Psalm 35 is a lament psalm of angry complaint. Trouble seems close by, hatred is growing, and trust in God is wavering. Maybe you can relate to a person in a badly deteriorating situation—you or others you have known or heard about, now or in the past.
Notice two important things about the psalmist. First, his prayer life is filled with anger and rawness, without politeness, entirely open about his distress and seeking to yield it all to God. Of course, the lament form gives him a way to do this. His difficulties cannot be yielded until they are fully expressed.
Second, the psalmist’s relationship with God is not all “comfortable, cozy and congenial.” He is risking revealing his resentment and his resistance. He appears to want to line up God with him, two against one, against his enemies. Psalm 35 shows the speaker working passionately and knowingly at a relationship that will bring him life. (Brueggemann, Message of the Psalms, p. 66)
Angry lament psalms show the suffering psalmist setting out to “do battle against God for God.” (Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer of the Bible, p. 48)
1. Look closely at the very strong petition to God: 35:1-3, 33:17, 33:22-24.
What imagery does the psalmist use to get God to move on the matters that are God’s proper business?
How does his admission that his life is out of control impact him? Where does owning his despair take him?
2. Look closely at all Psalm 35’s extended comments about the enemy.
Read Psalm 35:4-6 and 8, continuing in 35:19 and 25-26. What does he wish for his enemies?
How does he support his “venom” about his enemies? (35:7, 15-16, 20-21)
How does he describe the situation he finds himself in because of their enmity?(35:13-14)
“This entire element (the enemy) reveals the voice of one who is filled with rage, has a deep sense of unfair treatment, and finds it intolerable and unbearable for another instant.” (Brueggemann, p. 64)
3. In addition to Psalm 35’s strong petitions and angry complaints, notice also its promise of praise.
“I will thank you…I will praise you” 35:18
The psalmist promises to thank and praise God when God acts to make his situation right. His angry prayers are not acts of despair, but acts of hope. However, his withholding praise until God acts sounds like bargaining or threatening, tactics of a desperate person.
What will be the actual substance of the sure, but withheld praise that the psalmist promises in 35:18?
What will the psalmist be telling about God? What about who God is will the psalmist be praising? 35:10, 27b
4. As Jesus gave his final instructions to his followers before his arrest and crucifixion, he told them about how the world would hate them and would persecute them because of their association with him. (See John 15:18-16:4a.)
“Whoever hates me hates my Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.‘”
John 15:23-25
John 15:25 is a quote from Psalm 35:19.
Jesus’ use of the psalmist’s words validates the psalmist’s struggle. Jesus identifies with all human suffering, especially suffering of the innocent. Jesus’ Passion and the ongoing suffering of His Church are rooted in humanity’s deliberate ignorance of, even resolved hatred of God. In Christ, we pray for victory over sinful ignorance, hatred, and death. (Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, 67-68)
5. In Praying the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann explains that there is a way beyond the Psalms of vengeance. But it is not an easy or “natural way…it is the way of accepting the rage and grief and terror of evil in ourselves in order to be liberated for compassion toward others.” In Christ, we have “a more excellent way,”
…a way that only comes as a gift. It is something we are not required to do but enabled to do. It is not something we do in order to secure our own righteousness before God It is rather something that we are made capable of when we know that the power of God is greater than the powers of death.
(Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence, p. 82 quoted by Brueggemann in Praying the Psalms)
Embracing these harsh psalms as our own helps us own and express our rage and indignation.
And then (only then) can our rage and indignation be yielded to the mercy of God. In taking this route through them, we take the route God “himself” has gone. We are not permitted a cheaper, easier more “enlightened way.”
Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, 81