Stand-To at First Light

If someone asks you

The imprecatory psalms cannot survive the Sermon on the Mount

Verse 7 says God hates all the workers of iniquity and will abhor the deceitful man. Verse 11 asks God to judge them, make them fall, cast them out. Then Christ says love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. These are not two moods of one religion; they are two incompatible pictures of God, and you cannot have both. And do not reach for the liturgy, because the liturgy is my evidence. When the Church built the four-week psalter in 1971 she dropped three psalms outright — 58, 83 and 109 — and cut imprecatory verses out of a score of others. Psalm 5 is not your exception. Open the book: Morning Prayer, Monday of Week I, is prescribed as Psalm 5:2-10 and 12-13. Verse 11 — "judge them, O God, let them fall from their devices, cast them out" — is snipped out of the middle. Your own liturgists could not say it with a straight face. You do not believe this text either. You just will not admit it.

You are right, and you have actually undersold it, so let me finish the concession before I answer. Three psalms were dropped from the four-week cycle — 58, 83 and 109 — and verses were cut from around twenty others; the standard tabulation puts it at roughly a hundred and twenty verses in all, just under five percent of the Psalter. And yes: the cut in Psalm 5 is exactly the verse you named. The Office prays Ps 5:2–10, 12–13. The petition is gone from the daily cycle. Anybody who tells you otherwise has not opened the book.

Now here is what that act was, and was not.

It was a judgment about public recitation, and the document that made it says so in the same breath that it defends the verses. The General Instruction gives the reason plainly — a psychological difficulty — and then, in the very same paragraph, states that the psalms of imprecation are in fact used as prayer in the New Testament, citing Apocalypse 6:10, and that the omission is in no sense meant to encourage the use of curses. That is not a Church quietly disowning her own text. That is a Church saying: this is inspired, it is prayed in the New Testament, and we still judge that an untrained congregation reciting aloud in a language it did not grow up praying in is not the right setting for it. Disagree with the prudence if you like — many Catholics do — but you cannot read a retraction out of a document that refuses to retract in writing.

Removal from a cycle is not removal from the canon. The verse is in every Catholic Bible printed since. It is in the Vulgate. The Roman Breviary before 1971 prayed the Psalter whole, verse for verse, and the traditional and monastic uses still do. Nothing was declared uninspired, unedifying, or false. What changed was one distribution schedule.

And the canon has the last word here, because the Apostle got there first. Paul quotes this very psalm's indictment — the open sepulchre, the deceitful tongues — at Romans 3:13, to shut the mouth of the entire human race, his own included. The Church that trimmed a verse from the daily cycle did not trim the Apostle who quoted it.

Then the theology, which is what you actually asked about.

"Hate" in Hebrew and Latin idiom marks decisive rejection, not emotional revulsion; the same verb has Christ demanding a man "hate" his father and mother (Luke 14:26), and no one has ever read that as licence to despise parents. The canon's own control is Wisdom 11:25 in the Douay — God loves everything that exists and hates nothing He made. What He rejects is the iniquity that is eating the man alive.

Then read what verse 11 actually asks: "let them fall from their devices." Not "strike them." Let the plot collapse under the plotter. Aquinas, replying to this exact objection, lists four ways the scriptural imprecations are legitimately read — as prophecy in the form of a curse; as temporal evils sent for the wicked man's correction; as pronounced against the kingdom of sin rather than the man, so that the man may be corrected; and as our will conforming to divine justice concerning the obstinate (ST II-II q.83 a.8, reply to obj. 1). Private vengeance is on none of the four lists.

And the psalm does not end in wreckage. It ends: "thou wilt bless the just. O Lord, thou hast crowned us, as with a shield of thy good will." The last word is a crown, not a corpse.

One more thing, and it is the thing that resolves the objection rather than managing it. Christ prayed these psalms. He prayed Psalm 21 (22 in the Hebrew count) from the Cross while asking the Father to forgive the men who put Him there. Whatever the imprecations mean, they mean something a man can pray with nails in his hands.

Say it out loud: The Church took that verse out of the daily cycle for pastoral reasons — she never took it out of the Bible, and St. Paul quotes this psalm in Romans.

"I will worship towards thy holy temple" is the piety Christ abolished

Verse 8 has the psalmist entering a building and bowing toward a holy place, and Catholicism has built its entire physical apparatus on that instinct — basilicas, sanctuary lamps, genuflection toward a box on a wall, pilgrimage to holy ground. But Christ settled this at a well in Samaria: the hour is coming when you will worship neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, because the Father seeks worshippers in spirit and in truth (John 4:21-23). The temple is over. Its veil tore. Directional, localized, building-bound worship is the exact thing the New Covenant retired, and every stone church with a fixed east is a monument to not having heard Him.

Read the next line of the same conversation. Christ tells the Samaritan woman that salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22) — He is not abolishing the temple principle, He is relocating it, and He says where: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up... but he spoke of the temple of his body" (John 2:19, 21). The temple is not cancelled. It is now a body, and that body is not a metaphor — it is a real, locatable, physical thing, which is precisely why Christian worship stayed physical. The Incarnation is the reason we have buildings, not an argument against them.

Then look at what the psalmist himself says he is doing. Verse 8: "in the multitude of thy mercy, I will come into thy house." He does not claim the building lets him in. He says mercy does. That is the whole Catholic account of a church: God put His name in a place — "My name shall be there" (3 Kings 8:29) — and men come in on His credit, not their own. Verse 5 has already established that God does not will iniquity, and verse 6 that the unjust do not abide before His eyes. The psalmist knows he has no standing. He walks in anyway, on mercy, and that is not temple presumption. That is the Gospel three thousand years early.

And the direction of the argument runs the other way in the end. The last book of the Bible does not show heaven as disembodied spirit; it shows a throne with a rainbow around it and elders in white robes and crowns (Apoc 4:3–4), an altar and a golden censer and the smoke of incense going up (Apoc 8:3–4). If localized, embodied, directional worship had been retired, someone forgot to tell the Apocalypse. See CCC 1179–1181 on why the Church builds.

Say it out loud: He didn't abolish the temple. He said it was His body — and that's why we still build.