Psalm 149 ugh…
Written by Elaine Chatwin
When the readings for the season of Epiphany were listed as Psalms, I was pleased—after all some of my favourite bible verses come from the Psalms. Now there is something I can write about without breaking a sweat! After listening to Rev. Dale at church this morning, I was not quite so optimistic. The general consensus being that this is one of the most difficult psalms in the entire book. What was I thinking?
This afternoon I broke out a few of my bibles and printed off Nan Merrill’s interpretation of the Psalm as well as a commentary by James Coffman. An hour later, I was no further enlightened.
The first five verses were not problematic. They fit quite nicely into our theme for the year of Singing God’s Love Song. Singing, praising, dancing, through these words I could feel the joy of the writing welling up in me. Even the references to Israel and the people of Zion in verse 2 made historical and emotional sense as they too praised God.
Verse 6 is where my head started to hurt. So now, we are into double-edged swords and in Verses 7 to 9, God’s people are called to inflict vengeance and punishment – to carry out the sentence against other nations and peoples…. and this, all this will be the glory of God’s faithful people!
My mind grappled with trying to understand what this meant to me in the year 2016. Coffman’s commentary tells me this writing is a song concerning the conquest of Canaan by the Jewish people. In the end, he postulates that the reason this event was chosen for the psalm was to encourage the return of the Jewish captives. As historical narrative, this makes sense to me.
I then turned to Nan Merrill’s interpretation. Although the latter verses, as written by her, made sense in a way that I could use in my own faith journey, they seemed completely unrelated to the original verses. I loved how she spoke about harmony with the universe and breaking the chains of oppression, and praise by all the people on the earth! Just no connection for me to the original verses.
So, ugh. That is how I feel when I really struggle to understand something in the bible and I just can’t get it to make sense. Yes, Psalm 149 is a historical narrative and I understand the violent language in that context. And it’s all well and good to interpret the verses, but to me the interpretation seemed to pretend the original words or story did not exist. Can I take the second half of this Psalm into my heart as part of my faith journey? Nope. At least not yet, but I’m open to some sort of wisdom that will change my “ugh” to “halleluiah”.