An appeal for justice
October 13, 2023 - Friday, 27th Week in Ordinary Time
Psalm 9:2-3, 6 and 16, 8-9
We find many instances of injustice in the Bible beginning with the murder of Abel by his older brother Cain. The world is also filled with acts of injustice committed by individual people and entire nations. On March 24, 1944, Eilert Dieken, a German officer murdered 16 people - 8 Polish and 8 Jews, most of them children. He was never brought to justice for that crime. After the war, he worked as a policeman in his hometown, Esens.
Psalm 9 together with Psalm 10 were originally put together as a single psalm. The main theme of this psalm is an appeal to the Lord for justice. The psalmist writes from the experience of injustice where the poor have no defenders and the nations are plotting and setting up snares against the innocents. In Psalm 10, we hear that the wicked do not believe in the existence of God, that the wicked is arrogant, and “his mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression” (Ps 10:7; see also 10:3-4).
Most of us are familiar with the famous statement of Martin Luther King “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. That is also the conviction of the psalmist. We hear about the Lord establishing his throne for justice, making the wicked perish, and the nations sinking in “the pit that they made” ( see Ps 9:6,8,16). The psalmist is convinced that “the needy shall not always be forgotten, and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever “ (Ps 9:19).
The psalm begins with a superscription that puzzles the translators. Contemporary translators render it as “for the death of the son” but the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint rendered it as “for the mystery of the son”. That rendering allowed the early Christians to connect this psalm with Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus’ death was an act of injustice committed by Jewish religious leaders and the Roman authorities of Jerusalem. On the other hand, Jesus’ resurrection is an act of God’s justice that says “no” to our acts of injustice.
Psalm 9 ends with a request that God would judge the nations and thus make them realise that they are “but men” (Ps 9:20). In the ancient world, where the emperors and kings were considered divine, that was a daring request. But even today, some of us need to be reminded that no matter how powerful one can be, he is just a mortal human being, totally dependent on God. Moreover, the parable of the Last Judgement is a powerful response of our Lord to the psalmist’s request. All the nations of the world stand before the crucified and risen Christ and the way they treated the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters is the measure by which they are going to be judged.