The Accuser

Accuse my accusers, Yahweh; attack my attackers.

Grip your shield and buckler—Up, and help me!

Brandish your lance and pike in the face of my pursuers,

Tell my soul, “I am your salvation.”        (Ps. 35:1-3, New Jerusalem Bible)

I’ve never done a survey, but I would guess that at least one third David’s Psalms are cries to the Lord about his enemies.  This one is especially passionate: he’s giving orders to God, almost—“Get up!”  The man certainly collected enemies in his long and exciting life, but I was never sure how to apply these Psalms to me.  I don’t have enemies.  And if I did, should I be prodding the Lord into the ring to punch them out for me?  It seems antithetical to, say, Isaiah 53 where the Lamb is led to the slaughter yet never opens his mouth.  The Lord’s true servant, it seems, meekly takes all the abuse hurled at him with no appeals for intervention.

Speaking of Isaiah 53, did you ever notice how the servant’s tormentors are never identified?  They are either abstract qualities (“by oppression and judgment he was taken away”) or shadowed by passive voice, with the victim as the subject, front and center: he was led, wounded, crushed, afflicted.  In the Psalms, the enemies are never identified either.  Evil snarls like a lion and bares its teeth like a jackal, but in the end it has no personality.

But evil has very real causality.  What to do about it?  These Psalms do represent moral progress, in a way.  David wrote them in an age of blood guilt and honor killing, not that far removed, culturally, from Lamech’s time: I killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.  If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold (Gen. 4:23-24).   David is at least asking a higher power to intercede for him, knowing that the Lord’s judgment is perfect.

But notice his complaint: violent men accuse him, lie about him, gloat and jeer at him, tear his flesh, wait in ambush.  He must be  speaking metaphorically, since there’s no record of David being broken or severely wounded.  From a physical angle, his looks like a charmed life.

But Messiah was literally treated in the way David complains of, so literally it makes us cringe.  Gloated over? Jeered at?  (Why don’t you come down from that cross?)  Torn? (His flesh hung in ribbons.)  Lied about?  (He said he could tear down this temple.)  Accused?  (He’s trying to make himself king!)

Yet when David says Accuse! Christ says Forgive.

When Lamech boasts of seventy-seven fold, Christ pours out seventy times seven.

When David says, Rise up O Lord, Christ says, Here I am.

What David asked for, he got—only the blows he wished to fall on his tormentors fell on the tormented instead.  And ever since, when righteous men and women suffer, they can at least know that the judgment has fallen, the accusations made, the attack carried out.  They can find themselves in Messiah’s bloody footprints.

Why doesn’t God intervene?  Ha already has.

Easy for me to say, in good health and comfort.  Does it apply to the Syrian Christian tormented in a refugee camp, or the North Korean Christian huddling in scraps against the cold and scrounging for insects and amphibians to eat raw?  It has to.

Tell my soul, “I am your salvation.”  That’s what the cross pleads, and what the empty tomb replies.