Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 2 2016
Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1.1-14; Luke 17.5-10
Murrayfield Parish Church, Edinburgh
Psalm 137 is a hymn. But it’s a peculiar kind of hymn.
Six centuries before Jesus was born, the empire of Babylon captured the city of Jerusalem, destroyed the first temple, and led the leading families of Judah into exile.
The book of psalms is the hymnbook of the second Jerusalem temple, the temple built after some of these families returned home.
Sometimes these psalms encourage us to sing what we believe. But they also allow us to sing what we feel. And what we feel isn’t always religiously correct.
Many of these psalms criticize God, telling off the Almighty for doing a bad job. Others allow us to voice feelings that, however understandable, are far from acceptable.
The first and better-known part of Psalm 137 captures the feelings of loss and desolation felt by the exiles from Judah in Babylon.
Less well-known are the closing verses of the Psalm, which utter curses against the Edomites, who joined with Bablyon in conquering Jerusalem, and against Babylon itself: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
My Jewish Study Bible notes without comment that thoughts of retribution are commonly found in the psalms of lament and suggests, neutrally, that for more on dashing babies against rocks, we should see 2 Kings 8; Isaiah 13; Hosea 14; and Nahum 3.
In our Church of Scotland hymnary, John Bell’s metrical version of this psalm deliberately leaves out the ending. He explains that this “seemingly outrageous curse is better dealt with in preaching or group conversation.” He adds that “it should not be forgotten, especially by those who have never known exile, dispossession or the rape of people and land.”
My only quarrel with that is the word “seemingly”.
Seemingly outrageous? It is outrageous. Nothing – exile, dispossession or rape – can justify dashing the babies of your enemies against a rock.
This is what our heads tell us, but our hearts don’t always agree. When we are wronged, we want revenge.
And these days our heads often follow our hearts. Nothing is more common than what the Jewish historian Hans Kohn calls moral double-bookkeeping, in which we condemn our enemies when they do what is wrong and excuse ourselves or our friends when we do exactly the same.
This may be understandable. But it’s outrageous and unacceptable.
One of the things that psalms like Psalm 137 do for us is to hold up for inspection feelings that are understandable but outrageous and help us to see just how unacceptable they are.
Great writing does the same.
In Shakespeare’s play, the Venetian moneylender Shylock protests: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
If the Merchant of Venice is well produced, we find ourselves agreeing with Shylock all the way to the last question. Yes, we say, because yes, we see: Shylock is as human as we are.
Then we come to his last question, “and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” – and we want to say, No, please don’t behave as badly as we do.
If we are serious in that plea, we should put our lives where our mouths are. We ourselves shouldn’t behave as badly as we do.
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The strapline of St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem, is “remembrance – reflection – reconciliation”.
Remembrance, because St Andrew’s was built to remember the Scottish soldiers who died in the Palestine campaign in 1917 during the Great War.
Remembrance, because today we widen our horizons to remember all who have died in Palestine in the conflicts of the last century: British soldiers and policemen during the years of the Mandate, but also Jews and Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis, then and still today.
Reflection, because without facing uncomfortable facts we have nothing to contribute to the necessary task of making peace.
And reconciliation.
It is easy, and all too common, to reduce the high and difficult calling of reconciliation to sheer sentimentality. Why can’t people just be nice to each other? Why can’t they be more like us?
But reconciliation, rightly understood, is about more than making nice. Reconciliation is about restoring right relationships. Or about creating right relationships where they never existed to begin with.
The Spirit we receive when by baptism and faith we enter into God’s new creation is not a spirit of timidity that flees from difficult conflicts and hard choices, but a spirit of power in the grace of Jesus Christ, a spirit of love in which we seek earnestly to put right what is wrong, a spirit of selflessness and self-control. We are in the world not for our own advancement or prestige but for the good of the other.
The God in whom we believe is not an angry, punishing God, who enjoys nothing better than keeping us in after school, but a God who loves us unfailingly.
The God in whom we believe is committed unswervingly to rooting out injustice because injustice is the greatest threat to human well-being – the well-being both of those who are treated unfairly and of those who treat them thus.
This God is also merciful. When we go in diametrically the wrong direction, God calls us to turn around and take the right path. When we recognize the error of our ways and repent of them, we are forgiven. Our repentance just is God’s forgiveness, two sides of the same divine coin.
As stewards of God’s new creation, of the new world that God is bringing to birth from the womb of our fallen world, we are called to act in like manner. We are called to rekindle the gift of God that is within us.
*
If we are not committed to identifying and rooting out injustice, our world fragments into warring factions. If we are not committed to forgiveness and repentance, our world disintegrates into groups divided by hostility and fear.
For centuries Christian Europe was unwilling to treat the Jews of Europe as human beings. Even after Jewish emancipation spread across the continent in the 19th century, many Europeans were unwilling to accept their Jewish neighbours as equal citizens. Emancipation in many places created a vicious backlash in the form of modern, racist antisemitism – an antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s Germany.
The Austrian journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl invented political Zionism because of his experience as a Jew in 19th-century Europe. In 1896, he published Der Judenstaat – the state of the Jews. In 1897, he convened the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland, with the aim of establishing a state for the Jewish people in Palestine.
He argued that Europe would always hate the Jews, and that Jews, therefore, had no other choice but to go somewhere else and create a state of their own. He was wrong about that, in my view, and it is part of our calling as Christians to prove him wrong, but he certainly had his reasons.
The trouble is, when you go to Palestine to create a state of your own, you run into the problem of the Arab Muslims and Christians who are already living there.
What was for the Jews of Israel the war of independence in 1947-48 was for these Palestinians the Nakba, the catastrophe, in which 700,000 of them lost their homes and possessions, ending up in a contemporary exile from which they have yet to return.
And so it has continued to the present. Good news for the Jews has been bad news for the Palestinians. Today, it isn’t even good news for the Jews.
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The Church of Scotland has a school in the Holy Land – Tabeetha School in Jaffa, down by the Mediterranean sea. It is, in my view, the best thing that we do there.
In a land as divided as Israel/Palestine, it includes everyone. The teachers and the local students are Christians, Muslims and Jews; one in five of the students are from abroad. Inside the school gates, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is put to one side: students and teachers get on with the proper job of a school – to live and study and work together.
Inside the school gates, we model the kind of community that we would like Israel/Palestine to be and we hope it one day will be.
A community where Jews and Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis, may live as equals. A community where everyone is treated as a human being. A community based on justice and forgiveness, on reconciliation and peace.
Sources
John Bell, “By the Babylonian rivers”, CH4 94 (Psalm 137)
Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, Michael Fishbane, The Jewish Study Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Mark O’Brien op, The ABC of Sunday Matters. Reflections on the Lectionary Readings for Year A, B, and C (Hindmarsh, South Africa: ATF Theology, 2013)