The Human Desire for Vengeance

Aug 22

I am fascinated by the vengeance or ‘imprecatory / cursing’ Psalms. What are they doing in Scripture? Are we meant to be praying them? I mean, I’ve heard people advocating that we can pray this against our ‘enemies’, but that we need to ensure that our hands and hearts are clean in the process. Seriously? I don’t know who you are, but my ‘hands and heart’ are never that clean! In any event, Jesus says something radically different and we are the people of His Way.

Jesus teaches us unequivocally to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us (Lk 6). He goes even further: ‘Do good to those that hate you.’ And the NT is in every way the Messianic interpretation of the OT, which we get to read backwards through the eyes of Jesus. ‘You have heard it said X or Y, but I tell you…Z.’

So, how did these cursing Psalms find their way into the OT Canon and what on earth are we meant to do with them?

But for the mildest mannered of us, we’ve all been in the kind of space where we wish that the NT said something that allowed us to give someone a gentle tap. I mean, not something that does serious damage…just something to adjust their thinking. I’ve occasionally hoped that there was a small piece of the Bible that went missing and might be re-discovered, a small, short Gospel text by which Jesus says to his disciples, ‘and occasionally, just occasionally if the other person is totally unreasonable and obtuse, you may change their mind manually.’

The canon as we have received, it doesn’t hint at any such possibility. And we deal with it the way we have received it. The Way of Jesus teaches something totally different. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount…you have heard it said, eye for eye, tooth for tooth but I tell you turn the other cheek. The redemptive direction of our faith is toward pacifism. Pacifism has never been a popular doctrine.

None of us is ever free from using the wrong kind of power to our own ends. In a world where much of our conversation revolves around dissatisfaction with the status quo, there is a strong pull toward philosophy and theology that seems to offer a quick fix to our unhappiness. We live in a world now where people speaking on behalf of God are saying unhinged things like, ‘empathy is a sin.’ The problem with that kind of statement is that the NT remains completely unaware of such a posture from the people of the Way. When people who claim to speak on behalf of the Church of Jesus, are saying things like that, it is more indicative of the spirit of antichrist that has ‘gone out from among us’, than anything one comes close to finding in the Gospels.

In the Gospels Jesus takes pity on the ‘least of these’ and is filled with compassion for them. (Mt 14 &15). Compassion is by my definition empathy moved into action. Joan Halifax says that, ‘A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others – and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. (And, I would add, dead to God). The sharing of another’s pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty. And into the larger more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.’ (Italics mine.)

Midjourney Image - In the Style of **Francisco Goya**

But of course human conflict is a given. Conflict resolution is in large part much of what I have done over the past decade or more, and yet I do fail from time to time at my own apparent area of expertise, because I am, all too human. Often the best thing to say in conflict is…nothing. In some cases we are called upon to say nothing and instead of saying nothing we choose to defend ourselves. Sometimes we should take accusations against us, bring them before God, filter out the stuff and the nonsense, own what is ours to own, and say nothing. Sometimes, though like Paul, we are called upon to defend ourselves and it’s not always easy to discern at which time to do which.

There might be times when one needs to defend yourself, maybe to protect reputation or something similar. It’s the Paul thing. Sometimes he defends his ministry and sometimes he leaves it to God to do on his behalf because the OT is very clear about the fact that both vengeance and justice belong to God and they are different from one another.

The Vineyard leader, John Wimber, did the same thing; in fact he wrote two papers on defending oneself. One was called; ‘why I do not defend myself’, and the other was called; ‘why I do defend myself’ - go figure. Sometimes we get the timing of when and which to go for wrong. When do we do which? I am a slow learner, but I am slowly learning. That, I guess is where the gift and the praxis of discernment comes into play.

The Pastoral Case

Occasionally in ministry, one faces personal attack. Thanks to God, not that often, but it does happen. All who pastor long term, have faced direct personal assaults and then too, what I would call passive aggressive, or manipulative type assaults. The cowardly way. From behind the scenes, or now more probably from behind a keyboard. It is a part of the pastoral call, and in fact it’s part of the call to being Christian, and, for those of us who lead, we need to embrace it as a small part of what God has called us to.

In the pastoral world it happens, often, when people pick up on your weaknesses. When you are sufficiently vulnerable for them to see that you are human, and in every way as human as them. Christians don’t always like it when they find out (horror of horrors) that those who lead them are human after all. The expectation of religiosity is that Christian leaders need to be less human than those they lead. Btw, this has little to do with Paul’s clear outline for the standards God is calling leaders to. Those are perfectly valid and relevant. Being superhuman is not.

For anyone who labours under any kind of illusion: ‘If you think that there is anything that goes down in your life and home and workplace from which your leaders and pastors are somehow immune’ you might have a complete misconception of the call to ministry. We are called as communities who worship Jesus and follow his Way and when we stand to talk, or teach, or lead or guide, we talk as amongst…friends. Jesus said, ‘I have called you, my friends.’

Pray that your leaders would never become those people who take things so personally that they lose their vulnerability. That they become graceless. Pray for your leaders. That they would balance their personal conduct, their vulnerability and their grace.

The way in, is the Way on. The alternative is frightening and we are seeing it unravel all around us. That would be the route where pastors and leaders don’t really allow themselves to be known. In that paradigm one can stand six foot above contradiction because we don’t allow anyone close enough to be able to see our frailties and we live in the delusion that we are accountable to no one. In that context you will generally find a host of hidden sins. The only hidden life we are meant to have is a life hidden in God.

So what about vengeance as a desire?

Let’s talk a little about attacks and other nasty things done to us by other people – whether in a ministry context or just in life. As those philosophers Opus sing, ‘life is life.’ Occasionally things are done to us that might leave us with a real thirst for vengeance. What do we do with that thirst?

The desire for it is alive in all of us. Because the line of good and evil runs through each one of us. The world cannot be divided simplistically into ‘good and evil’, although some do try. Our human natures cry out for vengeance, and it is only by the Spirit that can we let things go.

The emotion is not wrong. The emotion is there to tell us that something is wrong! It becomes wrong when the emotion overflows into acting it out so that you slash someone’s tyres, or steal their stuff, or poison their cat, or send them long nasty anonymous emails, or whatever else your depraved mind can come up with.

More than a decade ago, someone made me a promise – a huge promise. A completely unsolicited thing that the person promised they would do for me. I was telephoned, and asked to come for a coffee. Over coffee I was told that ‘this thing’ is what the person was going to do for me. I can’t give the detail of that promise; but I can say this; the promise was so big, so beyond any paradigm I could imagine, that I checked three times on three separate occasions over a period of a more than month with the person that I had not misunderstood the nature of the promise - clearly I had not.

A few months after the promise was made, it was, by means of a gradual downhill backtracking, materially changed to the extent that it was fully broken. No reason was given, no apology made, just simply, ‘I’m not doing it anymore’. The difficulty I had in dealing with the emotional and indeed, significant spiritual fallout from that situation was that this particular person had been kind to me despite the broken promise. So kind that if you only saw the kindness, without knowing about the broken promises you would think me an extremely ungrateful person.

The broken promises placed me in a space of severe cognitive dissonance, a double bind, psychologically. The kind of head space that is so contradictory that you are unable to hold it together without something going off pop.

And then over a period of months, years if I’m fully honest, – in a variety of different ways, prayer, submission, words of knowledge from people, Scripture and even dreams and warning dreams, I became increasingly aware that if I held the offence, I would destroy myself. If I held offence and clung to bitterness it would be my soul that suffered damage. It would be my path forward that was obscured.

Scripture

With this as context, let’s look at what have traditionally been called the vengeance or imprecatory Psalms. One of the, often cited, objections to these Psalms, and their place in Scripture, is that they are written by someone who really wants God to ‘get the people who did it.’

The people who said that awful stuff over me, the man who tried to sink my business, the person who led my children astray, the group who forcefully removed my people from their land, the pigs who killed my friends. And Jesus says I need to turn the other cheek, he can’t honestly be serious, surely?

It’s not possible, I hate them, I hate them and they must die! And it needs to be said. Anytime there is a real desire to kill, to maim, to discredit (i.e., a desire for the death - even just the death of reputation), anytime there is that, rather than the desire for redemption, we are dealing with the dark side.

Psalm 58

Psalm 58 is probably the best example of the type of Psalm over which there is serious doubt about how it found its way into the canon

I’m picking it up from verse six in the NASB. Try to imagine yourself saying this to your counsellor or pastor, or therapist, who might be a friend, or might be a professional counsellor.

Oh God, shatter their teeth in their mouth, Oh God;
Break out the fangs of the young Lion, Oh LORD!
May they flow away like water that runs off; when he aims his arrows, may they be as headless shafts, (or be blunted says the NIV).
May they be like a snail which goes along in slime, like the miscarriage of a woman, that never sees the sun.
Before your pots can feel the fire of thorns, he will sweep them away with a whirlwind, the green and the burning alike.
The righteous will rejoice when he sees vengeance…He will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked…Aaaaaaarrrggghhh…(For those who are old enough, if you like you can picture Peter Sellers, ‘fake dying’ at the beginning of the movie ‘the Party’) Aaaaaaarghhghggh!
And the people will say, “there certainly is a reward for the righteous; There certainly is a God who judges the earth.”

…and as you’re saying all of this, your counsellor asks you: ‘Is there anything you’d like to add to that?’ And you go: ‘Yeahh… Declare them guilty Oh God let them burn in hell for all eternity!’

And of course in a nice Anglican setting you can sort of picture someone at the eagle lectern reading this Psalm as one of three readings for Morning Prayer, and then saying after the reading, (plum firmly in cheek) ‘this is the word of the LORD, thanks be to God…’

The traditional teaching says that Christians ought not to use these Psalms, because Christians ought not to feel this way, even if they have been through rather a rough patch, right? (Yeah right - so why do I feel this way?)

And of course if you use this psalm in the wrong way…if you honestly desire death mayhem and destruction of those who have crossed you, beware. I have a friend who confessed to me one day that she prayed for someone to be given cancer of the eyes.

The moral high ground is a difficult, actually no, it’s not difficult, it’s an impossible place to stand because all have sinned and fall way, way short of the glory of God. So then how should we read and how should we use Scriptures like these?

We do have, from time to time, all of us, yearnings for vengeance and often they are legitimate. So, the question is not whether you are allowed to feel that way, the question, more accurately is, if you feel that way what are you going to do with it?

I can think of only a few things you can do with your thirst for vengeance:

Act it out – Buy a gun, or a crossbow because it’s more gory. Buy a baseball bat. Hockey stick. Beat someone up. Let the neighbour’s tyres down…kill their cat, poison their parrot, deep-fry their Labrador, throw cyanide in their Koi pond, rip out their vegetable patch, set your Pitbull on their children’s bunnies. Get them back…discredit them, publicly. Cast doubt about their character, send them spam…whatever, just make sure you hurt them…badly…

You can do that. It wouldn’t be very wise, and it would certainly not be very good or helpful for your relationship with Jesus, but if you really want to, you can choose that option. Let everyone know how bad they are…Cause them to be pariah amongst all who hear about it.

You can deny it – which is probably (if we’re honest) the way most good Christians have dealt with it historically. I deny that I feel this way and if I do that for long enough maybe the feelings will go away.

But there is a big problem in that. The feelings don’t go away. When you deny it; it tends to come out somewhere else that you didn’t plan on it coming out, and in a way that you didn’t plan on it coming out and it damages your family or work, your relationships.

You find yourself acting out of character and you ask yourself: ‘Good grief, where did that come from?’ So de-Nile is neither a river in Africa, nor is it helpful to you, or to God.

Another thing you can do – which is what psychology has understood so very well – is that you can give it over to your therapist, you can give it over to Jesus. He’s your therapist right?

I am suggesting, along with Walter Brueggemann that this is mostly what we are meant to be doing with our desire for human vengeance. We move toward writing Psalms to God. Psalms that say: ‘Oh God! I am being eaten alive here, I am being devoured by my anger, and my thirst for vengeance…and God, I’d like to hand that over…to you, so I write it down without sending it to them, because it helps me to process the anger without moving to acting it out.’

Most half-decent parents will understand this. You have two siblings playing in the garden and one of them hurts the other one. And of course, the parent doesn’t know who initiated the squabble. My kids will tell you that when they were growing up and squabbles broke out and one desired the death and destruction of the other I always said:

‘I can only respond to what I see.’ But the one, of course, the one who had the scratch and the blood is using great hyperbole to get Dad to act on her behalf for the vengeance that she seeks.

‘…never mind the plaster! What are you going to do about her?! I’m not going to be happy until you beat her; I hate her!

And I guess it’s here that a wise parent might not say ‘hey, you can’t talk like that about your sister.’ A wise parent doesn’t say, ‘give me the whole story so that I can really sock it to her, little brat – she’s always at you my special baby.’

A wise Mom says, ‘hey, why don’t you leave that bit – her punishment - to me, OK? I have heard you, and now you can trust me and you can leave it with me…I’ll decide what needs to be done.’

I think that’s how these Psalms, at their best, are intended to work for us in alleviating our desires for personal vengeance. But, is there any other possible application of the Psalm beyond just alleviating our desire to get even with others?

We know that these Psalms were often written into the context of physical war and into the reality of threat to the very life of the Psalmist. That means the Psalmists’ real plea to God is for physical protection and salvation from a real or perceived threat. He has a real enemy who wants to kill him. So do we.

Our warfare is spiritual. That means that there is a way in which we can use Psalms like these when praying against our real enemy. What scripture calls the ‘powers and principalities.’ The demonic realm that is our real enemy. I think we ought to feel free to pray these psalms in times of spiritual oppression and to ask that Jesus rebuke our enemy. At the very least praying a Psalm in times like that would protect us from the vain repetition in prayer we sometimes revert to in situations of spiritual attack. But more of that perhaps in a different blog.

The people of the Way need to understand that it’s OK to feel the desire for vengeance, and that we have devised ways to process ‘feeling that way’ toward functional health. We will only understand that, If we reclaim certain parts of the Scriptures and use them properly and with great care, to convey that people have always known about these feelings and godly people have always had ways of dealing with them that don’t involve, threats, murder, vengeance, character assassination and mayhem.

We have, all of us, from time to time, feelings like these. Write them down like the Psalmist does, send them to no one, but give them to Jesus, and let Him decide what needs to be done about the ones who ‘did it to you.’ We have the freedom to decide for our own spiritual well-being.

Melt van der Spuy