08/26/2026
The Biblical prayer
we don’t know what to do with
Psalm 137 is written by people who have experienced catastrophic loss. They have been conquered.
Exiled.
Humiliated.
Their children have been killed.
Their homeland destroyed.
And then comes this horrifying prayer:
“Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” They don’t sanitize it. They don’t explain it away. They let it be outrageous. Because that’s what biblical prayer sometimes is. The psalmist doesn’t say: “I know this isn’t very Christian, but…” He puts the rage in the prayer book.
Let’s be clear: this psalm isn’t telling Israel: “Go bash Babylonian babies heads on the rocks.” It is giving a traumatized people permission to bring their rage, grief, desire for justice, and desire for vengeance into God’s presence rather than acting on it themselves. As I tried to say in my benediction Sunday: The Bible would rather have you say the terrible thing to God than do the terrible thing to someone else.
We project our expectations onto God.
“I expected you to protect me.”
“I expected you to intervene.”
“I expected you to prevent this.”
And when God doesn’t, we become angry.
Then we project our shame onto ourselves.
“I should have prevented this.”
“I should have known better.”
“I am unforgivable.”
And when we can’t bear our own guilt,
we turn it into shame.
And in Psalm 137, the human desire for justice becomes so distorted that it imagines God’s justice in the language of our rage. That’s the dangerous edge of this prayer. And yet God allows the prayer to be prayed.
That’s grace, too. And after I get my head around the shock and confusion, I draw comfort from the fact that the Bible’s editors included it. It would have made so much more sense to just keep it out. But it says something about what God is willing to put up and listen to and still accept the one prays it, without condoning the prayer itself.
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The Biblical prayer we don’t know what to do with
Psalm 137 is written by people who have experienced catastrophic loss.
They have been conquered...
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