Ps. 52.4 (absurdity of liturgical indifference)

“Why / don’t the evildoers / know
those / who devour my people / as those / who eat bread
and do not / call on God?” 

The psalm now shifts in perspective to the psalmist who declares his bewilderment at the “evildoers” (no longer called ‘fools’). The psalm itself has manifested the perplexity in its juxtaposition of the fool with God, of his ‘heart’ with heaven, and his evil deeds with God’s “look”. This tension has mounted and now found expression in what can only be a question for which there is no answer. If one understands the ‘transport to heaven’ the psalm has displayed, the conduct of the ‘evildoers’ is, simply but, absurd and nonsensical. And what we see here is a horrifying vision: while God looks down from heaven, these evildoers are consuming his own people like bread. The perplexity here is not in the horror of their actions so much as in the amazement that they would presume to do this in the very sight of God. The nonchalance attitude of the wicked is key: “as those who eat bread”. They engage in wickedness in as casual a manner as one who sits down for a meal. They do not even have the sense to act in secret. This is only compounded by the previous transport to heaven: there is in these lines the feeling that the evildoer’s exposure is much more acute because it is seen from God’s vantage point and no longer purely from the psalmist’s. The final line is, perhaps, the best summary of the fool’s practical atheism: they do not ‘call on God’. It is a poignant description, and, in other contexts, would encapsulate much of Israel herself (as in, the time of the conclusion of the judges and in Jeremiah). It does, furthermore, refer to practical atheism as a liturgical indifference to God. For the psalmist, this indifference is tantamount to the ‘feeding’ described earlier. We might say, flowing from liturgical indifference is the corruption of the fool’s ‘ethics’.