Happy is he...who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
Ps 137:8-9

The so-called “cursing psalms” come as a shock. Psalm 137 is the most famous example. In a gorgeous lament from exile, the poet crescendos to wish that God would bless anyone who knows out a Babylonian baby’s brains.

To many people, this wish seems too bitter to belong in the Bible. Aren’t Christians supposed to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44)? Even in the Old Testament, enemies were not to be treated unkindly (Exodus 23:4). How does this outburst fit into God’s Word?

A Cry for Justice

To answer, we must go to the courtroom, where more and more judges are allowing the victims of a crime to testify during sentencing. A mother who has lost her child to a murderer may spout wild and even vindictive emotions as she stands to demand the death sentence. Still the court needs to hear her. She alone knows fully what was lost. She alone feels the full outrage of the crime.

The cursing psalms voice such “victim testimony” to God, the judge. They always assume that the punishment they ask for is deserved. For example, Psalm 109 calls down curses on a man who “hounded to death the poor and the needy and the brokenhearted. He loved to pronounce a curse – may it come on him” (Psalm 109:16-17)

Psalm 137 was written out of similar anguish. As a nation, Babylon had callously murdered, earning punishment. The Bible says that God hears the cries of the innocent. He promises to punish those who have hurt them.

With all his teaching on forgiving enemies, Jesus did not change this idea of justice. He taught that justice will be meted out by God after death. (See, for instance, Matthew 25:31-46). But Old Testament Israelites had only vague ideas about life after death. For them, justice had to be carried out in this life, before their eyes. They asked for it in the cursing psalms.

Mercy for Your Enemies

What about mercy? Isn’t out duty to forgive our enemies and love them? How do the cursing psalms fit with that?

Three things must be said. First, while no mercy shows through in the cursing psalms, that doesn’t mean the people who wrote them were wholly unmerciful. David, credited with some of the strongest cursing psalms, showed extraordinary mercy towards Saul, his vengeful enemy. The cursing psalms are unbridled cries of agony. They honestly reflect the way people felt. Their authors’ lives sometimes balanced this cry with compassion.

Second, the psalmists wrote before Jesus offered forgiveness to all by dying, as God’s Son, in people’s place. Even today many people find it difficult to accept Jesus’ teaching on forgiving enemies, for it means forgiving rapists, child molesters, mass murderers. We can only forgive them because Jesus paid the price for their crimes. The psalmists lived before that  payment.

Third, the cursing psalms prepared the way for forgiveness. You can only be genuinely merciful if you start with a full appreciation of guilt. The judge who carelessly lets a criminal off on a technicality is not showing mercy. Maybe he or she just lacks sympathy for the crime’s victim. True mercy comes when victims themselves turn and forgive the people who have hurt them, releasing them to liberty.

Jesus the Victim

The cursing psalms express the hideousness of violence and injustice. Unless you feel the depth of this, you cannot understand the depth of God’s forgiveness, offered freely to anyone who pleads for mercy. God is not merely letting people off on a legal technicality. He hears the cry of their victims, and more: He shares it. In Jesus, God was the victim – beaten, cursed, killed.

The New Testament actually quoted two of the cursing psalms, referring to Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. These psalms speak of bitter injustice, and Jesus suffered the ultimate injustice. But the final word comes from Jesus himself: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

If we follow Jesus’ example, we dare not mouth the cursing psalms when we think of our enemies. These psalms are not for us to borrow from, as are other psalms. Yet these cursing psalms remind us of the bitter suffering many experience, and reading them can impel us to fight for justice. More, they remind us to forgive. For God, hearing such cries from the victim, having suffered as they suffer, forgives. So can we.

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Taken from The NIV Student Bible © 2002 by Zondervan. Notes written by Philip Yancey and Tim Stafford.