— by David J Goa —
Ah, the "wrath of God." It is a knotty (or is that
"naughty") matter in Christian exegesis. Let us read a text and
endeavour to hear its spiritual meaning through the din of theological
projections: Romans 5:6-11 from the Orthodox New Testament, in which the
Greek of the original text is translated into English with the care
noted in those for whom this ancient tongue is the foundation of their
mother-tongue.
"When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the
ungodly. For scarcely for the righteous man will one die, yet perhaps
for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God commendeth His
own love to us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
Jesus Christ is not God's messenger or sacrifice. He is not a prophet of
God the Father but is the incarnation of God, one and the same as God
the Father from before all ages. Our faith has no hierarchy of deities
as the Muslims claim and the Jews found scandalous and the Greeks found
foolish. Since God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One and fully
united and fully in communion they do not have different roles to
fulfill in some divine plan that motivates and organizes them. God is
the lover of humankind and loves us in our sin, in our separation, in
our death. God loves us even in our actions that are against the way God
created us. God's grace pours into our life while "we were yet without
strength" (or, as many translations of this text in the West have it,
"while we were yet sinners"). God reaches out to us, wooing us with his
love in the midst of our estrangement. His love is not dependent on or
waiting for our seeing the light and getting our life on track.
"Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be
saved from wrath through Him. For if, when we were enemies, we were
reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been
reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." [Authors italics.]
Many translations of this passage speak of us being "saved from the
wrath of God" a phrase that sets up and nurtures notions of God that are
akin to many pagan theologies. The "wrath of God" is the way we see God
when we are out of communion with God. Without communion our mind is
abandoned to its own projections, as every therapist knows. It is
precisely this way of seeing, not with the mind of Christ but with the
mind we acquire through the works of the flesh (as the apostle says over
and over again), that pits us against our own nature and against the
nature of God's creation. Creation, all of creation, is as Gregory of
Nyssa says so eloquently, "the energy of God." Creation comes to be as
God's delight and He "saw that it was good." When Eve and Adam sinned in
the garden it was they that walked away and hid from Him who came
seeking them in the cool of the evening. It was God who sought them and
called out to them. As it was for Adam and Eve, so it has been for me
and so many men and women. But Adam and Eve were filled with guilt and
shame and fled and hid and covered themselves. Their mind was filled
with fear and they saw wrath stalking the garden, heard only wrath in
the loving words of Him who was their lover, maker and sustainer. Our
mind in the flesh sees wrath as stalking life because we are outside our
God-given way of being in communion. We recreate the world as a place of
estrangement knowing ("what we did not know we knew" as the poet says)
that we have sinned against all the world by removing ourselves from the
nature of creation which is God's energy. We are plunged into turmoil
and our nature seems and is divided against itself. This is the root of
religion.
Many religions structures were developed by human beings based on their
desire to propitiate the judgment they feel and experience when they
step outside of God's energy, outside of the nature of things. The
mechanism of propitiation flows naturally from estrangement and in our
mind we reshape the world and the meaning of all experience as
estrangement. We step onto a pathway trying to reconcile our current
state of estrangement with our conscience that tells us we have left the
pathways of communion. This is why we read in the Hebrew Bible about
God’s wrath. It is a revelation but must be turned inside out to be
understood. It is a revelation about the projections of the human mind
not the mind of God. It is not a revelation about God but about how we
see creation and history and God when we are out of communion. And our
experience outside of communion is indeed one of wrath. We are opposed
to creation, opposed to our conscience, opposed to the order of things
as created by the loving God. No wonder we see God as wrathful because
we now see and experience all of creation through the prism of our own
passions. We have recreated the world as a sea of estrangement. But this
is not God's action nor is it the way the God who loves us is responding
to us. The revelation framed as God's wrath is our re-jigging of
creation in terms of our estrangement, endeavoring to justify, telling
ourselves a story that allows our current state of estrangement to
survive since it so easily becomes normal and we mistake its ways as the
heart of our identity.
"And not only so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus
Christ, through Whom we now receive the reconciliation."
When we open again to ourselves as created by God, to creation, and to
God (the existential trinity in communion) we are reconciled to all of
life. It is our resurrection, and all our boasts shift from being
associated with a sinful mind that seeks good works or ritual formulas
or other means to propitiate our image of an angry God, convinced He
hates His own creation once it falls away from him, to the mind of
Christ that dares to call God a loving Father.
All the Biblical texts on the wrath of God reveal a human truth: that
when we step outside creation through sin we experience ourselves pitted
against our own nature. This is the existential condition that turns us
away from walking in communion in the cool of the evening to the hidden
places filled with wrath born of self-delusion. So much of religion has
built a structure on this fallen condition as a way of justify actions,
thoughts, and rituals, all of which allows us to continue to live in the
hidden places beyond the reach of Jesus Christ through whom we may be
"transformed by the renewal of our minds." When we open to the "renewal
of our mind" we see the unity of God though the eyes of the Beloved and
guilt and shame no longer hold us in their grip.
God has no wrath. Wrath is all we experience when we enter into sin and
miss the mark of life. Wrath is the voice of our conscience calling out
to us as we step outside the created order of life that is held together
in grace and communion. The coming of Jesus Christ into the world
reveals to us in as complete a way as is possible for our nature to
comprehend that "while we were yet without strength, in due time Christ
died for the ungodly." In so doing Christ calls us into freedom from the
bondage we created of the world. We are called back into life from the
precincts of death that we created in and through our estrangement.
It seems to me that if this is not how we understand the phrase that is
so often quoted as “the wrath of God" we have no alternative but to
return to some form or other of the ancient Canaanite religion and
continue the endless cycle of propitiations. For the ancients and for
us, the projection of the wrath of God preserves our story that God is
not love. “Shall we continue in sin then so that grace may abound? God
forbid."
***
A HOMILY OF
ST ANTONY THE GREAT
God is good, without passions and unchangeable. One who understands that it is sound and true to affirm that God does not change might very well ask: `how, then, is it possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good, becoming merciful to those who know Him and, on the other hand, shunning the wicked and being angry with sinners.' We must reply to this, that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, because to rejoice and to be angered are passions. Nor is God won over by gifts from those who know Him, for that would mean that He is moved by pleasure. It is not possible for the Godhead to have the sensation of pleasure or displeasure from the condition of humans, God is good, and He bestows only blessings, and never causes harm, but remains always the same. If we humans, however, remain good by means of resembling Him, we are united to Him, but if we become evil by losing our resemblance to God, we are separated from Him. By living in a holy manner, we unite ourselves to God; by becoming evil, however, we become at enmity with Him. It is not that He arbitrarily becomes angry with us, but that our sins prevent God from shining within us, and expose us to the demons who make us suffer. If through prayer and acts of compassionate love, we gain freedom from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over and made Him change, but rather that by means of our actions and turning to God, we have been healed of our wickedness, and returned to the enjoyment of God's goodness. To say that God turns away from the sinful is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind. (St Antony the Great, Cap. 150).
