Anger Expressed in Psalms

The issue of Liturgy dealing with “Worship and Emotion,” guest-edited by L. Edwards Phillips, looks at the relationship between worship and emotion. What follows is an excerpt from Rachel Wrenn’s essay in this issue, “Worshipping in Anger,” exploring how anger is expressed in the Psalms and liturgically so that lament can be part of the truth-telling in worship. –– Melinda Quivik

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Where in our liturgies do we make space for human anger at God? A recent panel addressed the ethics of preaching the laments in the church at the 2018 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. The discussion centered on the imprecatory psalms and the ethics of preaching about one’s anger at human others. Never did we discuss the ethics of preaching about anger at God.

Perhaps this is because the Psalms are quiet on the subject of human anger at God. The Psalter is full of laments, poems of grief, fear, even despair which Walter Brueggemann has correctly called the church to reappropriate. Yet among the emotions explicitly expressed by the psalmist, anger is mostly missing. For all the pain, suffering, and jarring descriptions of disintegrating bodies, hearts, and spirits, never once does the Psalmist directly express anger at God.

I will argue that the psalmist never explicitly expresses anger at God because the psalmist relates to God as would a petitioner to a king in the setting of a royal audience. In that framework, there is no scenario in which anger at the royal patron could be explicitly expressed and still be considered appropriate. I will also argue, however, that this frame does not negate all expressions of anger. The psalmist expresses anger at God implicitly, without the use of words such as “angry,” “mad,” or “frustrated.” The Psalms make room for anger at God and could be a resource for worship liturgists looking to do the same.

In the course of this discussion, I will first clarify how anger functions in the Psalms, especially in terms of the individual psalmist’s anger. I will then demonstrate the royal audience setting of the psalms and the ways this setting inhibits the expression of anger at God. I will finish by exploring examples of implicit anger in the Psalms and suggesting new liturgical frames that might allow for the worshipper’s expression of anger at God.

The English language brims with words that explicitly communicate anger: irritated, fuming, furious, livid, wroth. Biblical Hebrew also contains a variety of words that express anger with variously nuanced meanings. These range from vexation (kaʿas) to anger (ʾap) to wrath (ḥēmâ) to uncontrollable rage (ʿebrâ). At times, these words appear in bodily idioms, a common way to communicate emotions in the Bible. One of the most frequently used Hebrew idioms to describe anger is to say that one’s nose (ʾap) burns hot.

This phrase may sound peculiar to the ears of modern English speakers. In Hebrew, however, ʾap can either refer to the organ of the nose, or it can be extended to reference the face more generally. Thus “the nose burns” may refer to the flush of heat that floods across one’s nose and upper cheeks in a fit of rage. These fits of rage typically result in separation of some kind, from verbal conflict to outright violence. In the Psalms, this separation is often imagined as divine abandonment, and it occurs most frequently in psalms of individual lament.

The full article and the entire issue of Liturgy 36, no. 1 is available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Rachel Wrenn, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is an instructor of Biblical Studies at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Capital University, and a PhD candidate in Hebrew Bible at Emory University, Atlanta.

Rachel Wrenn, “Worshiping in Anger: Anger at God in Psalms and Liturgies,” Liturgy 36, no.1 (2021): 19-26.