In the Lord I haven taken refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
“Fly like a bird to the mountains;
For look, the wicked bend the bow,
they have fitted their arrow to the string,
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart.
If the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”
The Lord is in his holy temple;
the Lord ’s throne is in heaven.
His eyes behold, his gaze examines humankind.
The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked,
and his soul hates the lover of violence.
On the wicked he will rain coals of fire and sulfur
a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.
For the Lord is righteous;
he loves righteous deeds;
the upright shall behold his face.
Psalm 11
Reflection
- The Monday
Psalter has again delivered up a psalm most suitable for people suffering
persecution, oppression, violence, war, hatred. In short, a psalm that is most
suitable for many millions of people living in the world today, particularly in
various countries of the Middle East, the Ukraine, and elsewhere.
It is very significant that God chose to be
the recipients of his revelation, not the Egyptians, the Greeks, the
Babylonians, the Assyrians. Not the great and powerful empires of the ancient
world, in other words, but rather a little tribe perched on a narrow strip of
land surrounded by larger and more heavily armed neighbors who were in a state
of near-constant warfare with one another.
Israel did have a brief period of
ascendancy and consequent peace in its history, in the reigns of David and
Solomon more or less, but not long after that came the succession of imperial
powers, a sword constantly held at the throat of God’s chosen people.
And these are the people to whom God chose
to reveal Himself and ultimately entrusted the fullest revelation of His own
self becoming man and living among us. And of course this fullest revelation
itself bears the mark of powerlessness, weakness, lowliness. Jesus did not come
with a sword to set the world at right by violence, but was Himself a victim of
violence and injustice.
There is something to truly contemplate in
all this. We live, more and more, in a world that worships power and violence
above all else. The way to overcome evil is to blow it away with a 357 Magnum,
or so several hundred Hollywood action movies have assured us.
It is not that we are never to resist evil
in this way—as I have said previously, I am not a pacifist, exactly. There are
times when the common good, and the good of the evil-doer himself, requires
that force be used to put an end to violent deeds.
I think that what the psalms convey to us,
and what the whole of our Christian revelation conveys as well, is that while
we must use violent means at times to curb violence, we must not put our trust
in these means. Justice will never come at the point of a sword, or from the
barrel of a gun. Justice comes from one place and one place alone, and that is heaven, from the exercise of perfect
justice-in-love of the Father.
And so as we make the hard choices we have
to make (I write this in deep awareness of the extreme difficulty facing world
leaders right now in their response to the IS and other situations) our call as
Christians is to continually not look to the mountains (symbols, Scripturally,
of human pride and strength) for refuge, but to the Lord of the mountains, the
God of heaven. And to trust that God is ultimately working out the salvation and
redemption of all people, and that his justice will in the end prevail over
human wickedness, violence, and hate.
This is the revelation He has given us;
this is the prayer of faith given us in Psalm 11.
