Compassion not Wrath
8 December 2024
Advent 2C
Homily preached at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
Medford, Oregon
9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Malachi 3:1-4; Canticle 16; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6
God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. Stir in our hearts a desire to change—with hope that all of us can change. Break our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Zechariah in the Temple blesses the newborn John the Baptist this way:
“You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,
To give his people knowledge of salvation
by the forgiveness of their sins.
In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace”.
“In the tender compassion of our God,” John will prepare the way for Jesus whose light will break upon us and lead us In “the way of peace.”
We live in a world not at peace. We live in a world very short on compassion. We see how bad things are and seem able to blame only our enemies, those whom Zechariah calls “those who hate us.”
We are sick with anger, broken with wrath.
Look at how we have handled the electoral campaign--stirring up hatred of foreigners, trans people, and socialists on the one side and fearful hate of Nazis, fascists, and racists on the other. And the election’s aftermath: derisive gloating here, and deep resentment at those who voted differently from us, here. We even hear people in our own country say that maybe the only solution is what Chairman Mao called the source of all political power, the barrel of a gun. And on Thursday this week, we woke to news about the murder of the CEO of one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, one that had twice the denial rate of any other company. The casings of the bullets used had inscribed on them the words summarizing the policies framed by the murdered man, “delay, deny, defend.” That’s bad enough, but then we were treated to a chorus of “this murder was justified,” some of it muted, with moralizing tut-tuts at violence in the abstract, but cheering nevertheless for real violence.
Anger and wrath, hatred and fear. On all sides. No matter who started it, no matter who might be the most at fault, it breaks God’s heart. And it should break ours too.
As I was reminded by dear friends at St. John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong when Saddam Hussein was killed and beloved colleagues were celebrating, in Ezekiel we read, “As sure as I am the living God, I take no pleasure from the death of the wicked. I want the wicked to change their ways and live. Turn your life around! Reverse your evil ways!” (Ezek 33:11)
But isn’t wrath an attribute of God? Isn’t it what is needed in response to patent evil? Isn’t it what “the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord,” the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, is all about? About God punishing the wicked? Isn’t that the point of having John the Baptist appear on 2nd Advent as a dour prophet calling out “Repent or be punished!”?
I admit it, the idea of wrathful settling of scores lies behind most of the hopes of ancient Judaism for an ideal king of the future, an anointed David. Though at times he is called “the prince of Peace,” the main reason people hoped for a Messiah was that he would use force to set things right.
The fact is, there are plenty of things in this world that justify “righteous” anger.
But as justified as anger may seem, it is something, in the words of Bill Wilson, perhaps better left to healthier people than we have proven ourselves to be.
The Bible talks a lot about the wrath of God. But it also says that God is love. Some texts each us to love our enemies, but others command us to hate the wicked, or at least avoid them, and ask God to punish and destroy those who cause such harm to us.
We read, “I am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the wicked on their families for four generations!” But we also read “God is slow to anger and of great kindness!”
People try to reconcile these contradictory texts. Some: God loves the sinner but hates sin. Some: love is demanding, love is tough. Some: the wrath of God is placated by Jesus taking the place of the wicked on the cross and suffering in the stead of those who have faith in him. In all these views, a bloodthirsty Deity can calm his wrath only through the shedding of blood, anyone’s blood. Yikes.
These are cheap ways of reconciling the irreconcilable.
The problem with them is that they keep focused on God as angry, rather than as loving. The wrath of God is what destines us, in this view, to a burning lake of fire and brimstone for the eternities.
Jonathan Edwards’ classic sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God” shows us what the doctrine of the literal wrath of God is:
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. …[T]here is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. … O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder…”
Again, Yikes!
This is not God as love. And it is not the God that Jesus taught.
For Jesus, God is a loving parent, our abba or papa.
For Jesus, God is a healer, a physician, not an Emperor, policeman, or a judge in a court of law.
For Jesus, we should not try to avoid the wicked, but engage them “It is not the well that need a physician, but the ill.” It isn’t uncleanness we need to worry about, but rather unkindness, cruelty, and abuse of others. It isn’t boundaries between neighbors and foreigners that count, but our need to be neighborly to those who hate us, like that Samaritan.
For such ideas as these, Jesus was accused of being a sinner himself, spending all his time with whores, drunks, and greedy traitors.
When we talk about the wrath of God, just remember that this does not describe the heart of God. Any talk about God’s emotions or passions should be an affirmation that God is more than us, not less. God’s wrath as an idea reminds us that justice is a basic character of God. But it does not mean that God is bloodthirsty, or has an anger management problem. To take such an image literally would be to say that God is as messed up as we are, driven to engage in abuse to make a point or satisfy an interior rage.
No. “The wrath of God” describes how things feel to us when we are alienated from God. We find salvation in the cross not by Jesus substituting for us as the literal aim of God’s rage, but by us participating with the God made man in his mortal sufferings and ultimate victory over death and the world’s brokenness.
C.S. Lewis, in talking about Hell, that ultimate image of God’s anger, imagines that it is a condition created by our own refusal of God’s grace. He puts it this way, “In the end, when all is said and done, there are two groups of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘alright, have it your own way.’”
Beloved, Jesus taught us to be compassionate as our Father in heaven is compassionate, not wrathful as God is seen by wrathful people. He taught us to love our enemies.
For the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
“It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without [first] accept[ing] the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us. … The forgiving act must always be initiated by the person who has been wronged… [It] does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that [we no longer let] the evil act …. remain… as a barrier to … relationship. Forgiveness [creates the chance] for a fresh start… It is the lifting of a burden…, the cancelling of…debt. …The evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. A persistent civil war rages within [us all] … There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface…, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that [his evil acts are] not quite representative of all that he is… We know [that, despite all of the distortions], God’s image is ineffably etched in [him, and that he is] not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love. …We must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but [rather] to win his friendship and understanding. … Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
This is what the elderly Zechariah is saying: Compassion drives God’s acts toward us, including giving us Jesus as the embodiment of compassion. By changing our minds and hearts, repenting, we come to share in Jesus’s compassion. And in this, we experience rescue from our brokenness, from our slavery to wrath, and find the way of peace.
Let us pray,
“Gracious Jesus, grant us your tender compassion. Shine your light on us who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. Break our wrathful hearts of stone, and give us compassionate hearts of flesh. Guide our feet into the way of peace, as hard as that may appear to us”. Amen.
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