What's This Business Called God's Wrath? Series

Fourth Sunday in Lent 2021

Today is Laetare Sunday or Rejoice Sunday. The Word of God today gives us some divine ideas to help us understand the clear statement that God loved the world.

To understand the reading from 2nd chronicles we have to know something about the Middle East, which has always been a kind of crucible of human conflict, in the 7th & 8th c. before Christ. Israel was in kind of the middle of three great pagan kingdoms, and it was divided north and south so both parts were very weak.

Assyria was dominant in the early period. In fact they had even conquered Egypt. Egypt tried to fight them for dominance, but as Assyria declined, Babylon advanced. They fought Egypt for hegemony and defeated them, first at Megiddo, where Judah and the Israelites lost their last really good king, and then at Carchemish.

From that point on, Judah was in some kind of thrall to Babylon, but was constantly tempted to form political alliances with Egypt, which over and over the prophets called “a broken reed”

Now we turn to the priestly authors of the books of Chronicles, which is a kind of second history of the Israelites during & after the reign of King David. The priests focused on the Temple of the Lord and its worship, so they judged only four kings to be in any way good. Here they pass judgement not so much on the kings, who were just politicians, but on their ancestor priests and people who allowed abominations to take place in the Temple, especially under the foul king Manasseh, who reigned for over a half-century, and even worshiped the bloodthirsty Moloch. He persecuted the prophets, and even murdered his own grandfather, the prophet Isaiah.

The result, of course, was catastrophe. After Josiah died, a series of disastrous leaders culminated in Zedekiah, who rebelled against Babylon, the new big kid on the block, and the Babylonians laid siege to and destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, The Chronicler says that after hundreds of years of forbearance, God had enough and turned His wrath on Judea. We’ll need to look at that in light of God’s love in a little while. Nebuchadnezzar then took the leaders and priests off to Babylon where they languished for between five and seven decades.

The Chronicler went further and related how after he defeated Babylon, the Persian king Cyrus, stirred by the Lord’s Spirit, sent the leaders of Israel–such as survived–back to Israel to rebuild their Temple. This led to the construction of the second Temple by Ezra and Nehemiah.

The psalm 137 is perhaps the most mournful in the whole psalter. It’s worth thinking about, especially when we realize that when we sin seriously, we cannot pray. That’s especially true with sins against the 6th and 9th commandments. Lust is specially destructive of positive human relationships, and of our relationship with God.

The Letter to the Ephesians emphasizes the “great love with which God loved us”, preparing us for the Gospel. It focuses not on the sacrificial death of Jesus here so much as the liberation from sin that made us subject to punishment. He has earlier called the unrepentant “children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” By our repentance and baptism into Christ, we are raised from the death of sin and made alive in the Body of Christ, the Church. So we, being made holy, already participate in the resurrection and eligible to sit in heavenly places as Christ does.

So, yes, God is a jealous God, and sin makes humans fit for chastisement. If we don’t turn away from sin and believe in Jesus, accept His forgiveness and participate sacramentally in His life, we are choosing to be absent from God’s loving presence forever, once we die. Wrath, or hell, is our choice, not God’s. God loves us all the time. We are recreated as images of Christ so we can do the works He did in the first century, in our own time.

We have been prepared for the answer then to our question about the wrath of God. God doesn’t change His mind about us, and dangle us over hell like a perverse sadist. The wrath of God is the absence of God, which God does not choose. In fact, just as Moses, faced with a horrible plague of serpents killing the people, at God’s direction raised up the image of a serpent for the people to look at, and believe in God’s mercy, and be healed, so it was with Jesus. He was to be lifted up on the cross so that we sinners can look on Him, believe in God’s mercy, and be healed sacramentally through baptism, which the water from His heart presaged on Calvary, and nourished through Communion, signed by His precious Blood.