Another Post About Enemies.

The Psalms contain a lot of complaints, and bad wishes, aimed at “enemies.”  The most problematic ones are the infamous end of Psalm 137 and most of Psalm 109.  But enemies are all over the place.

Taken literally and historically, of course, the enemies are people.  Either they are personal rivals and antagonists, or threats to the nation.  Psalm writers are reflecting on actual experiences with actual people.  The Psalms are all written from the perspective of the victims of violence.  People being lynched, for example.  The Psalms are great because they offer these expressions of primal and existential fear, pain, rage, and despair.  There is no human emotion that God does not know or accept or even share; none that is not redeemed in the ocean of God’s love.   

But this fact is often overlooked by people who use this language to justify their own violence against perceived enemies, even if those people haven’t actually done them any harm.  The greatest obscenity is a lynch mob or an aggressor army using these parts of the Bible to rationalize violence against invented “enemies.”  Unfortunately, that happens all too often.  (Nazi soldiers had “Gott Mit Uns” (God with us) stamped on their belt-buckles.  Segregationists set up "Christian Academies" to avoid integrated schools.)  

The Church recognized very early that, if Jesus Christ is the Word of God who is both the Source and fulfillment of Scripture, there is much in the Hebrew Bible that could not be taken literally.  Certainly no accurate reading of Scripture authorizes thoughts and behaviors that are utterly contradictory to the life and teachings of Jesus.  The Bible can only be understood in conformity to him.

Therefore, the Church learned to read all this talk of “enemies” in a primarily psychological way.  I pointed this out in an earlier post called “The First Enemy.”  Basically, our real enemies are primarily within us.  They are the thoughts, impulses, cravings, fears, incitements to anger and violence, memories, anticipations, feelings, and other things going on in our minds.  It is these influences that will kill us, and others, and therefore need to be controlled or even exterminated. (This is also how we read a book like Joshua.) 

So when the Psalms are railing against evil enemies, they mainly mean ourselves.  Or, more precisely, our old selves, what Paul calls “the flesh,” and I call “ego.”  We need to root out the limited, delusional, voices that tell us we are separated from God and others, and which lure us into thoughts and actions that are self-centered, sinful, and violent.  Ego is like cancer; it is killing us as individuals, and congealed into Empire it is killing the creation.  We need to remove it from us by any means necessary. 

The whole agenda of the Second Enemy (see my previous post by that title), Empire, is to organize and focus the evil generated by ego and apply it to invented “enemies” in the name of its own power and wealth.  The real enemy, of course, is Empire itself which concocts and feeds us other enemies to hate, fear, and kill, as a way of maintaining its power over us and in us.  

Both enemies are really one in that they represent the entity which Scripture refers to as the Evil One, the Adversary, the Accuser, the Father of Lies, the Devil, or Satan.  Having been unable to displace God in heaven, he has set himself to destroying God’s creation, using humans as his instruments.

Anyway, all this means that spiritual life means rooting out the enemy within us, and by extension within our communities.  The enemy is never human individuals; it is always within us, and that is where it needs to be fought.

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