Dual love, not vengeance.

The reading today includes one of the songs for warriors (Ps 144) and this, which you could call the song of the refugees. I dislike, intensely the Reggae version Boney M made of this in my youth. It’s jolly. A party song.

Which misses the point. This is a song of anger, of vengeance. It ends with probably the most horrid line in the bible — that those who smash the heads of Babylonian infants will be called blessed. It alludes to the siege, the sack, where that which cannot be stolen is raped, that which cannot be raped is killed, and all is then burned.

And people say that the Bible is a nice book full of moral wisdom. Yeah, right.

How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song?

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How shall we sing the LORD’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

(Psalm 137:1-9 ESV)

We need, for a second, consider what the Psalms are. They are, primarily, liturgical. They are sung in most liturgical churches — we may disguise it by singing them in Latin or Greek, but that does not help the choir monk: he knows Latin and Greek and he is fully aware of what he is singing.

The Psalms speak to all our emotions, and vengeance is one of them. There is injustice in this world, and most men do not want to apologize for injustice but instead string the miscreants up. There is part of us that wants a Terror, wants to see the streets running with blood from the enemies of the revolution. We can pretend to be civilized, but underneath the sheepskin that makes us seem safe within society is the wolf.

Now, I consider this is highly unwise. I oppose capital punishment: in part because the innocent can die,. and in part because I’d rather they sad in daily services within a penitentiary until they meet their maker, perhaps even finding salvation within the prison, like that stormcrow, Solzhenitsyn. Some may say that I am cruel, that death is a better release, but that is a mistake, one made all too often by the elite, who consider some lives worthwhile, or the Jacobin of this age, who considers killing some people useful.

But that is wrong. Besides, that video makes me want to hire a 325 kW Holden HSV and drop donuts in front of the Greenpeace headquarters.

Pro-Euthanasia activists absolutely disgust me.
Their arguments always boil down to “there’s no hope for your condition ever
improving, so you might as well just get your death over with”.

They ignore the spontaneous remission of terminal cancers, the sudden remission of autoimmune diseases, etc. to promote their radical ideology. They actually argue that’s its cruel for doctors to tell chronically ill patients that their conditions could might improve! *shudders* What a sick movement.

It is better to see the Psalm as what it is. Us being honest with God. We want to do these things, but we choose not to. We want to instead reflect the law of Love, not the law of vengeance. Hyperbole exists, and our Lord used it, telling those who tempt the young ones in Christ to perdition would do better to drown themselves, for suicide is the lesser sin. But the law is not about vengeance in the end, it is about dual love.

Sadducees Ask About the Resurrection

The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her.”

But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

The Great Commandment

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

(Matthew 22:23-40 ESV)

We need to remember two things. The first is that this life is not the end, and that we will need to give account. We are not just of this world: all of us know this life is too short and wish for far, far longer. Which we will have: either with Christ or in a Hell of our making.

The third point I want to make is to emphasize that this is not a pointless exercise. Everyone who is a Christian accepts that reconciliation with God is achieved not by human efforts to be good, but by acknowledging and conforming your life to a free gift that was offered by Jesus Christ. Christ died in order to pay the penalty for every individual person’s rebellion against God the Father. That atoning death is the basis for our reconciliation with God, and our eternal life with him. However, the passage in Philippians makes clear that our experience of Heaven after we have been saved by grace is affected by what we do here and now. So often, what you hear in church is do this, do that, and there is never any rationality to it, no emphasis on long-term planning or wisdom in decision-making. It’s all just ad hoc emotivism. But I am telling you something different today. You have a few years on Earth to understand the example of Christ, to follow him, and share in his sufferings as you imitate his obedience. You better have some sort of plan to produce a return on God’s investment in you, and it has to be a good plan. Not one that makes you feel good, but one that is likely to achieve results. Plan your charitable giving like your life were an episode of Mission Impossible, and focus on outcomes, not feelings. That doesn’t mean that results are the measure of success, because that’s God’s job. But it does mean that you should prefer the Thomas Sowell approach to the Disney Princess approach.

The second is that we are liberated from the cycle of vengeance, of Utu, of payback. The tribalist commits atrocities because it is payback for the atrocities that they have suffered: an eye for an eye is considered a minimal revenge. Instead it is a village for an eye. This does not mean that we do not feel the wish to do these things, but instead that we are led to instead act as Christ would, and be his witness. This life is not about us. We do not live for ourselves, we live for Christ.