156 ....(Psalm) 109 it ends with a verse which every christian can at once make his own: the Lord is 'the prisoner's friend', standing by the poor (or friendless ) to save him from unjust judges.this is one of the characteristic notes of the psalms and one of the things for which we love them. it anticipates the temper of the magnificat. it is hardly to be paralleled in Pagan literature (the Greek gods were very active in casting down the proud, but hardly in raising the humble). it will commend itself even to a modern unbeliever of good will; he may call it wishful thinking, but he will respect the wish, in a word, if we read only the last verse we should feel in full sympathy with this psalmist. but the moment we look back at what precedes that verse, he turns out to be removed from us by infinite distances; or, worse still, to be loathsomely akin to that in us which it is the main business of life to purge away. psalm 109 is an unabashed hymn of hate as was ever written. the poet has a detailed programme for his enemy which he hopes God will carry out. the enemy is to be placed under a wicked ruler. he is to have 'an accuser' perpetually at his side: whether an evil spirit, a
157 'Satan', as our Prayer Book version renders it, or merely a human accuser - a spy, an agent provocateur, a member of the secret police (v5). if the enemy attempts to have any religious life, this, far from improving his position, must make him even worse: 'let his prayer be turned into sin (v.6) and after his death - which had better, please, be early (v7) - his widow and children and descendants are to live in unrelieved misery (vv8-12). what makes our blood run cold, even more than the unrestrained vindictiveness, is the writer's untroubled conscience. he has no qualms, scruples or reservations; no shame. he gives hatred free rein - encourages and spurs it on - in a sort of ghastly innocence. he offers these feelings, just as they are, to God, never doubting that they will be acceptable: turning straight from the maledictions to 'deal thou with me, O Lord God, according unto Thy Name: for sweet is Thy mercy' (v. 20).
the man himself, of course, lived very long ago. his injuries may have been (humanly speaking) beyond endurance. he was doubtless a hot-blooded barbarian, more like a modern child than a modern man. and though we believe (and can even see from the last verse) that some knowledge of the real god had come to his race, yet he lived in the cold of the year, the early spring of Revelation and those first gleams of knowledge were like snow drops, exposed to the frosts. for him, then, there may have been excuses. but we - what good can we find in reading such stuff?
one good, certainly. we have here an uninhibited expression of those feelings which oppression and injustice naturally produce. the psalm is a portrait: under it should be written 'this is what you make of a man by ill-treating him. in a modern child or savage the results might be
158 be exactly the same. in a modern, western European adult - especially if he were a professing christian - they would be more sophisticated; disguised as a disinterested love of justice, claiming to be concerned with the good of society. but under that disguise and none the better for it in the sight of God, the feelings might still be there...now in a case of what we ordinarily call 'seduction' (that is sexual seduction) we should think it monstrous to dwell on the guilt of the party who yielded to temptation and ignore that of the party who tempted. but every injury or oppression is equally a temptation, a temptation to hatred and in that sense a seduction. whenever we have wronged our fellow man, we have tempted him to be such a man as wrote psalm 109. we may have repented of our wrong: we do not always know if he has repented of his hatred. how do accounts now stand between us if he has not?
I do not know the answer to that question. but I am inclined to think that we had better look unflinchingly at the sort of work we have done: like puppies, we must have 'our noses rubbed in it'. a man, now penitent, who has once seduced and abandoned a girl and then lost sight of her, had better not avert his eyes from the crude realities of the life she may now be living. for the same reason we ought to read the psalms that curse the oppressor; read them with fear. who knows what imprecations of the same sort have been uttered against ourselves? what prayers have Red men, and Black and Brown and Yellow, sent up against us to their gods or sometimes to God Himself? all over the earth the White man's offence 'smells to heaven': massacres, broken treaties, theft, kidnappings, enslavement,
159 deportment, floggings, lynchings, beatings-up, rape, insult, mockery and odious hypocrisy make up that smell. but the thing comes nearer than that. those of us who have little authority, who have few people at our mercy, may be thankful. but how if one is an officer in the army (or , perhaps worse, and N.C,O.)? a hospital matron? a magistrate? a prison-warden? a school prefect? a trade-union official? a Boss of any sort? in a word, anyone who cannot be'answered back'? it is hard enough , even with the best will in the world, to be just. it is hard, under the pressure of haste, uneasiness, ill-temper, self-complacency and conceit, even to continue intending justice. power corrupts; the 'insolence of office' will creep in. we see it so clearly in our superiors; is it unlikely that our inferiors see it in us? how many of those who have seen over us did not sometimes (perhaps often) need our forgiveness? be sure that we likewise need the forgiveness of those that are under us.
we may not always receive it. they may not be christians at all. they may not be far enough on the way to master that hard work of forgiveness which we have set them. bitter, chronic resentment, unsuccessfully resisted or not resisted at all, may be burning against us: the spirit, essentially, of psalm 109.
I do not mean that God hears and will grant such prayers as that psalmist uttered. they are wicked. he condemns them. all resentment is sin. and we may hope that those things which our inferiors resent were not really half so bad as they imagine. the snub was unintentional; the high-handed behaviour on the bench was due to ignorance and an uneasy awareness of one's own incapacity; the seemingly unfair distribution of work was not really unfair, or not intended to be; the inexplicable personal dislike
160 for one particular inferior, so obvious to him and to some of his fellows, is something of which we are genuinely unconscious (it appears in our conscious mind as discipline, or the need for making an example). anyway, it is very wicked of them to hate us. yes; but the folly consists in supposing that God sees the wickedness in them apart from the wickedness in us which provoked it. they sin by hatred because we tempted them. we have, in that sense, seduced, debauched them. they are, as it were, the mothers of this hatred: we are the fathers.
it is from this point of view that the Magnificat is terrifying. if there are two things in the Bible which should make our blood run clod, it is one; the other is that phrase in Revelation, 'the wrath of the Lamb. if there is not mildness in the Virgin mother, if even the lamb, the helpless thing that bleats and has its throat cut, is not the symbol of the harmless, where shall we turn? the resemblance between the magnificat and traditional Hebrew poetry which I noted above is no mere literary curiosity. there is, of course, a difference. there are no cursings here, no hatred, no self-righteousness. instead, there is mere statement. He has scattered the proud, cast down the mighty, sent the rich empty away. I spoke just now of the ironic contrast between the fierce psalmists and the choir-boy's treble. the contrast is here brought up to a higher level. once more we have the treble voice, a girl's voice, announcing without sin that the sinful prayers of her ancestors do not remain entirely unheard; and doing this, not indeed with fierce exultation, yet - who can mistake the tone? in a clam and terrible gladness.
I am tempted here to digress for a moment into a speculation which may bring ease to us in one direction while it alarms us in another. christians are unhappily
161 divided about the kind of honour in which the Mother of the Lord should be held, but there is one truth about which no doubt seems admissible. if we believe in the Virgin Birth and if we believe in Our Lord's human nature, psychological as well as physical (for it is heretical to think Him a human body which had the Second Person of the Trinity INSTEAD OF a human soul) we must also believe in a human heredity for that human nature. there is only one source for it (though in that source all the true Israel is summed up). if there is an iron element in Jesus may we not without irreverence guess whence, humanly speaking, it came? did neighbors say, in His boyhood, 'He's His Mother's Son'? this might set in a new and less painful light the severity of some things He said to, or about, His Mother . we may suppose that she understood them very well.
I have called this a digression, but i am not sure that it is one. two things like the Psalms with us. one is the magnificat, and one, Our Lord's continued quotations from them, though not, to be sure, from such psalms as 109. we cannot reject from our minds a book in which His was so steeped. the Church herself has followed Him and steeped our minds in the same book.
in a word, the psalmists and we are both in the Church. individually they, like us, may be sometimes very bad members of it; tares, but tares that we have no authority to pull up they may often be ignorant, as we (though perhaps in different ways are ignorant, what spirit they are of. but we cannot excommunicate them, nor they us.
I do not at all mean (though if you watch, you will certainly find some critic who says I meant) that we are to make any concession to their ferocity. but we may learn to see the good thing which that ferocity is mixed with.
162 through all their excesses there runs a passionate craving for justice. one is tempted at first to say that such a craving, on the part of the oppressed, is no very great merit; that the weirdest men will cry out for fair play when you give them foul play. but unfortunately this is not true. indeed at this very moment the spirit which cries for justice may be dying out.
her is an alarming example. i had a pupil who was certainly a socialist, probably a Marxist. to him the 'collective', the State, was everything, the individual nothing; freedom, a bourgeois delusion. then he went down and became a schoolmaster. a couple of years later, happening to be in oxford, he paid me a visit. he said he had given up socialism. he was completely disillusioned about state-control. the interferences of the Ministry of Education with schools and schoolmasters were, he had found, arrogant, ignorant and intolerable; sheer tyranny. I could take lots of this and the conversation went on merrily. then suddenly the real purpose of his visit was revealed. he was so 'browned -off' that he wanted to give up schoolmastering; and could I - had I any influence - would I pull any wires to get him a job - IN THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION?
there you have the new man. like the psalmists he can hate, but he does not, like the psalmists, thirst for justice. having decided that there is oppression he immediately asks: 'how can I join the oppressors? he has no objection to a world which is divided between tyrants and victims; the important thing is which of these two groups you are in. (the moral of the story remains the same whether you share his view about the Ministry or not.)
there is, then, mixed with the hatred in the psalmists, a spark which should be fanned, not trodden out. that spark God saw and fanned, till it burns clear in the Magnificat. the cry for 'judgement' was to be heard.
but the ancient Hebrew idea of 'judgement' will need an essay to itself.
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