The following is clipped from that sermon on Psalm 137. I guess it pretty
much sums up my own position better than my over long previous post.
Hoss (aka Burgy)
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And maybe that's how we need to take the end of Psalm 137, too. Perhaps this
line is in the Bible not because it represents the right way to think but
simply as a reflection of how many people do in fact think when evil has
ripped their lives to shreds. Not everyone agrees with this, of course. John
Calvin said we should not be too upset with this psalmist since it was God
after all who put this thought into his head and so that, according to
Calvin, makes this OK. I don't know about you, but that explanation does not
help me much.
Calvin also, along with Augustine and a host of others, tried to soften this
by making it an allegory. In our lives we shouldn't think of these infants
as real babies but instead see them as a kind of metaphor for our own
temptations. If we find ourselves drawn to pornography or prone to anger or
increasingly lazy, better to take these sinful tendencies while they are
still like little babies in our souls and smash them into the Rock, which is
Jesus. Better that than to let them grow and mature and so ruin our
spirituality. Again, that's a clever interpretation but it doesn't solve the
scandal of Psalm 137's concluding sentence.
So I think we can understand why the psalmist says this, borne as it is of a
pain too wrenching to imagine, yet without concluding that this was a nice
or even proper thing to say. We can understand why he wrote this without
thinking it provides any kind of a role model to follow in our attitude
toward the sinful people around us.
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The sermon is worth reading.
jb
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