I have been reading through the Psalms for some months now, a psalm a day, and Psalm 58 was always going to be a difficult morning.
It ends badly. The righteous rejoice when they see vengeance; they bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked. I read it, and then I read it again, and then I sat with the discomfort of a text I could not use. I work in prisons. I sit with men whose crimes are on public record. If this psalm means what it appears to mean, then what I do on a Tuesday morning is a contradiction of it.
So I did what I have done with these psalms before. I filed it under the parts we no longer pray, and moved on.
Except that I went back.
What kept me going back was the word.
Wicked. It has drifted. My grandchildren use it to mean excellent — that skateboard trick was wicked, that meal was wicked. The word has been hollowed out and refilled with its opposite, which is the sort of thing English does when nobody is watching.
But I had not noticed that I had done something similar with it myself.
Because when I read wicked in Psalm 58, I did not think of anything abstract. I thought of the men I visit. Not consciously, and not with any pleasure — I would have denied it if asked, and I would have believed the denial. But the word had a shape in my mind, and the shape had faces. Faces I know. Faces I have prayed with.
That is why the psalm was unusable. Not because it is violent, but because I had already decided who it was about, and I had decided wrongly.
Psalm 58 does not begin at the end. It begins with a question, and the question is addressed to somebody.
Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods? Do you judge the children of man uprightly?
I had read that verse every time and skated over it, because I did not know who you gods were and the psalm seemed to get going properly in verse three. But verse one is where the psalm tells you what it is about. These are people who decree. People who judge. The accusation in verse two — your hands deal out violence on the earth — is not about the violence of the street. It is what happens when the instrument built to restrain violence is turned around and used.
The psalm is not addressed to criminals. It is addressed to the bench.
And once you have seen that, you cannot unsee it. Every line that follows is aimed at people with power over other people's lives. The venom, the deaf ear, the refusal to be charmed — these are not the marks of a man who did something terrible at twenty-two. They are the marks of a system that will not listen.
I have worked with men whose crimes would be called wicked by any definition anyone has ever used. That is not in dispute, and they would not dispute it.
But something happens when you sit with them long enough to hear the story. You stop looking from the outside. You stop looking with judgement. You start seeing from the inside, and then — without deciding to — you find yourself sitting in their seat.
You are eight. Your parents are using, and you are the one working out where the next meal comes from for the younger ones. Then the police come and you are pulled out of the house and separated from your siblings, and you hope this is temporary and that they are somewhere better than you are. It is not temporary. The home you are placed in treats you as a source of income, and worse. So does the next one. By fifteen you have been in twenty-five placements.
You are out of school more than you are in it. When you are there you are difficult, and difficult means detention, and detention means out again. And at every turn there is a room with adults in it who will decree what happens to you next.
You have to ask yourself how you would have handled that. What has struck me, more than anything, is that these men are still alive. I am not confident I would be.
And then I ask the question the psalm has been asking all along.
What, in that story, is wicked?
I have been quiet about this.
Not about the men — I have spoken about them for years, to anyone who would sit still. But about the rooms where their lives were decreed. About the twenty-fifth placement, and the sibling nobody thought to keep them near, and the adults who signed each of those decisions and went home. I have called that unfortunate. I have called it a broken system, which is a phrase that blames nobody.
I have not called it wicked.
Twenty-five placements. Twenty-five rooms. And a debt nobody thought they were carrying.
That is hesed withheld by people whose office existed to extend it, and Psalm 58 has a name for that, and I have not used the name.
Amos gave the words to a preacher in Montgomery who used them until they were part of the language: let justice roll down like waters. He did not ask for the sympathy of the powerful. He named what was being done and demanded that it stop.
Psalm 58 gives me the words too. It has been giving them to me every time I skipped past verse one.
The case worked through in full — Psalm 82, the seven woes, and what Jesus actually called wicked: What Did Jesus Call Wicked?
And on the word itself: Is “Wicked” a Verdict or a Character?