1 Why do the nations conspire
and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and his anointed, saying,
3 “Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast their cords from us.”4 He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord has them in derision.
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.”7 I will tell of the decree of the Lord:
He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have begotten you.
8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage
and the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”10 Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear;
with trembling kiss his feet,
or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.Happy are all who take refuge in him.
Psalm 2:1-11 (NRSVue)
As a scripture reader committed to liberation, the opening of Psalm 2 tests my loyalties. When I read the kings of the earth cry out “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast their cords from us,” I’m partly conditioned to respond with sympathy! Yet at the same time, I recall how often the powerful exploit this very sympathy, claiming the position of the oppressed and appropriating the language of liberation. In this light, Psalm 2 presents the ways in which the powerful paint themselves as simultaneous victor and victim – and, more hopefully, it depicts a God who interrupts these fictions.
Imagine it: the governing powers of the earth, gathered in one place, united under one purpose. They represent all the wealth, capital, and military might of the world under their governance. And they are here to complain that they are in chains, that they are in fact the victims of a divine injustice.
This is the comic scenario with which Psalm 2 opens: the rulers united “against the Lord and his anointed,” declaring, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast their cords from us!” This is comical, but not only because the nations’ inflated idea of their strength leads them to declare an unwinnable war. It is also because the rulers proclaim their enslavement from atop the social order, far above all those who are truly, materially enslaved, even by the rulers’ own hands.
In short, the rulers are at once imagining themselves as far more powerful than they really are (as capable of taking on God) and far less powerful than they really are (as kept in chains). We can recognize this double move that human rulers often make to justify themselves. In his efforts to define fascism, Umberto Eco observed that fascist governments render their enemies as at once “too strong and too weak.” As a necessary mirror of this, we can observe that the fascist state itself must picture itself as both weak and strong: weak enough that it can be threatened by the Other, and strong enough to overcome whatever threat it imagines.
God’s response to this declaration is firstly to laugh “in derision,” and then to respond “in his wrath.” Both this derision and this wrath have usually been read as responding to the rulers’ claim of strength to break God’s chains. But is it not possible that God’s derision is equally directed toward the rulers’ idea that they are in chains in the first place? Is God laughing at the idea of a rival power, or at the attempt of oppressors to cling to their power and claim victimhood all at once?
In the response that follows, God challenges both the nations’ claim to strength and their claim to weakness and oppression. After laughing, God announces God’s king in Zion, and the psalm’s speaker, revealed to be that same king, relates what God has offered him:
“Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
And dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Psalm 2:8-9)
On one level, this response confirms that the nations’ strength is incomparable to God’s. If God’s anointed were simply to ask, they would be able to capture and shatter the nations of the earth. Yet by presenting this as a future possibility, God’s speech also confirms that this capture is not the current state of affairs. God can only offer the nations as heritage because the anointed does not, at present, rule over all the earth: certainly, the nations are not in chains.
Christian readers often read God’s words to God’s anointed in this psalm as referring to Christ. This type of typological reading carries supersessionist risks, and it certainly cannot exhaust the meaning of the text. That said, the offer to “make the nations your heritage” might be productively read in conversation with the devil’s offer to Jesus of “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (Matthew 4:8), which Jesus decisively rejects. God can offer these things to God’s anointed, and yet this is not how God’s anointed has chosen to exercise power in the world, contrary to the rulers’ account.
If we look beyond Psalm 2 to find how God does exercise power, we find that bonds and cords appear in the Psalms as things which God breaks (Psalm 107:14, 116:16, 129:4). We hear in Psalm 99 of a “mighty King, lover of justice” who has “established equity” and “executed justice and righteousness in Jacob” (Psalm 99:4). Elsewhere in the lectionary this week, we encounter the arrival of God’s law in Exodus not as the arrival of subjugation, with humans cast down, but rather as a moment of glory coming down and touching earth as Moses climbing up the mountain to meet it (Exodus 24:12-18).
Why, then, do the nations “imagine a vain thing,” as the King James Version memorably renders the psalm’s first verse? Why do they picture themselves as chained by a God who liberates the captive and who in fact has not conquered them?
Partly, we can say it is because humanity perceives power according to the ways we ourselves deploy it. When oppressors perceive a power greater than their own, they will naturally conceive it as an oppressive one. To recognize that God, in all God’s power, chooses to act otherwise than as conqueror, would require confronting their own capacity to act otherwise, to envision a different world of relationships than a contest in which the strong triumph over and shackle the weak.
Additionally, we can recognize that speaking of oneself as the shackled victim is a way of claiming moral authority, and drawing attention away from the ways one might be complicit in keeping others in chains. When God laughs at the rulers of Psalm 2, it gives us an example of how we might respond when we see our own rulers making these same maneuvers.
Recently, many of the current kings of the earth took counsel together in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. In the speeches offered there, rulers indulged the impulse to cast themselves as threatened enough to justify their strength. They did so with varying degrees of subtlety.
There was, of course Donald Trump, at one moment luxuriating at one moment in America’s military power, and at the next moment lamenting that “Everyone took advantage of the United States” and that they “get so little in return.” Here was the imperial core perversely complaining that it was suffering the extractive greed of others. He boasted about deportations while complaining that “ICE gets beat up by stupid people,” all while ICE agents back in Minnesota were using guns and gas to terrorize anyone who wasn’t white or who dared to protest their actions. On both international and domestic scales, his complaint relied on claiming the position of America’s victims.
But it’s easy to think of the U.S., because there the dynamics of power are currently so stripped of the usual euphemisms. In truth, versions of the same impulse were at work elsewhere. Consider the speech offered by Mark Carney, the ruler of my own country. Carney announced a “rupture” in the illusion of a rules-based international order, and spoke of the need for middle powers to find strength in relationships rather than might-makes-right nationalism.
I confess: Carney’s speech moved me at times with its assessment of our present moment. Yet it was also an anti-imperial lecture from the ruler of a colonial state–a state that, as Niigan Sinclair observes, is failing to work well with Indigenous nations or recognize their own rich histories of collaborative governance. It was a speech in which a middle-aged white man, former banker, and prime minister drew on Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless” and somehow managed to identify himself and his audience of politicians and business people with the powerless.
This identification threatens to obscure the ways that Canada is presently abusing its very real power at home. Right now, my country is experiencing a growing nationalist sentiment founded on the sense of itself as a victim of American bluster. Yet this focus draws the attention of settlers like myself from the ways Canada itself is presently weaponizing its own power and the vital work of reconciliation and reparations that remains to be done. Like the kings of the earth, it is more comfortable to picture ourselves as the underdog than to admit our own tyranny.
It is at times like this that I hope for God’s laughter, even God’s anger, to shake us from the control of these fictions. I hope that God will awaken us to the reality that we are neither as strong nor as weak as we are tempted to imagine. I hope that rather than seeking out victimhood to justify us, we can admit the ways in which we act as the oppressor, and repent. May we seek wisdom and refuge in the divine power that could possess the earth and yet chooses to work by other logics.
