Christchurch Parish News, January 2016
How do you feel about the notion of God getting angry?
Sometimes in church we sing the hymn ‘Be still for the presence of the Lord’. When we do, we’re expressing our deep-seated desire to be in God’s presence. We believe that when we are intentionally in God’s presence, it is a state of being which, in and of itself, is an unconditionally good thing. But in the story of Jonah, as soon as the unlikely and unwilling prophet is commissioned by God to ‘go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it’, Jonah reacts in a completely different way. No singing heart warming choruses for Jonah! Instead he belts it down to the coast and boards a ship that’s heading 2000 miles in the opposite direction to Spain. His sole intention is to flee the presence of God, because that’s the last place he wants to be. After all, Jonah understands very well that being in the presence of God doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be smooth sailing all the way.
Especially when the LORD hurls a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm comes upon the sea that the ship threatens to break up (Jonah 1.4) In the story of Jonah, the LORD, which when the word is capitalised is simply a respectful way of writing the holy name of the God of Israel, does not sit back and take Jonah’s disobedience lightly. Quite the contrary, just because this one man has not kept to his mission, God creates an almighty (!) storm which engulfs the eastern seas of the Mediterranean and threatens to break up the ship in which Jonah is fleeing.
How do we interpret this action on the part of God? Is God angry with Jonah for not doing what he’s told him to do. How do you feel about the notion of God getting angry? Is it something that you’re comfortable with? Or does the notion of God’s mood being subject to change leave you feeling uneasy, as if that’s something that God shouldn’t do. If God is God, then God is the same always and forever and so shouldn’t be subject to emotional ups and downs, moments of temper and anger? Besides, isn’t it terribly anthropocentric, attributing human emotions and characteristics to God that aren’t properly God’s? Shouldn’t God’s temperament, unlike the ship to Tarshish that’s almost breaking up in the storm that’s now raging, always be on an even keel?
Alternatively, we might deftly tap-dance round the question, pointing out that this is a story, a parable, not an actual occurrence, and to read it otherwise would be to read it mistakenly as a concrete, real world happening; in essence it is to mistake the genre of what it is that we’re reading (parable misunderstood as history), so we needn’t let such questions concern us. The story-teller is characterising God in this way, yes, but that is for dramatic effect in the plot and we don’t need to take that to mean that God actually gets angry in real life. But then does that mean that when the most atrocious things happen in our lives, in the lives of those around us, in the lives of those whom we will never meet but whom we see on the television, who suddenly find themselves subject to the most wretched experiences, be they inflicted by other human beings or by freak acts of nature (or acts of God as the legal phrase has it!), does that mean that God acknowledges these occasions with an absence of any anger whatsoever, as if impervious to the impact of any such unjust suffering?
Oftentimes, when we find ourselves in such quandaries, what lies behind them are two different approaches to God which have shaped our European culture’s understanding, and thereby ours, of what we mean and whom we are referring to when we say the word ‘God’. One comes from the Bible, both Old and New Testaments; the other has its roots in the broader Greek culture in the centuries before Jesus’s lifetime and in the philosophical tradition that continues from it right up to this day. In shorthand, we can refer to the former as the God of the Bible and to the latter as the God of the philosophers. And it is the latter understanding of God, which stipulates that there can be no variation whatsoever in God’s character, for example no changes of emotion or opinion, because if there were to be, then God would not be perfect. Why so? Because in this philosophical way of thinking change is assumed to imply imperfection (that which is perfect does not change) and therefore a God who changes cannot be said to be God. But it is very different with the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, where we find the God of Israel frequently spoken of as having the whole gamut of emotions, including in addition to being loving, being jealous, regretting, changing his mind, and yes, on many occasions, getting angry. Very, very angry.
At this point, what we sometimes find ourselves doing is pitting the God of the Old Testament against the God of the New Testament. For example, in the final series of the American TV political drama, The West Wing, the Republican presidential candidate, Arnold Vinick, played by Alan Alda, meets the Democratic outgoing president, Josiah Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen. Over a tub of ice cream in the White House kitchens, Vinick admits to not being a believer, one of the issues being for Vinick the violence he reads of in the Old Testament, which is sanctioned in the name of God. To which, Bartlett responds, ‘I’ve always been more a New Testament man, myself’. But this is a false dichotomy, by which I mean it’s a false distinction. It’s as if to say that the Old Testament is a book of violence and anger, whereas by contrast the New Testament is a book of love. Instead, when we read the Bible, we find acts of anger and love attributed to God and undertaken in the name of God in both Old and New Testaments alike.
On this topic, many years ago, I remember being brought up short by Fr Alex. I had just preached a sermon at the old Saturday Night at the Priory service on the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, saying that as Christians we were called not to get angry. After the service Alex’s words to me were as succinct as ever: ‘And what about righteous anger? Was not Jesusrighteously angry?’ And this is the key. Holy Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, speak of God’s anger but it is an anger which is righteous. God loves the Ninevites. In fact, when the story says of Nineveh that it is a great city, the Hebrew for ‘great’ also means that it is a city of God. Nineveh belongs to God and God loves the Ninevites. More precisely, God loves Israel’s enemies. And so He has sent Jonah to Nineveh ‘to cry out against it’ because God loves Nineveh and passionately desires the Ninevites to repent.
But it’s a no-go for Jonah. Israel’s enemies should just get what they deserve. If they don’t and wicked deeds go unpunished, what happens to justice in this world? Even more disturbingly for Jonah, if God is going to offer them mercy, how can one speak of the God of Israel being just? Eh, God, have you forgotten whose side you’re meant to be on? Jonah doesn’t want God to love the Ninevites. He doesn’t want the Ninevites even to be given the chance to mend their ways and receive God’s forgiveness. Jonah’s made up his mind: he simply doesn’t want to be in the presence of such a god as the God of Israel if this God is going to offer merciful forgiveness to Israel’s enemies. ‘If that’s what God’s like,’ it is as if Jonah is saying, ‘you can have him. I’m off. Like I’m going to be a part of God’s mission to bring the Ninevites back to Him, back into the orbit of His love? Hell no!’ And so off he sails, fingers in his ears. And that’s when God gets angry with Jonah. Righteously angry. For God’s mercy is for all. Even our enemies.
Well, we didn’t get to the mariners this month, as I had hoped to. Apologies for that. We’ll join them next time as they pray to their gods to save them from the waves that are crashing down on the ship’s deck.