Well Past Schadenfreude (Jeremiah 31:27-34)

By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” (Psalm 137.1-3)

The opening verses of Psalm 137 bear witness to the immense trauma exiles from Judah faced in Babylon.

They were a conquered and defeated people–mocked and abused.

Disoriented and displaced, their memories of better days offered little comfort as bitter tears overwhelmed their spirits.

A passage from Richard Friedman’s book, Who Wrote the Bible?, summarizes well the exiles’ plight.

Friedman writes,

In short, the Babylonian destruction of Judah had brought horrors and tremendous challenges and crises to this nation. They were forced to reformulate their picture of themselves and of their relationship with their God. They had to find a way to worship [God] without a Temple. They had to find leadership without a king. They had to learn to live as a minority ethnic group in great empires. They had to determine what their relationship was to their homeland. And they had to live with their defeat. (p. 155)

Their old world was shattered leaving the exiles from Judah with the unenviable task of rethinking and reevaluating everything that they once believed and treasured.

They had to ask themselves big existential questions about who they were and who they were going to be.

“What is the point of all this?”

“How do we understand who we are, who God is, and what difference does it make, anyway?”

“What legacy will we leave behind for our children and our children’s children?”

If we continued reading Psalm 137, we would find out that one of the possible answers to the big questions they were asking themselves was to become an embittered and violent people who gave their hearts over to seeking revenge on their enemies for the wrongs that had been done to them.

You see, that chapter of scripture that begins with a riverside lament ends with one of the most jarring expressions of a desire for vengeance and bloodshed found anywhere in the Bible.

Raging against the Babylonians and calling out Judah’s neighbors in the kingdom of Edom who cheered as Jerusalem fell, the psalm concludes with these graphic and disturbing lines.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Psalm 137:7-9)

It’s really a shocking passage that puts us in touch with the savagery of the moment.

If it’s true that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, then some of the exiles were at least wondering if there was anything worthwhile left to see.

While the Church has a bad habit of ignoring difficult passages like this, I think there’s an important connection between Psalm 137 and the ministry of Jeremiah that we’ve been following for several weeks.

But first, it needs to be said that while the psalm is an honest expression of the exiles’ rage and anger, it doesn’t indicate that God blesses the people’s bloodlust.

No holy spirit is whispering in any one’s ear saying, “Do it! Go get your revenge!”

And that absence of a divine mandate for violence is significant for us as readers of the scripture because it shifts the focus from interrogating the nature of God to raising questions about our human condition.

Psalm 137 doesn’t beg the question “Why is God so violent in the Old Testament?” but it should get us thinking about the way those ancient fires still burn within us.

It invites us to see the ways that rage, revenge, and violence impact our communities and infect our lives.

It shows us how important it is to be honest about the anger that we carry.

So let’s be honest.

There’s some horrible, unfair, gross, and detestable things that happen in this world, and—even though we worship a loving God, even though we follow the Prince of Peace–you bet we’re angry about them.

How can it be that the rich continue to sow division and heap scorn upon the poor, just like they did in Jeremiah’s age?

Why is it that those who abuse and denigrate their neighbors appear to be shamelessly creative, while the well intentioned seem hopelessly hamstrung and flat footed?

Why racism?

Why war?

Why, in the name of all that is Holy, are we living in a timeline when people are trying to increase their influence and further their careers by praising the likes of Hitler and the Nazis?

I’m not saying we’re Psalm 137 angry, but we’re well past schadenfreude.

Also, to be fair, while we might like to believe that we only get angry when our sense of justice is offended or because of our righteous indignation, sometimes our egos get bruised, our patience grows thin, and we just get pissed off like everybody else.

That’s why hearing the exiles’ honest expression of their anger is so important.

In Psalm 137 the exiles’ honesty becomes an invitation to God to hear them out and to sit with them in their rage.

That encounter, then, becomes the point of contact where God’s Word is heard and healing and transformation can begin.

“Rage belongs before God,” notes theologian Miroslav Volf, because “by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God who loves and does justice.” (Miroslav Volf on Psalm 137)

Volf continues,

Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness.

Volf gives us some beautiful theology and biblical interpretation here that resonates with the vision Jeremiah shares with us this morning.

Confronted by a broken world filled with broken people, pressed between the cruelty of the powerful and the promises of God’s mercy, aware of the same violent sentiments expressed in Psalm 137, if not feeling that way, too, Jeremiah preached about a new thing that God would do, a new way of being with God and one another that transcended dislocation, rage, and violence.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Sitting with Jeremiah’s words, I’m struck by how the actions that he describes God taking in days that “are surely coming,” came to pass and, even to this day, define what we would call genuine religious devotion, or at least what our Wesleyan / Methodist tradition calls genuine religious devotion.

A covenant written upon the heart–this speaks to an inward change and inner disposition toward God that we recognize as essential.

This is also why it’s vitally important to note that from Jeremiah’s perspective, in the Hebrew idioms and metaphors that he understood, the heart wasn’t just an individual’s emotional center. The heart was also the intellectual center, the personality, and the center of intuition and motivation.

It’s not all that far removed from what we would describe as one’s true self.

And that’s where God wants to get to work on us, not around the fringes of our identity, not with what’s leftover after we’ve spent ourselves chasing lesser and fading things, not with the pious corners of our lives that we’ve convinced ourselves aren’t really that bad.

God wants it all and has gone to the greatest lengths in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to give us new life from the inside out.

“Do not be conformed to this age,” wrote Saint Paul, “but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

“The true, living, Christian faith…is not only an assent, an act of the understanding,” preached John Wesley, “but a disposition, which God hath wrought in [the Christian’s] heart; "a sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of Christ, [their] sins are forgiven, and [they are] reconciled to the favour of God." (The Marks of the New Birth)

This is, I believe, consistent with what Jeremiah envisioned and prophesied—an experience of God, a relationship with God, a covenant with God in which there was nothing superficial, nothing artificial, just a deep, earnest, honest, transforming communion–something strong enough to endure heartbreaks and rages, steadfast enough to hold on when hearts wander and stupidity wins the day, powerful enough to let go of privilege and to choose mercy, forgiveness, and love.

“I will put my law within them,” says the Lord, “and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Confronted by a broken world filled with broken people, pressed between the cruelty of the powerful and the promises of God’s mercy, aware of the same violent sentiments expressed in Psalm 137, if not feeling that way, too, you and I have been entrusted by God with Good News that transcends dislocation, rage, and violence.

Through Jesus Christ, God came into our lives, holding nothing against us, to write upon our hearts a transformational story of love, forgiveness, and new life.

May all that we have and all that we are–our words and our actions, our joys and our lamentations–bear witness to this story.

And may we always give thanks to God for it. Amen.

Image Attribution: De Morgan, Evelyn, 1855-1919. By the Waters of Babylon, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57161