Scripture: The Cry of a Devastated People
1 By the
rivers of Babylon—
there
we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
Our psalm today is the cry of a devastated people, survivors who are living in the shadow of unthinkable loss. They are living in a nightmare.
According to scripture, Israel’s neighboring empire Babylon lay siege to Jerusalem for two long years (cf. 2 Kings 25), resulting in a great famine. The author of Lamentations paints a dire picture. “The children beg for food,” he says, “but there is nothing for them” (Lam 4:4). The people starving, he says, suffer a worse fate than those who die fighting, for their “life drains away” slowly, agonizingly, not with the swift mercy of those who die on the battlefield (Lam 4:9). There are even cases of cannibalism (Lam 4:10).
The Babylonians were a brutal bunch. When they captured Israel’s king, Zedekiah, they killed his sons in front of him and then put out his eyes, so that his abiding memory would be his family’s death. They looted and destroyed the temple. They razed the city to the ground. The survivors were deported and resettled in Babylon.
Which brings us back to our psalm, where the Judean survivors have gathered together by the river to grieve their great loss.
2 On the
willows there
we
hung up our harps.
3 For there
our captors
asked
us for songs,
and our
tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
Little commentary is needed here. The Judean survivors endure insult upon their injury, as the people who destroyed their lives taunt them and mock them with requests for a happy song about their lost land.
4 How could
we sing the LORD’S song
in
a foreign land?
5 If I
forget you, O Jerusalem,
let
my right hand wither!
6 Let my
tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if
I do not remember you,
if I do
not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
Here, the psalmist broaches a tragic paradox. He utters an oath, saying effectively that if he forgets Jerusalem, let his mouth be unable to speak and his right hand (his working hand) be unable to work. In other words, the psalmist identifies his life with something that no longer exists. Without the memory of Jerusalem, he will have no words left to say, no deeds left to do. His life is based on something he has lost forever.
7 Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites—
The Edomites were ancient Israel’s neighbors, the descendants of Esau; their relationship with Israel mirrors Jacob’s with Esau, marked with frequent hostility and conflict.
Remember, O Lord, against the
Edomites
the
day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they
said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
In other words, the Edomites cheered as their neighbor Israel was conquered and demolished by Babylon.
As sometimes happens with grief, the Judeans’ tears begin to burn with anger. Their sadness searches for some solution that could make things better. Revenge.
8 O
daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy
shall they be who pay you back
what
you have done to us!
9 Happy
shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
The psalm concludes with arguably the darkest, ugliest lines of all scripture.
It is a prayer for payback. It imagines all the horrible things that the Judeans have suffered at the hands of Babylon, and then it wishes those very same things upon Babylon. And it wishes them in excruciatingly graphic detail. “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and….”
What Is Psalm 137 Doing in the Bible?
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Why is this psalm even a part of scripture? Was the editor asleep on the job as the psalms were compiled into a scroll? Did they not notice the violent rage frothing in this psalm?
Later readers of the Bible certainly picked up on the fury and hate encased in Psalm 137. The famous 17th-century English minister and hymn writer, Isaac Watts, composed a hymn for nearly every psalm in the psalter. But he omitted Psalm 137. In his opinion, it was opposed to “the spirit of the gospel.” It’s not hard to see how he came to this conclusion. The final verses employ the same Jewish formula that Jesus used in his beatitudes: “Ashrei [happy or blessed] are the ones who…” But whereas Jesus blesses the merciful and the peacemakers, the psalmist blesses the exact opposite: the violent and the vengeance-takers. On the face of it, this psalm is anti-gospel. Whatever gains the gospel makes in the person of Jesus, seem to be lost in the reading of this psalm.
Sad, Mad, Bad
But as it happens, actually, Psalm 137 is not quite the exception that it seems to be. It is not alone. There are several other psalms that biblical scholars have labeled “imprecatory psalms,” or more conversationally, “curse psalms.” Consider this line from Psalm 12: “May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts” (12:3). Psalm 137 takes things to the extreme, for sure, but it is cut from the same cloth of these other psalms that pray for God to avenge the people of God and ensure that justice is done.
The common thread among these curse psalms is an inconspicuous detail that makes all the difference in the world. They all have the same audience. Namely, God. The curse psalms are prayers. They may be violent prayers, ugly prayers, abominable prayers, but insomuch as they are actually prayer—insomuch as the person praying them takes on an honest, open, and willing posture—they leave themselves vulnerable to the will of God. The person praying them exposes himself or herself to God, relinquishing the final word and allowing God to respond.
I’ve read that therapists who work with feelings sometimes employ a simple schematic: “Sad. Mad. Bad.” The idea is that there is an expected progression from one word to the next. But “while the movement from ‘sad’ to ‘mad’ in our experiences of profound pain is a natural one, the movement from ‘mad’ to ‘bad,’ where we [harm others or ourselves], is always a choice.”[1] For this reason, Paul can say, “Be angry, but do not sin” (Eph 4:26). Do not make that choice to move from mad to bad.
If we look at today’s psalm, we can clearly discern the movement from sad to mad. The first six verses are soaked in tears, as the Judeans gathered by the rivers of Babylon to weep and remember all that they have lost. But things turn sharply in verse seven, where they implore God to remember the malevolence of their neighbors, the Edomites, and they anticipate with relish the future destruction of their captors and tormentors.
The psalm ends disturbingly with an image of a bloodied rock.
But this seed of anger is not sown in fertile ground where it will take root and grow and finally bear the fruit of a bad deed. This is a prayer, remember. The seed of anger is planted not in the heart but rather given to God.
The Audience of Our Anger
The Vietnamese novelist Ocean Vuong shares a story from his childhood. Ocean and his mother came to the United States in 1990 as refugees. He took on work as a teenager to help pay the bills. His mother was making around $13,000. He worked one year as a tobacco farmer on a farm five miles away. The deal was that if you showed up every single day, you’d get a $1,000 bonus at the end of the season, which was nearly a month of his mother’s own wages. Ocean remembers one hot evening in July, he looked out the window of his home and saw someone riding away on his bike—the bike he would ride to work. It was a local drug dealer who was known to steal bikes. Ocean ran outside to the confront the drug dealer, who basically told him to get lost.
The stakes were high, as this bike was Ocean’s ticket to the thousand-dollar bonus. Consumed with anger, nearly possessed by it, Ocean ran to his friend Big Joe’s house and knocked on the window. He remembers putting both hands on the windowsill, shirtless, sweating, filled with anger. He cried out to his friend, “Please let me borrow your gun.”
His friend Big Joe responded, “Ocean, I’m not going to do that. You need to go home.”
Reflecting on that pivotal, life-and-death moment now, Ocean concludes with wonder, “What was so touching to me is that I was not responsible for [that moment of grace]. Someone else’s better sense saved me.”[2]
Ocean moved very quickly from sad to mad, and he was moving just as quickly from mad to bad before his friend Big Joe intervened. In his case, it truly was a moment of grace that prevented him from making a bad situation even worse. But his story illustrates that the audience of our feelings—and especially of our anger—can make all the difference.
Many people hide their anger around others, having been taught that they should not show it. Then maybe they will let it out in quick bursts, like pent-up exhaust fumes, either in a private space where they might indulge the feeling or in a likeminded community where others might actually share their anger and encourage it. In other words, the seed of their anger gets planted in a place where it might grow, where it might indeed move from mad to bad.
A Prayer
Today’s psalm, which envisions a violent payback, might seem grossly out of place in scripture. But the fact that it is a prayer, that its audience is God, makes all the difference. Anger is not safe bottled up in the heart. It’s not safe when it’s vented with others who share the anger. If the psalmist had stuffed his anger down and let it out later in the company of likeminded Judeans, not committing his feelings to God, mad may have moved to bad.
An unacknowledged wound cannot be healed. Similarly, an anger that is not turned over to God will only move from mad to bad. Only by submitting their anger to God, do the people have any hope for a bad situation to be made better, for curse to turn into blessing.
While today’s psalm seethes with rage, because it is prayed to God, it is also a first step toward healing and reconciliation. The people who prayed this prayer, were a little bit like a child who cries out, “I hate this!”—or even “I hate you!”—in the presence of their father or mother. It is the ugly truth of the moment, but it also reveals a deep and tender trust that the parent can handle the feeling, can absorb the blow. God can take our feelings, even the ugliest. By entrusting their hearts to God, the people were exposing their hearts to God’s care…and God’s response.
God’s response may not be what we want to heart. But it will certainly be what we need. In Christ, God has responded with a Word that refuses the quest for power and insists on serving others. A Word that refuses violence and insists on peacemaking. A Word that refuses payback and insists instead on forgiveness.
In Christ, God welcomes our prayers, even our ugliest…and responds, “Come, follow me.”
Prayer
Merciful God,Who welcomes our heart
Even at its ugliest—
Grant us courage
To expose our wounds and our difficulties
In your company
…
And courage to hear your response
And follow in your way.
In Christ, the Word of God: Amen.
[1] W. David O. Taylor, Open
and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life (Nashville: Nelson, 2020), 83.
[2] David Marchese, “The Interview: Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life,” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/magazine/ocean-vuong-interview.html, accessed August 25, 2025.
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