“[One] Isaian complaint is this: ‘Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful; all of us have become like unclean people’ (Isa. 64:4-5). It is difficult to read any two pages of the Bible in succession, Old Testament or New, and not encounter a reference to the divine anger. It will simply not do to set this idea aside, as though it were an unfortunate holdover from a benighted time. But we must be careful not to emotionalize the reference so as to suggest that God flies, like a raging, dysfunctional father, into a fit of pique. I would suggest that the divine anger is a beautifully apt metaphor for God’s passion to set things right. When sin and injustice deface the beauty of God’s beloved creatures and produce deep unhappiness in them, God cannot hold himself in. He rages, as it were, to rectify the situation.
[T]his Advent, we all ought to identify those actions and attitudes in us that rouse God’s anger. I fully realize that the culture instructs us in a thousand ways to affirm our guiltlessness: ‘I’m okay, you’re okay.’ But the Bible instructs us to admit to our ‘uncleanness.’ Once again, this is not an exercise in psychologically debilitating self-reproach; it is a courageous willingness to offer our weakness to the divine physician. It is allowing the God of justice to set things right in us. Until we do this, we will never appreciate the one who said, ‘I have come to light a fire on the earth’ (Luke 12:49), and who, in magnificently high dudgeon, turned over the tables in the temple.”
~Robert Barron
Comments