It was just a passing comment between songs: “I hope you all pray the Psalms.” This was the first time I'd heard John Michael Talbot in concert and I didn’t know what he was talking about. It sounded like a good idea, though, so I tried it, although I floundered a lot at the beginning; most of the Psalms didn't fit my mood at the time I was praying, so what was I to do with them? I have to admit that for the first year or so, my praying of the Psalms was pretty sporadic.
It's usually difficult to tell, at the beginning, whether a new spiritual practice is going to help, especially when it doesn't immediately connect with a felt need. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel in this area: “Believers must be aware that most of the time discipline feels dull and dead. We’re impatient if we have to wait a long time for something, especially in America. If we don’t find instant zest in a discipline, we make a negative snap judgement about it. But often what we describe as deadness, dullness, or boredom is simply our own slow waking up. We just have to live through that. Simple desire for more in our Christian lives is sufficient evidence that the life is there. Be patient and wait. It’s the Spirit’s work. We simply put ourselves in the way of the Spirit so he can work in us” (Living the Message, p. 295).
Historically, the Psalms have had a high priority in the Church. I was interested, around this time, to learn that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a short book entitled Psalms: Prayer Book of the Bible. Here's how he describes the importance of the Psalms for prayer: “In the ancient church it was not unusual to memorize ‘the entire David.’ In one of the eastern churches this was a prerequisite for the pastoral office. The church father St. Jerome says that one heard the Psalms being sung in the fields and gardens in his time. The Psalter impregnated the life of early Christianity. Yet more important than all of this is the fact that Jesus died on the cross with the words of the Psalter on his lips. Whenever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure vanishes from the Christian church. With its recovery will come unsuspected power” (p. 26).
I've come to the conclusion that it’s more important to get started and keep at it than to spend a lot of time at the beginning figuring out how all the Psalms fit into prayer. Questions come up as we’re going along, and these can be sorted out with the help of a few resources. But it's more urgent to establish a consistent habit than to work out a rational explanation for what we're doing.
Often the biggest hurdle is learning how to deal with the Psalms of Vengeance. How can we pray these as followers of Jesus Christ? Many prayer psalters, including the Liturgy of the Hours, either omit these Psalms altogether or remove the most offensive sections. Christians often find them to be an embarrassment. What are we to do with these Psalms?
It's easy enough to simply skip over them in our prayers, writing them off as inconsistent with the further revelation we have in Jesus Christ. Many Christians, understandably, take this approach. But maybe these Psalms have something to offer us that we won't find elsewhere. As Eugene Peterson points out, "The Psalmists are angry people” (Answering God: the Psalms as Tools for Prayer, p. 101). They are angry, but their anger has driven them to God, not away from Him.
Are the angry cries of the psalmists an Old Testament relic, something that belongs to an earlier stage of revelation? As tempting as this might seem, this longing for vengeance is not confined to the Old Testament, as is clear in Paul's words to the Romans: “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). He doesn't instruct Christians to repress the desire for vengeance, but to leave it in God's hands. If this sort of thing is only for those at a more primitive stage of spiritual development, what are we to make of these words in Revelation:“When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. The called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (6:9-10).
It's true that Jesus calls us to pray for our enemies and forgive those who sin against us, but the danger is that we may end up deceiving ourselves, and accepting a counterfeit, by moving too quickly to forgiveness without recognizing and facing what is really in our hearts. The question is how to get from where we are to where we know we should be. And this begins with a recognition of the truth about ourselves: “The articulation of vengeance leads us to a new awareness about ourselves. That is, the yearning for vengeance belongs to any serious understanding of the human personality.... The capacity for hatred belongs to the mystery of personhood. The Psalms are the rhetorical practice in fullest measure of what is in us. John Calvin describes the Psalms as ‘An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul.' And so they are. They tell us about us. The Psalms provide space for full linguistic freedom in which nothing is censored or precluded” (Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, p. 58).
The vengeance Psalms provide a context for facing the worst in our hearts. As much as we want to be like Jesus in asking forgiveness for those who hate us, we can't get there without acknowledging what we really feel. Peterson recommends a way through, rather than around these Psalms: “For those who are troubled about the psalms of vengeance, there is a way beyond them. But that way is not easy or ‘natural.’ It is not the way of careless religious goodwill. It is not the way of moral indifference or flippancy. It is, rather, the way of crucifixion, of accepting the rage and grief and terror of evil in ourselves in order to be liberated for compassion toward others.... My hunch is that there is a way beyond the psalms of vengeance, but it is a way through them and not around them. And that is so because of what in fact goes on with us. Willy nilly, we are vengeful creatures. Thus these harsh psalms must be fully embraced as our own. Our rage and indignation must be fully owned and fully expressed. Then (and only then) can our rage and indignation be yielded to the mercy of God. In taking this route through the Psalms, we take the route God has gone. We are not permitted a cheaper, easier, more ‘enlightened’ way” (p. 68). The Psalms are part of God's Word and are safe -- all of them -- as a school for prayer, training us to bring the full range of our emotions into God's presence where they can be transformed. It's our hearts, not the Psalms, that need cleansing.
No comments:
Post a Comment