can be difficult and some can be downright wicked.  That makes all these matters fraught at best.  Since Psalm 69 is itself a prayer to God in the face of all this, it is a good reminder that we all do well to remain constantly in prayer to guide us along in our lives, including down paths of justice, love, and compassion—the trail blazed by our Master and Lord Jesus Christ.

Illustration Idea

In a scene from the TV series The West Wing as President Bartlet prepares for a debate with the Republican presidential candidate running against him, the President asks his staff to do a quick debate drill.  It turns out the whole scene is a spoof on the President’s Communications Director Toby Ziegler to see if Toby could hold it together when the President (intentionally) appears to be woefully unprepared for the debate on one particular question.  As part of the mock debate drill, Toby asks the President if he would favor the death penalty in case his daughter Zoe were raped and murdered.  The President fumbles, gives a rather bloodless and academic answer, and so Toby explodes and tells him what he should have said, which is that of course he would want his daughter’s rapist/murder put to death in the cruelest way possible.  You can see the scene here.

That scene no doubt sprang from a real-life political moment from 1988 when presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was asked at a debate if he would favor the death penalty for someone in case they had raped and murdered Dukakis’s own wife, Kitty.  You can see that debate moment here and for Dukakis this became a defining moment in that his dispassionate and robotic answer felt less than true, less than human.  As in the fictional West Wing scene, what people wanted to see was a loving husband saying that of course he would want his wife’s rapist and murderer killed but that is why it is a good thing that victims of crimes and even the President of the United States do not get to make those decisions.  Some decisions for justice need to be left in the hands of others.

And when it comes to cosmic justice for evildoers, that was the point made in this commentary in terms of how we Christians parse and make sense out of Psalm 69-like wishes for the destruction of our enemies.  We admit our own anger over evil and what we would like to do to those who commit acts of violence and treachery.  But we leave all this in the far better and wiser hands of our God.