Series: Dwelling in the Psalms
September 13, 2026
As we dwell
in the Psalms, we must take the time to consider our enemies. Enemies. It is
not only that there are natural difficulties in the journey and physical
challenges. There are people out there who wish us ill. So, the psalmist takes
time to begin working this through.
One way to do it is through revenge. Maybe you have heard the old Irish prayer, which I first heard it from a priest named McGowan. He was called upon to offer a blessing, and this is what he said:
May those who love us love us,
and those who do not love us, may God turn their hearts,
and if God cannot turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles
that we may know them by their limping.
We laughed when he told it at the
Rubber Chicken banquet. It seemed so Irish: the joyfulness, the turn of the
phrase, the little twist of judgment that would seem so delightful (“that we
may know them by their limping”). We laughed because it seemed so funny.
Vindictive, but funny.
In the Bible’s prayer book, we have
a psalm that sounds like this. Psalm 129 is a prayer for the downfall of
Israel’s enemies. The Psalmist stops in his tracks, shakes his fist in the air,
and hurls a curse: “May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned backward!”
Or to put it another way, “Lord, give them a little limp!”
Notice, if you will, that
the Psalmist does not use ink in scripture to call down judgment on his
personal enemies – say, on the butcher who cheats him or the neighbor who dumps
dirty dishwater on the lawn. Rather, this is righteous anger. He is angry with
God’s enemies, the ones who “hate Zion,” the ones who disrespect the ways and
the worship of God. He prays that their hatred will cause public shame to heap on
their heads. He wants those who despise God’s presence on the earth to be exposed
and embarrassed.
But he cannot keep it
there, so he offers another little curse. Apparently, the Psalmist looks around
the countryside, and his imagination begins to flutter. He sees the peasant
housing with rooftops made from sod. What’s more, it must have been another sweltering
day in Palestine, for he says,
- Let them be like the grass on the housetops that withers before it grows up,
- Let them be like the grass which reapers can’t use or share with the farm animal.
- Let them be like the ones who will not hear the blessing of the Lord.
In other words, “So there,
you dried-up rooftops!” That doesn’t translate really well, but we hear the
gist of it. We have all heard, or uttered, more afflictive curses. For
instance, there is the curse uttered by a Jewish comic: “May all of your teeth
fall out, except for the one tooth that gives you a toothache.” Or there is the
response of the Palestinian shepherd: “May the fleas of a thousand camels
infest your armpits!” Somehow when the Psalmist curses, “May you become like
dried grass on a rooftop,” it does not quite cut it. But we understand the
sentiment.
At a high school reunion a few
years ago, I caught up with a classmate who hasn’t seen his daughter in many
years. His ex-wife has primary custody of the girl and moved away without saying
a word. That was not their agreement. He hired a private detective and tracked
them down. Then he appeared on the doorstep. The mother called the police,
accusing him of stalking. It descended from there.
We know these stories. Some among
us know them painfully well. Wishing for fleas or turned ankles are mild
punishments compared to some of the dark curses that can invade the heart.
People are capable of doing horrendous things to one another. Then they
perpetuate the warfare. I hear weariness when the Psalmist says, “Often they
have attacked me from my youth . . . they have taken a farm plow and run it
across my back so that the furrows are deep.”
We have known people who love to
pick a fight, just because they are not comfortable living in peace. When
things go too quietly, they share a gossiping word, speak the innuendo, or play
people off one another like pawns in a chess game. Sometimes they do it because
they are bored. Or because they are cruel. Once in a while, the motivation is
that they cannot live with peace and quiet.
In other situations, it can be a sense
of justice that stirs the pot. For some people, it is the feeling that fairness
would not be fair. A woman was recently arrested for setting her own home on
fire. She explained by saying, “The judge told me that I had to sell the house
and share the profits with my estranged husband, but I could not bear to have
him end up with so much.” Well, guess what - she received her wish. Now she has
a lot of time to think about what she did.
In spite of each situation and its
bag of tangled truths, the one thing we can say about our enemies is that they can
be enormous distractions from the pilgrim road. Enemies tie up our courtrooms
and tangle up our hearts. They provoke us, sometimes without our conscious
awareness. They prompt us to consider violence. And it is not only our enemies
who consume us – some time the very ways we respond to them will consume us.
As Frederick Buechner once described the unsavory truth,
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back -- in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.[1]
We laughed
when the Irish priest prayed for God to twist the ankles of our enemies. But
some of that laughter was nervous. It is simply not healthy to live by revenge.
Revenge has uncertain benefits. As Mahatma Gandhi is reported to have said, “If
you live by the rule of an eye for an eye, pretty soon the whole world is
blind.” Somehow the animosity must cease. We have to let it go.
In the
center of the psalm is the important affirmation: “The Lord is righteous.” God
sees things without the scalding tears of hostility. God is the judge who can make
things right. God is the One who stands outside the circle of our disputes. God
is concerned but immovable, loving, but unable to be bribed.
God’s righteousness is clearly
revealed when the world crucifies his own Son, and neither one of them
retaliates in revenge. Instead, we hear our Jesus say, “Father, forgive them,
they don’t know what they are doing.” Our hope is always that God has answered
that prayer, that God continues to answer that prayer, for the Lord alone is
righteous. Forgiveness is the way of God with infinite mercy. Frustrating as it
might possibly be, God inevitably sets everything right.
There is a sadly comic scene in the
biblical short story of Jonah. As you may remember, Jonah was a reluctant
prophet. When sent to preach doom and gloom to the nasty people of Nineveh, he
hopped on a ship to go in the opposite direction. God used a storm and a gigantic
fish to return Jonah to shore and redirects him to his commission. Bleached
white by the gastric juices of the fish’s stomach, the prophet hobbles his way
to Nineveh, preaches his fiery sermon, and waits for God to blast away his
enemies.
However, the people of Nineveh
change their minds, and that changes God’s mind. The moment of judgment never
comes. Jonah is furious. As the poet Thomas John Carlisle voices the prophet’s
fury, “I hate God’s enemies with a perfect hatred; why can’t God do likewise?”[2]
The best answer: because this is
not the kind of God that we have. God did not condemn the world for killing
Jesus, deciding instead to transform the world through the power of
forgiveness.
Ever so quietly, the psalmist
remembers that we are not defined by our enemies, but by the covenant love of
God. We have felt the plow cutting on our backs, but our enemies have not had
the last word. “God has cut the bonds of the wicked,” so we are no longer tied
down, tied up, or twisted into knots. It is possible to be cut free. Let the
angry burden go. You have carried it long enough. Let it go. Let God set you
free.
Many years ago, our church had a
congregational memorial service on a Sunday afternoon. It was the season of Lent;
first time we ever tried such a service. After a brief sermon and a hymn, we invited
people forward to light a candle on the communion table and speak the name of
somebody who has passed away, somebody for whom they still mourn. It was a
powerful moment.
A young woman named Helen attended with
her husband and three children. They came forward and lit a candle as a family.
Her husband had recently lost his mother, so he spoke her name, paused for a
moment of silence, wiped away a few tears, and they returned to their seats.
A few
minutes later, Helen came back, this time by herself. She lit another candle
and said another name. It was a name I had never heard, loud and clear, and I
wouldn’t have thought anything of it except for the strange look that was on
her face.
The
memorial service ended, and everybody scattered. A few hours later, I received
an e-mail from Helen. “I surprised myself,” she said. “I never thought I could
say that name. I don’t know where this is going. Could we get together and
talk?”
We sat in
my study the next morning and the story came tumbling out. It was her brother’s
name, and he had been dead for sixteen years. This was the first time she
allowed herself to speak his name. The two of them were the children of a
minister and her brother Eric had a full-blown rebellion as a teenager. “To say
that he and my father didn’t get along would be a gross understatement,” she
said. Their relationship grew violent. They threatened to actively do harm to
one another.
The
situation became so bad that Eric sat down and wrote a letter. He renounced his
father and everything he stood for, cursed him for this reason and that, and
then went to his bedroom and took his own life. The final insult is that he did
it on Good Friday, while his father was leading a worship service at a nearby
church.
The father
was not to be outdone. He refused to print an obituary. He refused to allow a
funeral for his son. He arranged for a quick cremation and told mother and
sister they would scatter the ashes later at their summer home in the
mountains. Then the father decreed the name of his son would never again be
spoken in his home.
Sixteen
years later, Helen came down the aisle in our church. For the first time in
years, she spoke her brother’s name. “I don’t know where this is going,” she
said, “but I need to put it to rest.”
She said the one continuing
reminder of her brother was his duffel bag. After he died, the parents cleaned
out his room. They gave Helen his duffel bag. Not knowing what else to do with
it, unable to throw it away, she carried that baggage with her for the next
sixteen years.
Now it was
time to let go of the burden. About a week later Helen, her husband, and I gathered
at a country cemetery up in hills near Uniondale. Helen had a shoebox with a
scoop or two of soil from the backyard where her brother’s ashes had been
scattered, the charred remains of that duffel bag which she decided to carry no
longer, and a letter of reconciliation that she wrote to her brother. We laid those
relics in the ground and gave her brother a proper funeral.
Sooner or later, we must put things
to rest. We have the power to lay our burdens down. We leave them in the hands
of the God who alone is righteous, a God in whose justice the whole world has
its hope.
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