This
morning I want to speak about the wrath of God. The wrath of God has fallen out of fashion. It is something we are
uncomfortable with, and so we focus on the love of God, the compassion and
faithfulness of God, the wide sweeping inclusivity of God. We might even seek
to differentiate between a wrathful God of the Old Testament—and the apostle
Paul—and a loving Jesus. That would be a tragic mistake. God’s love demands the
wrath of God, as an expression of that love. The Bible speaks of the wrath of
God over 600 times; so, it is important that we understand what we mean by the
wrath of God—and why it is a good thing.
Listen
to how God reveals his glory—that is, his character, or nature—to Moses:
‘Yahweh,
Yahweh, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love
and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness,
rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the
children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth
generation.’
This
passage, from Exodus, is perhaps the
passage from the Bible most quoted across the rest of the Bible. In addition to
direct quotes, it is alluded to countless times. It is the foundational passage
for how we are to understand what God is like—and, by extension, how we are
called to be as God’s people.
I
don’t have time to unpack this passage today, but to summarise: God’s
fundamental stance towards us is an active, intervening, engaged, enduring,
unchanging, love; a love that, whenever we are estranged, will always move to be reconciled. This love
is slow to anger, and utterly opposed to all that separates us from each other.
Why? Because the opposite of love is not hate—as we are so often told—but indifference. He will root-out that
which separates us, even if doing so takes several generations, because mercy
is unimaginably greater than judgement.
God,
then, is slow to anger. This means two things: one, that God gets angry; and
two, that God is slow to act on his anger. Me, I am quick to anger. And my
anger is most often an unhealthy reaction to my ego being bruised. I get angry
when, emptying the dishwasher, I want to put bowls away in a cupboard and my
wife has the effrontery to sit on the chair right in front of the cupboard door
when there are four other identical chairs around the kitchen table. I get
angry when we must wait while four cars go past before we can turn out of a
junction because they are all too selfish to let us in (and I’m not even driving
the car). I get angry when I lose mobile phone signal passing through the
underground sections of the Metro.
I
have a long way to go in being conformed to the likeness of Jesus. He got angry
about dehumanising lust and bloodlust. When a mob came to him seeking to stone
an adulterous woman, he took time to process his response. When he eventually
spoke, it was with such compassion and grace that it turned the men from their
bloodlust, and the woman from her lust.
Jesus
got angry about people being afflicted by demons, driving the demons out,
forcefully. He got angry at the temple authorities giving over the space that
was intended to be set apart as a house of prayer for all nations for other
purposes; and—having gone to the temple countless other times and not done this—overturned
the tables.
I
believe that God gets angry about child abuse, sexual assault, human trafficking,
the rich maximising their profit margin by cladding the homes of the poor in a
death-trap, zero-hours contracts, the arms trade, racism, the West’s
overconsumption of the resources of the natural world, global poverty, and our
sheer indifference towards most of these things, to name but a few.
A
god who, like me, is quick to anger would be hellish, literally. A god who did
not get angry, even more so. How God’s slow anger works out is what we mean by
the wrath of God. Both our quick anger and our resigned indifference need to be
conformed to it.
The
book of Jeremiah, from which our
first reading this morning is taken, is all about God’s wrath. It is a
testimony that shows us that God allows a people to reap the consequences of
turning away, handing them over to their choices, withdrawing his protection: but
that he does so incredibly reluctantly, in the hope that they will turn back to
him as a result, before disaster strikes. Indeed, Jeremiah is not alone among
God’s friends in being frustrated by how much opportunity God gives the people
to pull back from the brink of disaster, how patient his love is. Jeremiah
calls on God to bring down retribution for him on his persecutors—even accusing
God of being unfaithful for having not yet done so: truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.
But
God responds by declaring that the way in which he will bring retribution on Jeremiah’s
persecutors for him is this: that if Jeremiah will turn back to God, God will
strengthen him to continue to speak for the God who longs for reconciliation,
until his persecutors turn back to God, and are reconciled to Jeremiah. This is
how God will deliver Jeremiah from
the wicked and redeem him from the grasp of the ruthless: by the wicked
repenting and being transformed into the righteous.
It
is this principle of hopeful forbearance, of allowing rebellion against God to
play itself out until it over-extends itself, and of—even then—embracing those
who turn back in a new beginning that plays out in the agreement of the persons
of the Trinity that the Son should be handed over to his persecutors, suffer
death and be buried, rise again, and ascend to the right hand of the Father, where
he intercedes for us and from where he will come again to judge the living and
the dead, taking his place over a kingdom that shall have no end. It is
breath-takingly good.
How,
then, are we to live in faithful relationship with such a God? Well, Paul also
wrote at length about the wrath of God to the church in Rome: about how God had
handed us all over to the consequences of our rebellion, in the hope that all
might be saved. You can read about that in the first eleven chapters of his
letter. But in chapter twelve he shifts from how we are saved and what we are saved from, to what we are saved for.
And in our second reading this morning he exhorts his hearers to:
“Rejoice
in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer…Bless those who persecute
you; bless and do not curse them…Do not repay anyone evil for evil…Beloved,
never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is
written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies
are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for
by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by
evil, but overcome evil with good.”
When
you are wronged—genuinely wronged, not simply nursing a bruised ego—know that
God has not abandoned you, but is playing the long game. When we are wronged,
we need to remind one another of that hope, keep it before us, encourage one
another to join in the long game, by praying, blessing, serving. In this way,
we ‘leave room for’ the wrath of God.
Where
we see others wronged, allow our anger to be conformed to God’s slow anger, by
praying, blessing, serving.
Where
we see others wronged so very many times that we grow numb, allow our indifference
to be conformed to God’s slow anger, by praying, blessing, serving.
This
is an outrageous way to be asked to respond. Some would call it naïvely idealistic;
others, condoning injustice. And if we are quite mistaken in believing in this
God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, and fleshed-out in Jesus of Nazareth,
then it is quite possibly both these things. Almost certainly so, in fact.
But
if the story we confess is true, it just
might change everything.
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