The text: Psalm 109 – NRSV
When I was much younger, a friend surprised me one day by saying something like “I was so made today that I had to go yell at God!” Never had I heard someone claim to be mad at God. It gave me pause. So today we come to a type of Psalm that may likewise give us pause, as it doesn’t appear to be the kind of song that has a place in polite company. This is not a psalm you will likely hear read in church or at weddings, funerals, or almost any other occasion for that matter. The psalm is like a lament, but the emotions are more raw, and there are calls for retribution or even violence. Such psalms (yes, there are others) are often called imprecatory psalms, literally psalms that call down a curse. What is something like this doing in Scripture? We might feel ourselves recoiling from this text, much like we might recoil from another person who is raging or in agony. These parts of human experience—pain, suffering, anger, despair—make us uncomfortable. Nevertheless they are very much part of being human, and we have all experienced them, and know that we will experience them in the future. That, I think, is a big reason why these psalms exist, because the psalms express the full range of human emotions. Like we discussed when considering Psalm 10, God is very familiar with these emotions, and God does not recoil from us when we experience them. It reminds me of the story of the Good Samaritan. In that story, to whom is the character of God drawn? From whom do the outwardly “good” people recoil and avoid? Pointedly, the psalmist in v. 22 makes the central claim: For I am poor and needy. It is no longer someone else who is least and lost, it is I. In this sense, the psalm is a profound testament of faith, as the God who cares for the poor and needy will certainly care for us when we find ourselves down and out. Perhaps this Lent, when we feel the presence of enemies at the gate and need to yell at God, this psalm can be a prayer for us.
Perhaps another illustration may help. When I was a teenage my mother would say to people that when she came home after work, she could always tell what kind of mood I was in by the kind of music I was playing on the piano. When I was upset, bothered, or angry, I reliably found that an appropriately angry passage from Beethoven, Brahms, or Rachmaninoff would do the trick. No matter how hard I would throw myself and my disquiet at the instrument, all that would come out is music.
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