April 4thPrayer: Challenging Power
Psalm #58
*NOTE: Occasionally I will write on a psalm out of order to address a current reality. This week we look at Psalm 58 in light of the violence in Ukraine.
Throughout the book of Psalms there is a special category known as ‘communal lament’ or imprecatory psalms. These prayers call down a curse for calamity, destruction, and God’s judgment on God’s enemies. Psalm 58 is one such prayer.
58-1-5 – here the psalmist addresses the rulers who seem steeped in evil, violence and injustice. In short, the governance of the unjust is a reign of terror, the very opposite of the reign of God.
58.6-9 – the psalmist’s prayer intensifies. The language is violent:
6 Break off their fangs, O God!
Smash the jaws of these lions, O Lord!
7 May they disappear like water into thirsty ground.
Make their weapons useless in their hands.
8 May they be like snails that dissolve into slime,
like a stillborn child who will never see the sun.
58-10-11 – but now the psalmist’s prayer moves to affirmation. The main characters are the same – the wicked, the righteous, and God – but it is God who is the primary actor and who alone is sovereign. The prayer affirms that the apparent power and misrule of the wicked will be ended. The ‘violence on earth’ will be replaced by the work of a God ‘who establishes justice on earth.’
The ongoing unjust war in Ukraine has brought many Christians to reflect on how we should pray for the conflict and especially for those who have begun the war and continue the carnage and death. I offer a few thoughts here:
- It is revealing that the righteous do not carry out the vengeance but are witnesses to it.
- This prayer is the desperate prayer of a powerless people threatened by powerful people who dangerous as deadly snakes or the fangs of a young lion.
- The word ‘reward’ (v.11) suggests that those living in dependence on God will bear the good fruit that comes with justice.
- We remember that throughout the book of Psalms and the entire Bible, the proclamation of God’s reign is eschatological. Such good news is proclaimed even amid circumstances that seem to deny it. It was no different for Jesus. Jesus’ reward for his life and witness was a cross and he promised followers the same. Yet he taught us to live in dependence upon God and wait patiently for the fullness of the kingdom: ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’
- While Jesus Himself quoted some imprecatory psalms (John 2.17; 15.25), He also instructed us to love our enemies and pray for them (Matthew 5.44-48). It is not sinful to pray the imprecatory psalms against our enemies, but we should also pray with compassion and love and even thanksgiving for people who are under evil’s influence. We should desire their salvation. After all, God “is patient . . . not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3). Above all things, we should seek the will of God in everything we do and, when we are wronged, leave the ultimate outcome to the Lord (Romans 12.19).
- “As Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann has reflected, the imprecatory psalms put words to our thirst for vengeance. In praying these psalms, we process our rage and give our violent impulses over to God. “O God, break the teeth in their mouths,” one psalmist prays; “let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime” (Psalm 58:6, 8).I’m all for this kind of prayer. I’m all for praying the entire range of the psalms — even the ones that sometimes make us uncomfortable or aren’t necessarily welcome in church. And if there is any occasion for an imprecatory psalm, certainly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in all of its brutality and sheer horror, is one of those occasions.” [Liz Coolidge Jenkins]
We should struggle with such prayers. We should also remember that we do so from an incredibly privileged and safe vantage point. Nevertheless, solidarity with the Ukrainian people demands our fervent prayer support. And we must open our borders to assisting those seeking safety and new homes.