Divine Abortion

I once read about a pastor whose liturgy called for the reading of a Psalm at the end of Sunday worship, then the pronouncement of a parting benediction. A lectionary selected the reading for each week. As the service flowed smoothly toward its conclusion, the pastor, swathed in robe and stole, entered the pulpit to waft the lovely words of divinely inspired Hebrew poetry over the congregation. Unfortunately, a busy week of pastoral duties had prevented her from checking in advance which particular Psalm appeared in that week’s rotation. Thus it transpired that the minister’s final two words to the assembled saints were:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

followed by:

Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord!

Bummer!

The 137th Psalm horrifies us, as it should, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. We think we are too good for it; perhaps we are not in fact good enough.

Two factors come into play: First of all, the ancients did exactly this kind of thing as a means of exterminating an enemy nation: no sons, no successors. (See 2 K 25.7.) Second, we must remember that this is a poem. In his commentary on the passage, John Goldingay asserts that “Daughter of Babylon,” while literally accurate, would better be translated, “Madame Babylon,” or even “Mother Babylon.” This makes sense in light of John’s metaphor on Revelation 17.5. Thus the “infants” in question are not the literal babies of actual Babylonian women, but the future of the empire itself.

While that reading may produce a sigh of relief, it shouldn’t.

Taken this way, Psalm 137 becomes a manifesto against systemic injustice. The psalmist recognizes that the deaths of this or that Babylonian ruler or soldier will not suffice. As with a drama, putting different actors in the same role will not flip the script. No matter who plays King Claudius in Hamlet, there’s still something rotten in the state of Denmark. The removal of this or that bad person, even the repentance from this or that bad action, offers far too civilized a response to injustice. Only spiritual genocide will do the job.

C. S. Lewis claims that if we understand these infants to be the small seeds sown by our sin nature, “the advice of the Psalm is the best: Knock the little bastards’ brains out.” True, but Lewis reads as individual what the psalmist experienced as systemic. God’s Word incites us to rage in prayer against every organized entity, every culture, every power that thrives on the subjugation of others.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own being?”

That line also cuts through every human institution - every school, every committee, every government, every church. And who is willing to bash the brains out of the very things that insure the survival of our way of life?

Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.