FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, enliven and preserve your church with your perpetual mercy. Without your help, we mortals will fail; remove far from us everything that is harmful, and lead us toward all that gives life and salvation, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn from their ways and live.” Ezekiel 33:11.
God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Quite the contrary for God’s human creatures. We are prone to take a perverse delight in the downfall of people we regard as deserving retribution. No better example can be found in our own country than our embrace of capital punishment. There a morbid public fascination and delight taken in the highly ritualized killing of people found guilty of particularly revolting crimes. From a practical perspective, capital punishment does not make much sense. The expense of prosecuting a capital case from arrest through trial, appeals and execution takes years, costs far more than incarcerating a person for life and, according to numerous studies, does not deter crime. But moral outrage and the lust for retribution appear to trump common sense. We take too much pleasure in the death of the wicked to abandon the wasteful, futile and cruel practice of killing them.
From classic westerns to modern police dramas, popular entertainment has frequently capitalized on our need to see retributive justice done. They present us with simplistic narratives pitting strong, virtuous gun toting heroes against hopelessly depraved villains whose death seems wholly justified and quite gratifying. Little effort is made to humanize the evil doers by giving us insight into their stories and the events that brought them to where they are and the people they have become. Seldom do we encounter on the screen circumstances in which violence, the threat of violence or the use of firearms proves unnecessary to resolve conflict. In the real world, however, conflicts within families, communities and among nations are resolve daily without resort to violence. The police regularly do more talking down than shooting down. It is not uncommon for police officers to serve for their entire career without ever using their weapons. But that does not make for good television. What emerges, then, from the distorted view given us by entertainment media is a world in which evil is overcome and justice is restored by good people with guns killing bad people. It is a highly satisfying, if altogether delusional version of reality.
Of course, the human lust for retribution is nothing new. It goes all the way back to the dawn of time as does God’s efforts to limit its destructiveness. God marked Cain in order to protect him from any who might seek retribution against him for the murder of his brother. The frequently misunderstood admonition calling for an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” did not mean literally that eyes should be blinded or teeth knocked out. Rather, the point is that the penalty for an injury done should not exceed the damage of the injury inflicted. Covenant justice under Torah is to be restorative, not retributive. The injured party must, to the extent possible, be made whole. Both parties to the conflict should then be reconciled for their own sake and the sake of the covenant community.
Yet this very human hunger for revenge and retribution remains. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the Book of Psalms. These prayers contain numerous petitions for God to intercede in a retributive and even vindictive manner on behalf of the psalmist. At first blush, that seems altogether contrary to what Jesus teaches us. Yet the Psalms are the prayers Jesus grew up praying. No doubt they shaped his understanding of the God he called “Abba” or Father. So how does one square the pleas for retribution in the Psalms with Jesus’ call in our gospel lesson to seek reconciliation rather than retribution? How can cries for vengeance against the wicked be made to the God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked?
A couple of things are worth noting. First, it is easy enough for privileged progressive white, ever polite upper middle class protestants who have never been gang raped by invading troops, never seen their homes ploughed under by people seizing their property, never held the bomb shattered remains of their children in their arms to relegate the imprecatory psalms to the rubbish heap of primitive religion unworthy of their more highly evolved god consciousness. It is easy to forget that the Psalms are the prayer book of a people enslaved, conquered and exiled. The psalms give expression to a people crying out to God for justice because justice is not about to come from anywhere else. Moreover, they express faith, though sometimes only a hairs breadth, that God hears the prayers of the poor, the marginalized and neglected. Our failure to hear the psalms as good news bespeaks not a higher level of spiritual understanding and morality, but enslavement to privilege and a sense of entitlement.
Second, the Psalms are deeply human. They give voice to the full range of human experience and emotion, the good, the bad and the ugly. One of the stupidest remakes people make is, “you shouldn’t feel that way.” There is no should or should not when it comes to emotions. Feelings are neither good nor bad. They just are. The psalms do not judge human emotions. Instead, they provide us with templates for prayer expressing human feeling, emotions running the whole psychic spectrum: praise, thanksgiving, celebration, lament, anger, despair. The psalmists frequently confess their failures to live faithfully under their covenant with God. But they also do not hesitate to let God know when they feel God has not fulfilled God’s end of the covenant. The faith expressed in the psalms testifies to a God big enough to receive the prayers of our hearts-even when they are not models of faith, piety and righteous intent.
The psalmists frequently seek relief from their enemies. Often, they pray for vindication against their foes. Sometimes they demand vengeance and they are not shy about telling God just what shape God’s punishment for their enemies’ wickedness should take. It is important to note, however, that the psalmists do not take the task of punishing the wicked into their own hands. Rather, they leave the business of retribution in the hands of God where it rightfully belongs. As the prophet Jonah had to learn, God’s view of who should be punished, how, when and for what frequently differs from our myopic understandings of what justice requires. God hears the cries of the oppressed and defenseless for justice. God receives with understanding and empathy their anger, impatience and thirst for justice. More important still, God promises that “the needy shall not always be forgotten, and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever.” Psalm 9:18. But God’s way of bringing about the reign of justice does not take the shape of violence and retribution we are so prone to follow. God takes no delight in the death of the wicked, however much we might believe they richly deserve it.
Does this contradict Jesus’ call to love our enemies? I think not. Love, after all, is not a matter of feeling. It is a matter of doing. I do not have to like people in order to treat them with kindness. I do not have to approve of what people do, agree with what they believe or tolerate their abusive behavior to treat them as I would have them treat me. Love is not always gentle. To the contrary, love sometimes requires speaking discomforting truths, taking actions that offend and disrupting the false and fragile peace of complicity with evil to open the way for the genuine peace of repentance, restitution and reconciliation. Love does, however, require that I renounce retributive justice, foreswear revenge and renounce coercive force. Punishment, retribution and payback, if there is to be such, is the sole prerogative of God. Jesus’ disciples are given to understand that their sole responsibility is to love their neighbor even as they are loved by God.
Here is a poem by Ethan Chua expressing both the exasperation arising from theft and a genuine effort to understand the thief and recognize a kinship with him or her.
To the stranger who stole my bike
—the lock cut in two. Now I have to walk
to Our Lady and St. Joseph, through
the sparse needlework of deciduous
branches. It turns out we still need
each other—stranger, maybe
you saw the black and orange chassis
and thought speed, something sleek
to meet the headwinds; maybe warm
meals for the week or a present for someone
you hurt and love; or maybe you’d make
of its handlebars and spokes better use
than I could, as forest floor mycelia
spin carbon, nitrogen from muck—
I was so angry with you. The date I’d planned
for Saturday fell through, a friend
vanished from my life last week.
The fossil news from Baku, bleak, and suffering
in Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, Palestine.
All things that can be taken, what you thought
was yours, that everything changes hands, and I—
I was late. The mass was almost over,
the voices nearly finished with their singing.
Bread, water, some kind of stolen grace
flashed past me on two wheels in the wind.
December was late. Outside the ash
was watching itself end
and time ride with the thief.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2026) Ethan Chua (they, them) is a Chinese-Filipino poet, scholar, comic book writer, and community organizer. Their poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in The Journal, while their translations of poems from Filipino to English can be found in Asymptote and Alchemy. They are currently pursuing a Master’s degree in International and World History. You can sample more of Ethan Chua’s poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 