“Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”
Psalm 50
The question, of course, is rhetorical. God almighty, in this vision of the psalmist, is not looking for an answer. He’s looking to hammer the truth into the minds and hearts of his listeners, who are all of us.
But is the rhetorical question ironic or sarcastic?
Irony is sarcasm in a Boy Scout uniform. Irony simply plays with words and phrases and concepts; sarcasm, on the other hand, draws blood. Irony depends totally on there being two different meanings of specific words or phrases. Example? During the Second World War in occupied Holland, my friend Diet Eman and her cronies, resistance fighters, used to slap stickers on those huge Nazi propaganda posters. I have one of those stickers here on my shelf. “Streng verboden te lachen,” it says, meaning, “It is strictly forbidden to laugh.” Those little stickers were deadly serious, of course, but they brought joy to Dutch souls, even during the occupation, because of the joke, the play of words.
Sarcasm is irony’s bitter and angry cousin. Irony uses magic; sarcasm uses stilettos. Wikipedia says sarcasm “is sneering, jesting, or mocking a person, situation or thing,” and is “often expressed through vocal intonations.”
One of the jobs of any writer is to create dialogue that crackles when readers cannot help but read the lines in the way they were intended. That’s not always easy. You can’t use emoticons, and neither does the Bible.
But I dare say we all know very well how to read this line, and we feel how it cutting and slicing, and it’s frightening because at this moment God himself is (and we know he is talking to us too) not just some dreamed-up crowd of ancient Israelites. This rhetorical question is far more than a stiletto—it’s is a sumurai.
Can—will—does God almighty use sarcasm? Read it and weep. He does.
My etymology book says sarcasm comes from the Greek and likely originated from sarkes, slices of meat, and then “to tear flesh,” and “to bite one’s lips in rage.” God is angry here, biting his lips in rage, screaming inane questions at inane people, spit flying through the air. “What on earth do you think?—that I actually eat your blasted oxen and sheep?”—which is another way of saying, “are you stupid?”
My granddaughter used to say stupid was a naughty word; they were told they were not say it at her day care. That’s good. Maybe I shouldn’t have—or certainly shouldn’t have ascribed its usage to God almighty.
But it’s certainly here in this voice. God is coming at us, snarling, and what he’s livid about is form, not substance. He doesn’t need the bloody bulls of the Jews, he says, nor our offerings, our mission trips, our strategies of righteousness, no matter how sweet. He doesn’t need what we give up, thinking we’re better believers. He doesn’t need me writing these words. He doesn’t need anything.
What angers God is us, pure and simple—those who believe, those who sacrifice, those who worship, those who think they’re doing it all right. It’s not the degenerates he’s after here in Psalm 50, the low-lifes; it’s those who are reading these words—and writing them--if our emphasis is on form, not substance.
He’s the one who brought his son up from the grave and out from a pitiless mob who just didn’t understand. Seriously, he doesn’t need our sacrifice, just doesn’t need it. “Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”
He is our God. This Easter and everyday, he is all we need.
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