Psalms 35:22–26

In these closing verses of his lament, the Psalmist makes a final, urgent cry for God to act — to see, awaken, vindicate, and silence the gloating of enemies. The appeal is grounded not in the Psalmist's own merit but in God's righteousness (ṣeḏāqāh), framing justice as an attribute of God's own nature. Together, these verses crystallize the soul's desperate but trusting turning to God when human courts and human consolations have failed.

Verse 22 — "You have seen it, Yahweh. Don't keep silent." The plea opens with a bold assertion: God is not ignorant of the Psalmist's suffering. The Hebrew verb rāʾāh ("to see") carries covenantal weight throughout the Psalter and the Torah — God "sees" the affliction of Israel in Egypt (Exod 3:7), and this divine sight is itself the prelude to divine action. To say "You have seen it" is therefore not merely factual; it is an implicit demand that God fulfill what His seeing obligates Him to do. "Don't keep silent" (ʾal-teḥĕraš) echoes Psalm 28:1 and 83:1, where divine silence is experienced as functional abandonment. The Psalmist is not accusing God of ignorance but of deliberate non-intervention — and he challenges that silence with an act of raw covenantal boldness.

Verse 23 — "Wake up! Rise up to defend me, my God!" The imperatives intensify dramatically: hāqîṣāh ("Wake up!") and hāʿîrāh ("Rise up!") are anthropomorphic cries that shock in their audacity. The image of a sleeping or inactive deity is turned on its head — this is not a pagan god who truly sleeps (cf. the taunting of Baal in 1 Kgs 18:27), but the living God who is being called, as it were, back to attention. The double address — "my God and my Lord" (ʾĕlōhay waʾdōnāy) — is intimate and insistent. The phrase "to defend me" uses the root rîḇ (legal contest, lawsuit), situating God as the Psalmist's advocate in a court where human justice has broken down entirely. This legal metaphor runs throughout Psalm 35, and here it reaches its apex.

Verse 24 — "Vindicate me, Yahweh my God, according to your righteousness." Here is the theological hinge of the entire cluster. The Psalmist does not appeal to his own innocence as the ultimate standard — he appeals to God's ṣeḏāqāh (righteousness). This is crucial: vindication flows from who God is, not merely from what the Psalmist deserves. The Hebrew concept of righteousness here is not merely legal or retributive; it encompasses God's fidelity to covenant relationship, His ordering of reality according to truth. To ask God to judge "according to your righteousness" is to ask God to be fully Himself — to let His character break into history. The second half, "Don't let them rejoice over me," reveals that what is at stake is not mere personal vindication but the public witness of God's faithfulness.

Verse 25 — "Don't let them say in their heart, 'Aha! That's the way we want it!'" The Hebrew heʾāḥ nepeš — literally "Aha! Our soul!" — is an expression of malicious triumph, of enemies delighting in the Psalmist's downfall as though it confirms their worldview. The Psalmist fears not only suffering but the false narrative the enemies will construct from it: that the righteous man has been abandoned, that God does not protect those who trust Him. This is the voice of what the Church would later name — the harm done to faith by the apparent triumph of wickedness. The prayer is, in this sense, a prayer for the integrity of witness.

Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage through the lens of Christ's Passion and through the Church's theology of imprecatory prayer.

The Christological Reading (Patristic Tradition): St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, interprets the entire Psalm as the vox Christi — the voice of Christ speaking prophetically of His own suffering. Verse 23's "Wake up! Rise up!" becomes, for Augustine, the Son's prayer that the Father vindicate Him through resurrection: "He was heard," Augustine writes, "but heard after three days." The divine silence of verse 22 is the silence of Holy Saturday; the rising of verse 23 is Easter. This reading is not allegory imposed from outside but is rooted in Jesus' own use of the Psalms (cf. Matt 27:46 citing Ps 22).

Righteousness as Divine Fidelity: The Catechism teaches that God's justice is never separable from His mercy (CCC §1992, 2009). The appeal to ṣeḏāqāh in verse 24 reflects precisely this Catholic synthesis: divine righteousness is not cold retributive calculation but the faithful, loving ordering of all things toward truth. To ask God to judge according to His righteousness is to ask for the full expression of His character — both just and merciful.

Imprecatory Prayer and the Church: The Church does not sanitize the imprecatory Psalms out of the Liturgy of the Hours. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, addresses these "cursing Psalms" directly, arguing that prayed in Christ, they become prayers against evil itself — against the demonic forces that animate injustice — rather than expressions of personal hatred. The shame wished upon the enemies (v.26) is properly understood as the prayer that evil be exposed and defeated, not that persons be damned.

Scandal and Witness: The concern in verse 25 — that enemies not rejoice in apparent proof that God abandons the righteous — reflects the Church's deep concern for the scandalum fidei. The visibility of God's faithfulness to the suffering righteous is itself a form of evangelization.

Contemporary Catholics facing prolonged injustice — whether workplace persecution, false accusations, family betrayal, or systemic institutional failures — will find in these verses a scripturally authorized grammar for honest prayer. The Psalmist does not perform stoic acceptance or manufacture premature peace; he presses God with urgent, almost impatient language. This models something essential: that telling God the raw truth of our situation — "You have seen this; now act!" — is not lack of faith but its deepest expression.

Practically, these verses can be prayed directly in situations where one has been falsely accused, overlooked, or marginalized, particularly when human redress has failed. Verse 24's pivot — asking God to act "according to your righteousness," not "according to my merit" — is a crucial spiritual discipline: it shifts the center of gravity from anxious self-justification to trust in God's character. This is the antidote to the spiritual exhaustion of constantly defending oneself.

For Catholics engaged in justice work — advocating for the marginalized, opposing institutional corruption, or speaking truth in hostile environments — verse 25 names a real spiritual danger: the fear that the enemy's narrative will prevail. The prayer itself becomes an act of resistance and hope.