I'm currently reading A Long Obedience In The Same Direction by Eugene Peterson and want to share a passage of it with you. The chapter is on Psalm 129 and this particular line in scripture bears discussion by Peterson:
The psalmist is talking about Israel's enemies in this psalm - how they try over and over to kick Israel and keep her down, plowing long furrows in her back. But God sticks by Israel and rips the harness of the evil plowmen to shreds. Praise the Lord! And yet here, in the midst of this psalm, is talk of angry vengeance. And here is how Peterson sees it.............
We can't excuse the psalmist for getting angry on the grounds that he was not yet a Christian, for he had Leviticus to read: "You shall not hate your brother in your heart . . . You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev 10:17-18). And he had Exodus: "If you meet your enemy's ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying undet its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it up" (Ex 23:4-5). And he had Proverbs: "Don't laugh when your enemy falls; don't crow over his collapse" (Prov 24:17). When Jesus said "Love your enemies," he add nothing to what this psalmist already had before him.
So we will not make excuses for the psalmist's vindictiveness. What we will do is admire its energy. For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship. The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness - THAT is the person to be wary of. For if there is not all that much difference between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there isn't much use in making any effort to stick to it.
We drift on the tides of convenience. We float on fashions. It is regarding the things we care about that we are capable of expressing anger. A parent sees a child dart out into a roadway and narrowly miss being hit by a car, and angrily yells at the child, at the driver - at both. The anger may not be the most appropriate expression of concern, but it is evidence of concern. Indifference would be inhuman.
And so here. The psalms are not sung by perfect pilgrims. The pilgrims of old made their mistakes, just as we make ours. Perseverance does not mean "perfection." It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us. We get caught yelling at our wives, at our husbands, at our friends, at our employers, at our employees, at our children. Our yelling (though not all of it!) means we care about something: we care about God; we care about the ways of the kingdom; we care about morality, about justice, about righteousness. The way of faith centers and absorbs our lives, and when someone makes the way difficult, throws stumbling blocks in the path of the innocent, creates difficulties for those young in faith and unpracticed in obedience, there is anger: "Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation!"
For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength. There is nothing fatigued or humdrum in Isaiah, nothing flatfooted in Jesus, nothing jejune in Paul. Perseverance is triumphant and alive.
The psalmist lived among prophets and priests who dealt with his vindictive spirit and nurtured him toward a better way of treating the wicked than calling down curses on them, learning what Charles Williams once described as the "passion of patience." We are in a similar apprenticship. But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.
Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation;
We can't excuse the psalmist for getting angry on the grounds that he was not yet a Christian, for he had Leviticus to read: "You shall not hate your brother in your heart . . . You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev 10:17-18). And he had Exodus: "If you meet your enemy's ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying undet its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it up" (Ex 23:4-5). And he had Proverbs: "Don't laugh when your enemy falls; don't crow over his collapse" (Prov 24:17). When Jesus said "Love your enemies," he add nothing to what this psalmist already had before him.
So we will not make excuses for the psalmist's vindictiveness. What we will do is admire its energy. For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship. The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness - THAT is the person to be wary of. For if there is not all that much difference between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there isn't much use in making any effort to stick to it.
We drift on the tides of convenience. We float on fashions. It is regarding the things we care about that we are capable of expressing anger. A parent sees a child dart out into a roadway and narrowly miss being hit by a car, and angrily yells at the child, at the driver - at both. The anger may not be the most appropriate expression of concern, but it is evidence of concern. Indifference would be inhuman.
And so here. The psalms are not sung by perfect pilgrims. The pilgrims of old made their mistakes, just as we make ours. Perseverance does not mean "perfection." It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us. We get caught yelling at our wives, at our husbands, at our friends, at our employers, at our employees, at our children. Our yelling (though not all of it!) means we care about something: we care about God; we care about the ways of the kingdom; we care about morality, about justice, about righteousness. The way of faith centers and absorbs our lives, and when someone makes the way difficult, throws stumbling blocks in the path of the innocent, creates difficulties for those young in faith and unpracticed in obedience, there is anger: "Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation!"
For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength. There is nothing fatigued or humdrum in Isaiah, nothing flatfooted in Jesus, nothing jejune in Paul. Perseverance is triumphant and alive.
The psalmist lived among prophets and priests who dealt with his vindictive spirit and nurtured him toward a better way of treating the wicked than calling down curses on them, learning what Charles Williams once described as the "passion of patience." We are in a similar apprenticship. But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.
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