God is not all sweetness and light. This week’s story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) and the Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22) feature an angry God and an angry king who represents God. Passages of Scripture that depict God’s “wrath” appear throughout both the Old and New Testaments – and Christians have never had an easy time grappling with them!
Biblical scholar Gary A. Herion puts the two classic questions around our angry God well:
- In the “wrath” stories, is God really mad, or are the biblical authors just using figures of speech?
- If God is really mad, is it a part of God’s personality, “co-equal” to Love, or is it a passing phase?
Here’s a few guidelines to help us puzzle through these issues:
Passion v. Pathos: Passion describes loose, uncontrolled, radiant emotion that we might call “irrational.” Pathos is emotion directed toward a particular situation, and is related to ethos, which has to do with moral norms. In Scripture, God’s anger has the character of pathos and is provoked mainly by covenant-breaking: human straying and acts of injustice. In Exodus, God’s pathos is directed toward Moses when he initially refuses to stand up to the Egyptians, and toward the Egyptians when they persecute the Israelites. More than any other Ancient Near Eastern deity, the Hebrew God is no capricious, nor is Yahweh inherently wrathful.
Angry Kings: God is often depicted as a king in the Old and New Testaments, not only because the metaphor is apt (God is Lord over Israel), but because metaphors themselves allowed pious Jewish people to avoid using the divine name. Ancient Near Eastern kings often expressed their “wrath” formally, in writing. When a king wrote that he was angry, he was being provoked by an external event – something that required him to exercise his power and express his displeasure in a way that offered no apologies. Wrath was his “royal prerogative.” Could the same be said for God’s wrath in Scripture?
Wrath in the New Testament: In Matthew, which we will read in worship until late November, God is never depicted as wrathful. John the Baptist does, however, mention a “day of wrath.” This day, ironically, is when God will conquer all wrath. The adversity that humans experience just by being alive – not because God, in God’s wrath, punishes misdeeds – will be no more.
New Testament wrath is more at home in Revelation, where, again, it is associated less with God and more with a coming day of judgment and setting-right. Wrath, therefore, is never some free-floating thing but is occasioned by injustice and broken relationships.
Bibliography: Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v.6 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 989-998.
(Danielle Thompson)
