One psalm comes to mind when thinking of imprecatory passages. It is, in the KJV, Psalm 137
How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Psalms 137:4-9 KJV
How is a Christian to explain those words to a person who has expressed interest in Christ but who has read the psalm and has questions about it?
I shall offer the written form of a homily I have given many times on this Psalm, known as Super Flumina, to answer this question, which is dear to my heart:
The words of this Psalm are terrible words indeed, but since at the end of the Gospel of Luke, our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ assures us that the entirety of the New Testament is about Him, we must find Christ in this passage, and to do so we must search for its Christian meaning, which we shall do as follows:
Babylon is used in Scripture to represent the world capitulating to sin, and the diabolical ,whereas Jerusalem is used to represent the world embracing godliness, and the angelic. Thus, the offspring of Babylon, its little ones, are not to be understood as Chaldean children, God forbid.
This is the danger of Antiochian literal-historical exegesis.
Rather, we must turn to the Alexandrian exegetical method, which is based on what Christ said at the end of the Gospel According to Luke, and what the Apostles said, regarding the Old Testament, that it is to be interpreted as Christological prophecy or as reinforcing the teachings of Christ. Babylon, in the Apocalypse for example, as I said earlier, represents the world capitulated to sin, and also the diabolical. What are the offsprings of the world’s capitulation to sin, and the diabolical? The sinful passions and temptations, which we are called to overcome, to resist, to dash against the rocks.
Conversely, the offspring, the little ones of the world embracing godliness, represented by Jerusalem, are children: Godly children, our love for those children, the love that prevents us from wanting to see any child dashed against the rocks, that causes the literal words of this Psalm to catch our attention, and send us on a quest for its true meaning, since God, being love, does not want us to kill children, indeed, abortion is one of the great moral offenses today, and the very reason God allowed the Babylonians to capture Jerusalem is that Jerusalem had become like Babylon by sacrificing its children, passing them through the fire to Moloch in Gehenna, despite St. Josiah, the most virtuous of the early Kings of Judah having previously destroyed the altar to Moloch, like a filthy disease of poor hygiene such as a wart, or like a dog returning to its vomit, the altar came back, and people continued to kill the literal children of Jerusalem, because they would not kill the metaphorical Children of Babylon, and thus the Babylonians were allowed to conquer Jerusalem.
Yet God even when he reproaches us for not triumphing over the sinful passions does not abandon us. Christ himself acted to save, in person the three Jewish children Nebuchadenzzar placed in a furnace, repeating the very offense, ironically, which had caused Israel to conquer Babylon, which is to sacrifice the literal children of Jerusalem and indeed of Babylon as well, for benefit of the figurative children of Babylon, and because the Babylonians kept doing this eventually they were conquered by the Persians, and converted to Christianity, and many of them remain Christian, primarily members of the Ancient Church of the East or the Chaldean Catholic Church or the Syriac Orthodox Church or the Antiochian Orthodox Church, or the Assyrian Church of the East, which are the main denominations in Mesopotamia, or Iraq as it is now known, to this day (and Babylon was abandoned when the Tigris moved, and the people moved to the nearby city of Seleucia-Cstesiphon, also commonly called Bablyon, and then the river moved again and they moved to modern day Baghdad, which is built adjacent to the ruins of Old Babylon.
So the children of Baghdad who are the descendants of the literal children of Babylon are not to be dashed against the rocks, nor the children of Russia, or Germany, or any other conquering power we happen to dislike; this is the passion of revenge, which is one of the figurative children of Babylon, which are the sinful passions: wrathfulness, worldly apnetitites, sexual lust, greed, vengeance and so on, which we must overcome and destroy in order to be perfect even as the Father is perfect, and the Orthodox practice of Christianity, which is the practice of the ancient church, is that we must struggle to overcome these sinful passions.
This is the true spiritual meaning of Psalm 137,
Super Flumina, which is one of my favorites, because its superficial meaning is intentionally shocking and offensive and provocative, but Christians who follow the exegetical technique of the Alexandrian church Fathers will quickly realize what is meant here are not actual children at all, on the contrary, to kill a real child of Babylon is to raise to maturity a figurative child of Babylon, allowing a sinful passion, of wrath and vengeance, to take over and turn us into a monster, trying and failing to mete out justice the application of which is reserved for God almighty.
For this reason I strongly objected to some recent Anglican Psalters deleting the imprecations from this Psalm, or indeed John Wesley, who was unaware of Alexandrian exegetical technique despite his learned nature due to the preponderance of the Alexandrian technique in the West (I attribute this to the extreme popularity in the early Western church of Antiochian exegetes like Theodore of Mopsuestia, who was the master of Antiochian literal-historical exegesis, had in the West, in the fourth century, so that when he was anathematized by Emperor justinian, wrongly I think, it resulted in a decades long schism in the province of Hispania known as the Three Chapters Controversy). There is a place for the literal-historical exegesis that was the speciality of Antioch, and actually, we need both that method and the Alexandrian metaphorical-typological-prophetic technique in order to understand the Old Testament in light of what Christ teaches about it before His ascension in the Gospel of Luke, namely that it is all about Him, and the most successful early Church Fathers like St. Athanasius the Great, the Cappadocians (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Gregory of Nyssa), St. John Chrysostom, who was close friends with Theodore of Mopsuestia as both were from Antioch, by the way, and many others, used both techniques skillfully. Indeed the one church father who overused Alexandrian exegesis to the exclusion of Antiochene literal-historical interpretation, Origen, was anathematized, wrongly I think, at the same time as Theodore of Mopsuestia.
But the literal-historical reality of Jewish anger at their conquest by Babylon which inspired the writing of this Psalm cannot serve as an excuse for ignoring its prophetic and mystagogical meaning, which Alexandrian exegesis provides us, which is that we must struggle against the passions.
Most Old Testament texts have an exoteric or literal meaning, which relates to the history of the Hebrew people before Christ, and an esoteric, or implied, meaning, which relates to the prophecy of Christ, and the trick is to avoid missing the latter by concentrating to much in the former, or vice versa, because if we move too far in either direction, we lose the Christological perspective.
Which returns us to the beginning of this homily on Psalm 137, which is: how do we interpret this Psalm in the light of Christ? For the same way we interpret the challenging words at the end of this Psalm, which seem so terribly opposed to Christianity on the surface, and are so fundamentally Christian on deeper reflection, is the same way we must interpret all other challenging words in the Old Testament, by searching for its meaning in the Light of Christ.
