Psalms | Eric Duong | Psalm 137

Introduction: The Psalms We Don't Talk About

When we go through a series like the Psalms, it can feel like we're only doing our favourites — Psalm 1, Psalm 23, Psalm 42. The Lord is my shepherd. As the deer pants for water. These are the ones everyone knows and feels comfortable with.

But we don't often get the picture at the end of Psalm 137, a prayerful cry for vengeance:

"Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." (v.9)

And yet that's in the Bible. Scripture deals with all the emotions we face in life. There are times to feel close to God and satisfied in him — and there are also times to lament. Of the 150 psalms, about a third (60-65) are laments, psalms that process grief. Six of those are imprecatory psalms — curse psalms — where the writer calls for God to judge his enemies.

Our instinct is to avoid these psalms altogether. We tell ourselves we've moved past this, that we're more mature, more educated, that we know how to process emotions — we even pay for therapy. Statistics suggest one in three of us will pay for therapy in our lifetime. But look around: we may talk more about our emotions, yet we don't necessarily process them well.

Two Unhelpful Ways We Handle Anger

1. We vent it — we complain, we let it out — but this doesn't satisfy our cry for justice. It doesn't stop us waking at 4am thinking, it's still not right.
2. We repress it — believing that good Christians should just be loving, kind, and forgiving, so we bottle our anger up. But swallowed anger doesn't vanish. A 2010 paper in the British Journal of Health Psychology linked emotional suppression to cardiac damage. It comes back to bite us.

So if we shouldn't vent or repress our anger, what should we do with it? Psalm 137 shows us the way.

Don't Cut Scripture to Fit Our Comfort

It's tempting to look at verses like this and think they're too strong, too dangerous to touch. Even C.S. Lewis — a hero to many, myself included — wrote that the curse psalms are "devilish in spirit... diabolical." But we don't get to choose what counts as Scripture. All Scripture is God-breathed.

As Eugene Peterson puts it:

"Before we can truly love our enemies, we have to honestly pray our hatred to God... We have to stop performing surgery on the Psalms to cut out whatever offends us."

This passage will show us how to own our anger, pray our anger, and hand it over to God.

1. Own Your Anger

Read Psalm 137:1-6:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion... How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.

Picture the context. Babylon has ransacked Jerusalem and taken the elite as captives. In ancient warfare, soldiers who'd been out fighting for weeks or months, frustrated and enraged, would commit horrific atrocities when a city fell — including, as historical records note, ripping babies from their mothers and dashing them against the city walls.

This psalmist is one of those captives, likely having lost his own children to this violence. And his captors mock him: "Sing us one of the songs of Zion. Come on, entertain us."

What does he do? He doesn't repress his sadness or fake a smile. He doesn't grab a sword either. He refuses to perform for his captors — he sits down and weeps, even though this likely meant a beating.

Why does he sit in his anger? Because he owns it. The opposite of anger is not love — love sometimes expresses itself as anger. There is enough darkness and injustice in the world that our appropriate response to it should sometimes be anger: this is not right, this is not how things should be.

An Illustration: The Stains Family

One of our former ministers now serves at Hebron, a school in South India that cares for missionaries' children. My wife Clare grew up there. On 23rd January 1999, missionary Graham Stains took his two sons, Timothy (6) and Philip (10), to sleep in their car while serving a village in the jungle. A group of Hindu extremists surrounded the car with machetes and axes, set it on fire, and the whole family burned to death.

Would it be appropriate for Gladys, the wife and mother, to be angry? Absolutely. To cry out for justice? Of course. When there is significant injustice, appropriate anger is a good thing — it is a proper response of love. The psalmist shows us: anger can and should be owned.

2. Pray Your Anger

Now look at verses 7-9:

Remember, LORD, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell... Happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

This is the verse that makes us want to look away. But watch what the psalmist actually does — this is the most important move in the whole psalm. He isn't stuffing his anger down. But he also isn't spewing it sideways onto the people around him. He doesn't say, "I hate them, I will get them back."

He prays it to God. He takes his rage, his grief, his hatred, and instead of letting it drive him from God or explode onto others, he carries the whole boiling mess to God. He brings his real self to the real God.

This is the difference between religion and relationship with God. Religion says, "Good people don't feel like this — push it down, put on a holy face." The world says, "Let it fly, truth is relative anyway." But God says, "You can be angry — bring it to me."

3. Hand It Over to God

Notice the psalmist doesn't say, "Give me the strength to repay them," or "I swear I'll make them pay." He says, "Remember, LORD." He hands it to God and asks God to remember — not because God has forgotten, but as a plea for God to move to action, in his own timing.

The structure of the psalm bears this out:

• Verses 1-4: a description of what happened to him
• Verses 5-6: he swears himself in as witness
• Verses 7-8: he submits the evidence
• Verse 9: he proposes a sentence — but does not carry it out himself

He is not saying he should do it. He has given it up to God. History records that the Medes and Persians did eventually bring judgment on Babylon. God is the only one with the power to put every wrong right, the only one with the knowledge to judge every situation perfectly, and the only one with the right to judge.

As Tim Keller observed on this psalm: if in your anger you say, "I want everyone to get exactly what they deserve at midnight," don't make plans for 12:01 — because none of us are innocent either.

Doesn't Belief in Judgment Fuel Violence?

Some might object that trusting in a God of justice is a cop-out, or even that it fuels violence — pointing to the Crusades and other Christian failures. Miroslav Volf, who has witnessed real violence and suffering, answers this in Exclusion and Embrace:

"If you think that believing in a god of justice leads to violence, you've probably had a comfortable life... It is precisely because I trust that God will judge that I am not free to pick up the sword myself."

Believing in a God of judgment doesn't fuel violence — it diffuses it. The person most likely to spend their life seeking vengeance is the one who believes there is no God to entrust it to.

Jesus: The Better Psalmist

This psalm is a wonderful prayer for the Old Testament believer. But this side of the cross, we know fully what to do with our anger — we can own it, pray it, hand it over, and go further: we can forgive.

Turn to Luke 19:41-44. Jesus is riding triumphantly into Jerusalem, about to go to the cross — completely innocent, about to be tortured and killed for the sins of the world.

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it... "They will dash you to the ground, you and your children within your walls, because you did not recognise the time of God's coming to you."

Jesus looks at the very people who will crucify him in days — and weeps over them. He doesn't gloat over coming judgment. Justice will be done, but his disposition toward us is weeping love, mercy, and kindness.

Does Jesus care less about justice than the psalmist? No — he goes to the cross and prays, "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing." He pays for everything that has gone wrong, and he enacts justice perfectly — but not with vengeful anger. He does it delighted to die for us.

The justice your anger cries for didn't get waved away — it fell on Jesus. Every furious cry for justice in this song book, and in the world, and in your own heart right now, is validated and answered at the cross. Validated, because the cross proves injustice is deadly serious — it cost God his Son. Answered, because the one the psalmist demanded be "dashed on the rocks" was, in a sense, Jesus himself — dashed on the rocks for us.

Jonathan Edwards captures this tension:

"There at the cross do meet infinite justice and infinite grace. Christ... is infinitely just... and yet he is infinitely gracious and merciful."

He is the lion and the lamb — the judge who will not clear the guilty, and the judge who is infinitely merciful. And to the degree you see him for who he is, you don't just gain the ability to own, pray, and hand over your anger — you gain the ability to forgive.

The Rest of the Stains Story

After the murders, Gladys Stains received the news in waves — first that her husband and sons were dead, then that they'd been burned, then that her husband's charred body was found cradling his two boys as they died. To her young daughter Esther, she said, "It seems like we've been left alone, but we will forgive." Esther replied, "Yes, mommy, we will forgive."

Gladys went on to advocate for the forgiveness of the 40 extremists who murdered her family — and some of them became Christians because of the forgiveness and love she modelled. In her own words:

"I forgive the other because I first received forgiveness from Jesus Christ... When we forgive, there is no bitterness and we live our lives and continue the task entrusted to us."

Gladys and Esther stayed in India, continuing Graham's work for decades — not because it was the noble thing to do, but because Jesus's forgiveness toward us gives us a better story to live inside.

Application: Bring It to the Cross

We can go even further than forgiveness — we can will the good of those who've hurt us, loving our enemies as Jesus commands. But this is impossible unless we first see how much God has forgiven us.

As a church, it's right that we value kindness and relationship. But we also need to take seriously both the weight of our own sin and the legitimacy of our anger at what's wrong in the world — bringing both honestly to God. We spend time confessing our sin not to beat ourselves up, but to see the size of the gap Christ has closed, so we can celebrate how wonderful it is to be forgiven.

If you're young and haven't experienced deep betrayal, hear the gospel anyway: every disappointment, every letdown, doesn't need to be tried and re-tried in your head. You are fully known and fully loved in Christ already.

If you're further along in life, carrying real wounds and real injustice, know that it takes no effort to become bitter — but forgiveness, though hard, is possible. This psalm is for you: bring your lament to God, and know it's never too late to begin processing anger you've buried for decades.

The Christian faith isn't naive. We're not saying "look on the bright side." We're saying the world is darker than you can imagine — but there is a God who is better, who we can turn to.

The hero of this story isn't the psalmist, and it isn't even Gladys Stains, remarkable as her forgiveness is. It's Jesus — the judge who came to be judged. He took the justice your anger cries for and absorbed it in his own body, so that you could be forgiven and could forgive.

So when your wounds feel fresh and the wait for justice feels too long: don't look at the person who hurt you. Don't look at yourself. Look at Jesus.