Bring Me Your Worst
A Theology of the Cursing Psalms
You’ve wanted someone dead.
It’s ugly; and none of us want to admit it, but you’ve almost certainly, at some point in your life, wished ill upon another person. I know I have. Whether fleeting or obsessive, human nature is prone to these disturbing thoughts and feelings. The desire for vengeance isn’t limited to sociopaths. When we’ve been wronged—really wronged, not just inconvenienced—something in all of us cries out for blood.
And that rage has to go somewhere.
The Church’s Awkward Silence
Here’s the thing: the church has historically been deeply uncomfortable with this part of being human.
We know what to do with guilt—we have confession and absolution for that. We know what to do with doubt—we have apologetics and pastoral counsel. We even know what to do with grief, at least in theory—we have funeral liturgies and casseroles.
But rage? Murderous fantasy? The white-hot desire to see your enemy suffer?
We don’t really have a place for that in polite Christian company.
The Church has a complicated relationship with the psalms of imprecation—the so-called “cursing psalms.” These are the texts that call down destruction on enemies, wish for babies to be dashed against rocks, and pray for the wicked to be consumed by fire.
In his preface to The Sunday Service of the Methodists (1784), John Wesley explained that he left out “many Psalms... and many parts of the others, as being highly improper for the mouths of a Christian Congregation.” He excised 34 Psalms entirely and removed portions of 58 others. Before him, Isaac Watts made similar editorial choices, explaining that in Psalm 69, David “breathes out dreadful imprecations on his enemies.” On Psalm 109: “Rejoicing in the destruction of our personal enemies is not so evangelical a practice; therefore I have given a little turn to the words.”
This tradition of avoidance continues. The Revised Common Lectionary omits Psalm 58 entirely. So does the Episcopal Sunday Lectionary. When the Roman Catholic Church revised its Liturgy of the Hours in 1971, it removed Psalms 58, 83, and 109 completely.
We’ve sanitized our worship. We’ve given God our best behavior—our polished prayers, our grateful hearts, our measured emotions. But we’ve hidden the parts of ourselves we’re most ashamed of.
But Scripture Isn’t Embarrassed
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Psalm 130 begins in a moment of extreme grief. The depths—what kind of depths? The Hebrew word is ma’amakim, the deep places, the abyss. It’s the same word used for the primordial chaos in Genesis, the formless void before creation. It’s the word for the depths of the sea, the place where Jonah sank when he fled from God.
This is not polite prayer. This is a scream from the bottom of the ocean.
Then there’s Psalm 137, with its notorious ending: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.” The United Methodist Hymnal includes it—complete and unedited. Or Psalm 55:15: “Let death come upon them; let them go down alive to Sheol.” Or Psalm 109, that extended curse that Wesley and Watts couldn’t stomach: “May his days be few; may another take his office. May his children be orphans and his wife a widow.”
These aren’t aberrations. They’re not mistakes that slipped past the editors. They’re inspired Scripture, included in the canon for a reason.
What We’re Actually Doing
So what do we do with these texts?
I want to suggest that imprecatory prayer—the prayer of cursing—is actually one of the most mature spiritual practices available to us. And to understand why, we need to understand what it isn’t. It isn’t suppression—the psalmist doesn’t stuff the rage down, pretend it isn’t there, paste on a Christian smile and say “I’m fine, God is good.” It isn’t indulgence—the psalmist doesn’t act on the rage, doesn’t actually go break anyone’s teeth or dash any infants. It’s something else entirely. It’s sacred outlet.
What we are doing in imprecatory prayer is taking the fullness of our emotional distress to the Lord and using prayer as a place to process what’s happening to us, what has happened to us. Rather than taking revenge, we’re taking those feelings to God and letting God transform them.
By bringing these dark emotions to God, we’re not endorsing them. Rather, we’re surrendering them for transformation.
The Crucial Distinction
Here’s where it gets theologically interesting. One minor prophet in particular illustrates the glaring difference between paganism—idolatry and false worship—and a relational understanding of the one true God.
Consider the book of Jonah. Who’s the pagan in this story?
Your first instinct might be to say the sailors who throw Jonah overboard. Or the Ninevites, the enemies of Israel who worship foreign gods. But look at what happens. The sailors—pagan mariners who worship multiple deities—encounter the God of Israel and convert. They offer sacrifices and make vows. The Ninevites—the brutal Assyrians, Israel’s dreaded enemy—hear Jonah’s reluctant preaching and repent in sackcloth and ashes. Even the animals are fasting.
Meanwhile, Jonah? Jonah knows exactly who God is. He can recite the catechism: “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” But Jonah doesn’t want God to be who God is. He wants God to be who Jonah thinks God should be—a deity who shares his hatred for Nineveh, who will rain down fire rather than extend mercy.
The pagan in this story is the person who wants their deity to behave exactly the way they would behave.
Jonah whinges, whines, and protests in a way that would embarrass Veruca Salt. He’s furious that God won’t give him what he wants: the destruction of his enemies. His prayer in chapter 4 is essentially a tantrum: “I knew you would do this. That’s why I ran. You’re too merciful, and it makes me angry enough to die.”
This is paganism wearing the mask of orthodoxy. Jonah knows the right words, the right theology, the right God—and yet he wants that God to conform to his broken human will.
Internalized paganism originates in the desire to conform God to our will—to remake God in our own image. And here’s the danger: the more we twist our image of God to be what we want it to be and think it should be, the more twisted we also become. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. We distort who God is, and we distort ourselves, until we become something monstrous—something we can’t even recognize.
The Inversion
Imprecatory prayer does exactly the opposite.
Where Jonah’s paganism demands that God reshape himself to match human vengeance, imprecatory prayer brings human vengeance to God for transformation.
The direction of change is everything. The pagan says, “God, become like me in my rage.” The psalm says, “God, here is my rage—do with it what you will.”
When you pray an imprecatory psalm, you’re not asking God to share your hatred. You’re submitting your hatred to God’s judgment. You’re acknowledging that the desire for vengeance is real—and also that you’re not qualified to execute it. You’re placing your enemies in God’s hands, and in doing so, you’re releasing your grip on them.
God may say no. The prayer acknowledges this possibility by placing the outcome in God’s hands rather than the psalmist’s. This is submission, not manipulation. This is surrender, not control.
The worshiper changes. Not the deity.
This is why the imprecatory psalms can be such profound instruments of spiritual formation. They don’t baptize our rage; they baptize us out of it. They give us language for the darkness and then draw us through it into light.
Permission Granted
Let me be clear about what I’m saying and what I’m not saying.
I’m saying that voicing vengeance is not the same as enacting it. The psalms give us permission to speak our rage to God. That speech is not sin—it’s prayer. It’s honest prayer, raw prayer, the kind of prayer that treats God like someone who can actually handle the worst of us.
I’m also saying that voicing vengeance is not the same as harboring it. There’s a difference between crying out in a moment of anguish and nursing a grudge for years. The imprecatory psalms are meant to be prayed through, not rehearsed endlessly. They’re a door, not a dwelling place.
But I’m not saying it’s fine to hate your enemies. The psalms give us permission to bring our hatred to God precisely so that God can transform it. The goal is not to stay angry. The goal is to become free.
The Sequence Matters
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus.
This is the shortest verse in the Bible, and it might be the most important. Jesus knew he was about to raise Lazarus. He knew death would not have the final word. And still, he wept.
The Son of God did not bypass grief. He entered it.
The sequence matters. Weeping first, then resurrection. Jesus doesn’t skip over the grief to get to the good part. He doesn’t rush Mary and Martha to the punchline. He enters the depths with them before he brings Lazarus out.
God receives our darkness before transforming it. God doesn’t demand that we clean ourselves up before we come. God takes us as we are—enraged, bitter, broken—and then begins the work of healing.
This is the sequence: First, the honest cry. Then, the transformation. You cannot skip the first step. If you try to forgive before you’ve acknowledged your anger, you’re not forgiving—you’re repressing. And repression always has a cost.
The psalms teach us to bring everything to God. Not just our gratitude, not just our praise, but our fury, our despair, our desire for our enemies to be destroyed. God can handle it. God has been handling it for three thousand years.
The Depth I Cry From
I watched my grandmother die of Lou Gehrig’s disease. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, trapped in a body that had become a prison. My grandparents grew up Pentecostal and poor. My grandfather came from nothing, had a profound conversion, and learned to lean on Jesus early. I watched them sit in their matching recliners, reaching their hands toward the television, praying along with the faith healers who pranced and preened across stadium-sized stages. I thought (and still believe) those men were charlatans. But I never doubted my grandparents. If anyone’s faith was sufficient, theirs was.
She died anyway.
My father had glioblastoma. Brain cancer. We had the whole squad on it—Protestants, Catholics, tag-teaming in prayer. His priest friends came and anointed him. I anointed him. I prayed a novena. Nine days of concentrated prayer. We were believing for a miracle.
No one recovers from glioblastoma.
My son Titus was nineteen months old. I won’t go into the sleepless nights, the tear-filled cries of anguish and prayer. I’ll just tell you that he loved French fries more than anything. He loved dancing with me in the living room. He would wave at every stranger he passed and offer high fives to anybody who would take one.
The world is dimmer without him.
This is the depth I cry from.
And here’s what I’ve discovered: The imprecatory psalms don’t just give me permission to rage at my human enemies. They train my rage toward the right target.
Look at Psalm 55:15 again: “Let death come upon them; let them go down alive to Sheol.” The psalmist calls death down on his enemies because death is the ultimate weapon. But the mature form of imprecatory prayer isn’t calling death upon people—it’s calling death upon Death itself.
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood,” Paul writes, “but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Ephesians 6:12). And what is the last enemy? Death. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).
Let death come upon Death.
The Psalms as Spiritual Practice
Thomas Merton, in Praying the Psalms, quotes Augustine: “God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it.”
The psalms form us. They don’t just express our emotions; they shape them. When we pray the imprecatory psalms, we’re being trained in a particular kind of spiritual practice—one that takes our darkness seriously, brings it into the light, and allows it to be transformed.
This essay began with a dark confession: we’ve all wanted someone dead. The imprecatory psalms meet us there. But they don’t leave us there. They take our rage and align it with God’s own enmity against everything that ruins souls and devours lives. Our curse becomes God’s curse. Our enemy becomes the Enemy.
This is not cheap grace. This is not permission to wallow. This is rigorous spiritual work—the work of surrender, the work of letting God be God instead of trying to make God in our own image. The work of learning to hate what God hates.
John Wesley thought these prayers were “highly improper for the mouths of a Christian Congregation.”
I think they might be exactly what we need.
This essay is part of my ongoing work on grief, suffering, and theological reconstruction. If you’re someone who’s been told to suppress your “negative” emotions in the name of faith, I want you to know: the Psalms tell a different story. You don’t have to arrive at God already healed. You can come from the depths.