Ps. 79.1 (Beginning with the Temple)

O God / the nations have come / into your inheritance
they have defiled / your holy temple
they have reduced / Jerusalem / to ruins. 

Coming and Defilement. The nation’s ‘coming’ was not by way of invitation, but by way of defilement. Their entrance was an act of impurity into a land that was, by its acquisition of God, a ‘holy’ Land. That land, in turn, received its permanent state of holiness by way of the permanency of the Temple. It was organized like a concentric circle, with the Temple of God radiating the power of his holiness to the surroundings. Yet, that whole drama of acquisition is in the past. Likewise, its destruction. This psalm emerges not from the midst of battle but from defeat. This litany is what the enemies “have done”. The concrete Temple has been destroyed and Jerusalem raised to the ground; God’s holy servants have been slaughtered. This is not a time of ‘lost aspirations’ or ‘hopes’. It is the ‘time of defilement’. The psalm begins with “your inheritance.” This terms is varied, and can represent everything from the Temple, to Jerusalem to the Land to the people. As the psalm will make clear, it represents them all and therefore stands as a type of prefatory summation of what will follow. 

Beginning with the Temple. The destruction is total and reaches from the top to the bottom, seemingly without remainder. The first focus, however, is important to notice: the Temple. From there it moves to Jerusalem (from there, to the people). The Temple is ‘ground zero’ for the devastation wrought by the nations. It is the sacramental heart of Jerusalem and the people. Destroy it, and everything else cascades. (Our non-sacramental focus, tends in the opposite direction…). The real, foundational horror is the Temple’s desecration. 

Defilement. This word strikes an important thematic note. This psalmist is intensely aware of the fact that the nations’ actions have been not merely that of destruction but of intentional defilement. They not only defile the Temple, but the people (by failing to bury them) and Jerusalem itself (by the pouring of blood ‘like water’ around her). These details—this focus—is, arguable, the heart of the psalm. In it we notice something key: that the nation’s actions are horrendous for an almost aesthetic reason. What I mean is this: to the psalmist, the nation’s actions are drenched in ugliness and filth. This act of perception reaches deeper than destruction, which we could say would be the perception of the tragic. Rather, by perceiving of it as an act of defilement it moves into the realm of ‘horror’. One recoils from this rather than being only in awe of it. ‘Defilement’ assumes a receiving, personal subject. Although it is clearly an act of war (it is not merely ‘decorative’), its ‘weapon’ is ugliness; it is the attempt to remove ‘the power of holiness’. The point: the Temple and Jerusalem were, to the psalmist, the pinnacle of glory (the beautiful expression of the Lord’s authority and dwelling). As such, the arrow that would most successfully challenge this position is that of defilement. To a person breathing in the sacramental beauty of holiness, defilement is perhaps the greatest form of destruction.