Psalms of Exile: An Eye Exam
How we read the Bible—as the literal word of God or as an expression of God’s people and their experience of God—makes a significant difference in who we think God is. Brian McLaren uses a psalm of Exile as an example:
The best known psalm of Exile is Psalm 137. While the beautiful poetry of the first part of the psalm is often read—and even became a popular hit in the musical Godspell—the ending of the psalm is often regarded as one of the ugliest passages of the whole Bible. It is seldom read aloud in most church settings because of its horrific content.
When lovers of the Bible glibly refer to the Bible as “The Word of God,” without also taking seriously the reality that the Bible is also the testimony of human beings in great pain, they can find themselves unintentionally rendering God a monster.
For example, read these closing lines of Psalm 137:7–9 in two different ways. First, read them as an expression of the agony and fury felt by displaced, dispossessed, oppressed people who are repeatedly dehumanized by their enemies and oppressors:
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!”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
Read in this way, this desire for horrific vengeance cannot be excused, nor can it be justified and attributed to God … but it can be understood. Of course, they would dream of and pray for revenge against the Babylonians who ransacked their country, kidnapped them, and now ask them to perform their native music for their captors’ entertainment. Again, when we understand their outrage, we feel their pain, but that doesn’t mean we justify it.
Now read the passage again, assuming that every word in the Bible should be read as God’s true opinion of a matter. Can you see why people who are taught to read the Bible in this way would get an idea of God as a heartless, vengeful, cruel monster?
Can you see how a wise and careful reading of Psalm 137 can help us read the whole Bible more wisely and carefully?
No, of course God does not take delight in the suffering and death of babies or the heartbreak of their bereaved parents. No! Of course not! If we see God as taking such perverse delight in violence, soon we will make ourselves in that God’s image.
Yes, reject that awful reading. But please, don’t stop there.
Ask this question: How can we stand with God and share divine loving kindness in the midst of all-too-real and all-too-often-repeated human cruelty?
We certainly do not tell the oppressed to shut up and submit to their ongoing dehumanization. Nor do we give them encouragement to act upon their revenge fantasies.
Instead, we dare to listen deeply, to understand and empathize, to put ourselves in the shoes of those who suffer and feel their fury and despair.
And we don’t stop there either: then we see how oppression and revenge, if we let them take over, create vicious cycles that grow uglier and more catastrophic. We imagine how in our future, we could repeat the worst mistakes of our past.
Then we are ready to take our stand: If we want to break out of the vicious, violent cycles of our history, we must develop a new way of reading the Bible, a new way of seeing, a new way of being.
That’s why, in a sense, Psalm 137 is like an eye exam: What we see there tells us how well we see.
Reference:
Brian D. McLaren, “Psalms of Exile: An Eye Exam” for Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing, 2026).
Image credit and inspiration: Michael Sturgeon, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Ukraine, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The drummer holds on to the inner rhythm that exile cannot erase—a rhythm echoed in the Psalms—the power of music to name oppression, remember home, and resist forgetting.
Story from Our Community:
“Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). This verse is one that I’ve used for many years when I am overwhelmed by my internal self or the world around me. It provides me the opportunity to let go and simply “be,” after which I’m able to understand my role in a situation or my total lack of ability to influence it, thereby “letting God.”
—Barbara B.