God’s rage against rage

The Rightness of the Divine Wrath

Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash

I was angry. And justifiably so: my six-year-old child had, after a long afternoon of defiance and belligerence, come close to me, feigning a cuddle – and then head-butted me on the bridge of the nose.

My reaction was instantaneous and born from anger. I slapped him: not especially hard, but enough to upset him and his mother, who witnessed the whole thing.

What had I done? I was shocked by my own rage and the violence it had spawned, and I was instantly filled with regret and doubts. It didn’t take him long to recover as it turned out, and within minutes he was laughing and playing happily. But still: I had lifted my hand, in anger, against my child, violently. Rather than absorbing and restraining his lashing out against me, or disciplining him in a measured way, I had repaid him in kind. Would he always remember this moment with bitterness in his heart? I was appalled at myself.

When human beings use violence, even with the intent to uphold the good, it seems so difficult to control. It rarely remains confined to the boundaries we attempt to set for it, but rather spreads like a bushfire jumping the firebreaks. Even then, human societies are loath to let go of violence as a means to settle all manner of problems. In some bizarre way, we like to think that violence has a cleansing effect.

Photo by Gianna B on Unsplash

One of the most violent movies I have ever seen was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It wasn’t so much that the body count was very high - it was only three – but that the violence was prolonged and concentrated on one individual. It wasn’t cartoonish, like it is in Rambo. It was repulsive and yet it drew me in at the same time. It was a reminder of just what a combination of religious hypocrisy, political expediency and military efficiency can accomplish.

But it was quite clear from the film – as it is in the Gospels themselves – that this is a story that is occurring on two planes. Not only were the events of Golgotha a vicious instance of religious and political persecution, they were the site of a cosmic struggle in which the Creator himself was seeking to defeat not only a particular instance of evil, but evil itself. Jesus was sent by God to endure this violent torture and to suffer death. As Isaiah puts it:

…it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer… (Isaiah 53:10a)

All this horror – the Lord’s will? What God actually wanted? It might be one thing to suggest that Jesus bore upon himself all the hostility and violence of humankind, absorbing every blow that we could throw at him. It is quite another to suggest that this occurred because God himself willed it.

So was God like me but only on a larger scale – lashing out at his own Son in barely-contained rage? Is he lusting for a vengeance that needs an outlet and finds it on the cross? Shouldn’t I be as appalled at God’s rage as I was appalled at my own?

Furthermore, there are those who will argue that the picture of a God who, even with the best of intentions, acts forcefully to exclude evil is the basis for all kinds of human violence. Is it not true that the violence poured out by the Father on the Son has become the pattern for the violence poured out by human beings on other human beings? Even the staunchest defender of religion would have to acknowledge that religiously inspired and justified violence terribly mars our world. And depicting God as vengeful is surely at the core of this problem.

One of my favourite books is Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. In this book, the Croatian Baptist theologian tests out exactly these questions. A pacifist himself, and one who has taught theology within earshot of the Balkan war of the early 1990s, Volf argues that you cannot think of the Christian God except as one who is determined to exclude forcefully all that is evil.

In fact, it would impossible to call God ‘good’ if he were not to stand against evil in this way. That does not mean, however, that his character is justification for human beings to act belligerently towards one another. Not at all.

The cross of Jesus, violent and bloody scene though it is, is actually God’s challenge to human violence. For one thing, Jesus isn’t hanging there as the passive victim of the bullies, allowing them to win in the end. In the gospels Jesus isn’t depicted as defeatist. He goes willingly to the cross, knowing better than Pilate and Caiaphas or even his disciples exactly what’s at stake. He demonstrates perfectly that turning of the other cheek that he himself taught. He absorbs the violent rage of human beings against him.

And he also exposes it. He suffers an unjust death – a death that was the result of many lies. It is interesting how lies and violence often intertwine with each other in this world. Jesus was made a scapegoat precisely because the truth that he was speaking and the life that he was living was such a threat. He was a sacrifice made to keep a corrupt regime afloat – but by the way that he went to the cross, he exposed the deceit and hypocrisy that was involved in propping it up.

But this is not enough. As Volf puts it:

if Jesus had done nothing but suffer violence, we would have forgotten him as we have forgotten so many other innocent victims.

The cross of Jesus seems like a mass of contradictions. The Son of God, as the Suffering Servant, enters into the place of the condemned, ‘numbered among the transgressors’ as Isaiah would say. It looks like he is abandoned to death and completely excluded from God’s good world. Yet on the cross is also the great triumph of the Son. He refuses to return evil for evil and instead prays for the forgiveness of his executioners. He willingly bears the cost of human hostility towards God – and as he does so, a way is opened for the victory of God in his resurrection, where evil and death themselves will be excluded.

Death tells us what God’s view on our wickedness is. A God that wasn’t outraged by human evil would be complicit in it: not the turner of the other cheek but the turner of the blind eye. It would make a nonsense of the idea of a loving God to have him stand by in passive serenity, a little bit sad but utterly inactive. The violent outrages of humanity are not met by a God who poses as a teddy bear. For the sake of peace, we must long for the day when the just God excludes everything that stands implacably opposed to him.

But just as death shows God determined to exclude, the death of Jesus shows him resolved to embrace. He does not merely act as if our sin is not there. On the contrary: from the deep wells of his love, God acted on the cross with a mighty force against our sin so that we might be reconciled to him. He will not have us any other way.

This is not a ‘nice’ way to think of God, I guess. But I think the Bible wants us to be out of our comfort zone when it comes to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We tend to think that love and hate cannot co-exist. But even we hate that which hurts those we love. Nice indifference is not love, even though it less consolingly suburban.

But is this ‘violent’? It is certainly forceful and decisive – it is powerful. Yet, as with so many of God’s qualities, it is not a carbon-copy of human violence. It does not burst out rashly, like a frustrated parent striking a child.

And it gives us no grounds to pursue a policy of violence in his name. Let us be clear about that! Paul for one urges us not repay evil with evil – but to overcome evil with good. As Volf points out, even Christian committed to a stringent pacifism have upheld a view of God that speaks of his wrath and his judgement. I am not myself a pacifist, not absolutely, though I have a feeling Christians ought to at least want to be. The point is this: God is God, and we are not. Though there are many things in which we ought to copy God, our first duty as human beings is to have only God as God. Though rulers have a God-given responsibility to restrain and punish wickedness, we do not have a licence to kill because God does.

This was the witness of the martyrs of the early church – and many since then – who have not sought to take up the sword, even against those who have treated them unjustly. But as they went to death they did so trusting in both the fierceness of God’s hatred of evil and in the power of his love to overcome it.