5 Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
6 ‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’
If I am going to continue this journey with HP, I am going to have to come to grips at some point with the idea of God’s “wrath.”
It is a tiny Hebrew word which has caused a world of grief. It conjures up images of a mighty potentate sitting on high who is infuriated at the failures of human beings to abide by the almighty will of Divine decree. It has led in Christian theology to the abhorrent concept of a God whose anger can only be appeased by the sacrifice of a pure and innocent victim, a God whose fury needs to be placated by death.
The Hebrew word is “ap”; it means literally “nose or nostril” and hence, came to signify the whole face, and even occasionally the entire person. Because the word was associated with rapid breathing through the nose, it came to be used as an image for “passion” and thus for “anger” or “wrath.” When I am angry, I tend to hyperventilate.
We are dealing here with an image. Images are not scientific concepts that define, categorize, or formulate doctrine. It is a risky business to take a poetic image and turn it into the basis for a theological construct. An image intends to evoke, to point and to lead the reader to ponder and question. Images are multivalent, inevitably amenable to more than one interpretation.
If we are going to continue this journey with HP, we are going to need to hold some questions without pushing too quickly for precise answers:
What might HP be attempting to evoke in me by using this image of God breathing with passion in the face of my attempts to run my own life without reference to any power beyond myself?
How is the God who “laughs” at my presumption and arrogance, the same God who speaks to me in “wrath” when I refuse to conform my will to the way that this God has designed life to work?
Lord help me to keep my heart open to you and to hold firmly to the vision that you are a God of love and compassion, even when HP seems to suggest a different version.
In A Spacious Place 
3 comments
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April 27, 2021 at 10:25 am
bobmacdonald
This is a grand walk we are on. Thanks for the word by word and verse by verse approach. We have before us, as we do in our ambivalent lives, a set of poems that draw us out of ourselves into a relationship of mercy to each other in the body, as well as individually and personally. How do we get to see this overall movement of the Psalter?
I find myself taken in a direction I am not expecting to go when I look at the words of this poetry. I noted this morning what I have seen before: that Psalm 2 is reflected in Psalm 149, the second psalm is a frame in the second to last psalm so much so that 7 of the 14 words in verses 2 and 8 of Psalm 149 are dependent on words in Psalm 2. I have put a post with an image here https://meafar.blogspot.com/2021/04/psalms-2-and-149.html
As we read in sequence, we don’t see this, and if I look at the words in Psalm 149, I see that there is a frequently used word that is not yet reflected in the first two psalms. Its first occurrence is in Psalm 4. This word is in English, ‘mercy’ or ‘kindness’, ‘loving-kindness’ in the traditional authorized translation. The word, in Hebrew, hesed, and its noun hasid, occurs 291 times in the Old Testament, 155 of these are in the Psalter.
It seems to me that the Psalms are definitely a move by the Mystery to teach a violent and rebellious people the reality of mercy.
April 27, 2021 at 7:04 pm
Christopher Page
thank you Bob for this wise and really helpful comment. I hope to put it up as a separate post in a couple of days as I do not want it to languish lost in the dark dungeon of IASP’s “Comments” section. Your deep reading of Psalms has clearly borne rich fruit.
April 27, 2021 at 10:39 am
bobmacdonald
I also want to note that the word for ‘set’ in verse 6 is the sacrificial aspect of offering a libation. It is not a passive appointment of power, but a voluntary giving up of power as if a libation was being poured out on the altar.