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2004-04-20 issue:

Getting angry with God

The Psalms teach us to freely express our feelings to God.

by Ken Gibble

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There are some things in the Bible that make me shudder. Case in point: Psalm 88. One Old Testament scholar has called Psalm 88 “an embarrassment to conventional faith.” He writes: “It is the cry of a believer … whose life has gone awry, who desperately seeks contact with [God], but who is unable to evoke a response. This is indeed ‘the dark night of the soul’ ”(Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms).

Here is just a portion of Psalm 88 (vv. 1-2, 4-8a, 14):

“O LORD, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence,
let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry.
… I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
I am like those who have no help,
like those forsaken among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.
You have put me in the depths of the Pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves.
You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a thing of horror to them.
… O LORD, why do you cast me off?
Why do you hide your face from me?”

Angry psalm: The tone of this psalm is unrelentingly dark and desperate. Even more, the psalmist accuses God of being the cause of it all: “You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a thing of horror to them.” This is an angry psalm, and the anger is directed at God. There is not a single word of praise to be found here.

How did such an outpouring of despair and anger make it into the pages of Holy Scripture?
I’ll never forget how surprised I was when I first realized this kind of language was in the Bible. I was in high school and had decided to read through the Psalms. I’m not sure who or what prompted me to do that, but I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had no idea the writers of Scripture expressed such doubt, such anger—anger at God, no less. I remember thinking, What a relief! How refreshing to discover such honesty. If it was OK for whoever wrote the Psalms to express their doubts, their anger, to God, then surely it was OK for me to do the same. Reading the angry psalms was liberating for me at that point in my faith pilgrimage. When I got angry at God or doubted God’s love or even God’s existence, it was all right. God could handle my doubts, my rage.

I still believe that. I think it is a mistake for Christians to suppose that faith is always a matter of being cheerful and upbeat. Where did we ever get this idea that God wants us to be happy all the time? Maybe we breathed it in from the messages in our culture, in a North America that has been described as “the officially optimistic society” (Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness).

Ours is the great love affair with “success,” defined usually in terms of growth—a rising stock market, more material goods. This definition of success has infected even the church of Jesus Christ with “successful” churches being those with more members, programs or money than surrounding churches. This is strange when we remember who Jesus was and what he told his disciples: “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:43b-45).

God desires from us our entire selves, just as we are. We don’t have to come to God with the masks we so often wear for the benefit of others. “How are you doing?” “Oh, fine.” And often we are fine. But sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes our lives are filled to the brim with worry or pain or anger or despair. God welcomes whatever feelings we have. The great commandment, Jesus said, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Not just with the good stuff in your heart, soul and mind. Love God with everything you have. Love God with the best in you, and love God with the worst in you.

Goodness: That’s not easy to do. We have been conditioned to be good, to think good thoughts and do good things, especially when we imagine God is watching or listening. The writer Madeleine L’Engle says that when she was a little girl she ended her prayers with, “and God bless me and make me a good girl.” Now, looking back, she says, “I become less and less sure that it was a good prayer.” Now she understands that goodness is what God can do in us, not something we can accomplish by an act of will. She writes, “If I am ever good, it is not because I am trying to be but because goodness is for a moment offered me as a gift of sheer grace” (A Stone for a Pillow).

How freeing it is to come to the prayer book of the Bible, the Psalms, and find there both great joy and great despair. Some of the Psalms express a desire for revenge on enemies. Psalm 109 contains a string of curses directed at those who, the psalmist says, “attack me without cause.” “He loved to curse,” is the accusation, therefore “let curses come on him!” “Let there be none to extend kindness to him, nor any to pity his fatherless children!” On and on goes this chilling set of curses. And again we ask, What is stuff like this doing in the Bible?
Again, the answer is honesty. The psalmist is being ruthlessly honest to God about feelings of rage. Let’s face it, you and I can get angry about the way others have treated us. People we count on offend us or betray us. Sometimes we’re afraid to acknowledge our anger or rage to God because such feelings aren’t, well, nice.

The psalmist suffers from no such misgivings. The longing to have the wrongdoer suffer is poured out to God with a vengeance. But notice that the psalmist does not exact revenge. Instead the feelings are given to God because there is a trust that God will know what to do and will do what is just. What a healthy kind of faith this is. Sometimes just naming our anger and giving it to God may be just the right therapy for our anger.

Often we think our prayers should contain the right words. We wrap ourselves in a cloak of religious piety and goodness, when what we may be feeling is the opposite. In fact, praise of God that is genuine comes from the depths of our being, and in those depths there is always a measure of suffering, of pain.

When I read the prayers in the Psalms, I am comforted in knowing that prayers from the heart are not just OK but are welcomed by the Holy Shepherd who longs to lead me by still waters.

God knows that situations arise in our lives for which there are no clear answers. Why am I feeling so depressed? Why did my loved one have to die? When we hear someone express such questions, you and I are tempted to answer with an explanation or a word of encouragement. But that is probably not the best response. Sometimes the best we can do is to point to a psalm like Psalm 88: “My soul is full to troubles.”

And the final word is not the reality of suffering. In the words of Psalm 30: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” When that morning comes and exactly what it will look like, you and I cannot say. At best, we have clues to it from our faith, from the Scriptures: clues such as an empty tomb, a risen Lord preparing breakfast for his friends, John’s vision of “a new heaven and a new earth,” God wiping every tear from our eyes.
And even though Psalm 88 ends on a somber note, with the psalmist unable to give voice to praise, it is hard to miss what follows. These are the opening words of Psalm 89: “I will sing of your steadfast love, O LORD, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.”

That can be our song, too, a song of God’s steadfast love, a love that will not let us go, no matter how long and winding the road, no matter how dark the shadows in the valley, no matter what.
 
Ken Gibble lives in Greencastle, Pa.

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