(2 Kings 2:1-12)
Anyone who has lived through a disaster has asked the question: “Why? Why did it happen? Why did God let it happen?”
It’s a reasonable question to ask. What role does God play in the hurricane, wildfire, cancer diagnosis, layoff, or divorce?
Today’s passage from Isaiah says God “sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (40:22). Maybe God lacks a telescope to see the grasshoppers suffering?
Isaiah allows no such easy answer. Earlier in the chapter, the prophet promises the exiled Jews returning from Babylon that God will feed them “like a shepherd,” gathering these lost lambs of Israel in a loving embrace (40:11).
The good-shepherd God who hugs those lost lambs tight surely knows their heartache, their fear, their desolation. Surely God knows when we, too, struggle with feelings of abandonment. Isn’t that so?
In the fall of 2012, the Rev. Carl Wilton was serving a congregation on the Jersey Shore in a community located very near ground zero for Superstorm Sandy. The parish he served was literally cut in half by the storm as punishing winds and waves blasted a new inlet through the barrier beach. The next morning, half the community was underwater. Roughly a quarter of the congregation had been driven from their homes. Some couldn’t return for many months. A few never did. The electricity came back on after five days, but it was years before all the flooded homes were fully repaired.
Did the Almighty arrange for that perfect confluence of winds, high-pressure system, wobbly jet stream and warmer-than-usual ocean waters? Did God set Hurricane Sandy on a collision course with a nor’easter, then cause the two storm systems to merge, becoming the much-heralded Superstorm? Then, did God position a high-pressure area just south of the Canadian Maritimes, acting like a huge pool table bumper to bounce the superstorm right into the side pocket that is the Jersey Shore?
If the Almighty does indeed arrange for such anomalies to happen, what on earth was God up to? Did the storm’s highly unusual right-angle turn indicate divine judgment? That’s an ancient line of reasoning, imprinted deep within our brains — concluding that God uses hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes to deliver a dreadful message, like modern-day plagues of Egypt. If that was the case, then what was God trying to say?
Not long after the storm, Rev. Wilton was talking to a former church member who’d rushed back to his hometown to lend a hand with recovery efforts. He told Wilton how, after several days of driving through one heavily damaged neighborhood after another, he could think of only one word to describe the magnitude of the destruction: “Godsmacked.” Did he mean gobsmacked? No, he meant GODsmacked. That’s the heart of the fundamental theological question the congregation was struggling with. Were they Godsmacked? Is that what happened?
Here’s another way of answering the question. A New York City woman was interviewed on a public television documentary after the storm. Tragically, she’d lost her teenage son. A friend had called, asking him to come over and help. Over her objections, he walked out their front door and into the howling wind.
He never came back. A day or two later, the police showed up, bearing devastating news: both her son and his friend had died when a tree fell on them. So overtaxed were the city’s first responders, it was 12 hours before anyone was able to do anything about the two bodies.
She couldn’t make sense of why this had happened. She wondered, through her tears, if there had been a disturbance in “The Force,” distracting God for a moment, just long enough for the tree to fall.
Yes, her statement to the reporters was a strange mash-up of Star Wars lore and Christian theology. But surely a grieving mother has the right to grasp for meaning wherever she can. What else can you say after you’ve been Godsmacked?
This question we’re talking about is known, in theological circles, as the problem of evil. It’s a conundrum as old as the hills. Among all the brilliant philosophical minds of Western civilization, no one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation for why one community is Godsmacked while another remains untouched. Or why a tree must fall in the precise instant when two promising young men are standing beneath it.
There’s something deeply unsettling about the old-fashioned language, found in the fine print of many insurance policies, that holds the company harmless from “acts of God.” Is that really how God acts?
There’s one strain within the Hebrew prophetic tradition that says, yes, this is exactly how God acts. This view finds expression in a word that’s all but forgotten in our modern era: wrath. The wrath of God.
Isaiah would agree. Did you notice these words from today’s passage?
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when God blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble (40:24).
God blows upon them, and they wither. Is there a better symbol for divine wrath than a swirling mass of 60-mph winds, bigger than the Mid-Atlantic states, accompanied by a storm surge of 6 feet or more, that just happens to come ashore at the precise moment of high tide?
Some of you may still remember a satellite photo that appeared in the news media, not long after the storm. It was a night-time photo of North America, taken during the massive power failure. An unbelievably vast chunk of the continent — covering the Mid-Atlantic states, extending as far west as Ohio — was sunk in total darkness. It looked as though some ravenous cosmic beast had taken a huge bite out of the country.
Elsewhere in North America, displayed in stunning satellite imagery, was the blazing glory of our civilization — the invention we call, with almost unbelievable vanity, the power grid. Our power! Human ingenuity banishing the darkness. Human cleverness pushing back the night. Except, of course, for that multi-state region swallowed up by the shadows. On the night of Superstorm Sandy’s arrival, the power grid collided with a far greater power. And it lost the contest miserably.
Those who lived through it became reacquainted with the darkness our ancestors once knew. We lit candles and oil lamps to push back the sinister shadows. We went to bed early for a change because what else was there to do but sleep? From our front porches we could see the gleaming band of the Milky Way again, with no light pollution to obscure it. We’d once imagined ourselves masters of the darkness. How quickly that delusion faded!
The storm is a reminder of an uncomfortable truth: that just beyond the borders of our proud and self-congratulatory culture, a fearsome chaos lurks. We expend much thought energy trying — vainly — to deny such chaos exists. We like to pretend there’s no such thing as suffering. Perhaps there is for other people, but not for us. We believe we’re entitled — good people that we are — to every comfort imaginable. For long stretches of our lives, we even allow ourselves to believe there’s no such thing as death. In our foolish pride, we do something no generation in human history — until the two or three most recent — has ever been able to do. We live most of our days pretending, for all practical purposes, we’re going to live forever. Our ancestors never had that luxury. Maybe that’s why the idea of God’s wrath made more sense to them than it does to us.
Lots of people hear that phrase — the wrath of God — and think it denotes a clean, surgical strike, with God smiting specific evildoers with lightning bolts. But really, it’s more like a Civil War battlefield, wreathed in smoke, the soldiers fighting on in uniforms so mud-caked they can barely tell friend from foe, accompanied all the while by the banshee cries of the wounded and the dying. It’s a blunt instrument, the wrath of God.
But isn’t there’s a part of us that wants to abandon such an uncomfortable thought? More than 70 years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr looked around at the church of his day and summarized, with incredible precision, the creed of a comfortable, self-satisfied American Christianity that has no room for the wrath of God: “A God without wrath brought [people] without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Note well, it’s not just God’s wrath that this easygoing, feelgood Christianity has abandoned. It doesn’t need the cross, either. Where there’s no sin, what need is there for grace? And where there’s no grace, what need is there for salvation? We save ourselves. We do it with our power grid, right?
What a contrast this is to what the Bible teaches! The oldest story in the Scriptures tells of Adam and Eve driven out of paradise after their first encounter with the wrath of God. Thereafter, the Lord decrees, their days will be cursed by chaos. The Lord curses not only Adam and Eve, but the very earth itself, for their disobedience:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:17b-19).
The earth is just as broken as we are; since Scripture tell us it wasn’t about the man Adam, his wife, Eve, and whatever piece of forbidden fruit they may have stolen. The Hebrew word adam simply means “human.” The message of that ancient tale is that all humanity is condemned to live under the generalized, unspecific wrath of God.
Well, what kind of God is that, you may be inclined to ask? What kind of God allows a world of such chaos — and yes, sometimes even suffering — to exist?
According to the Bible, we don’t have the right to ask the question, any more than we can trade our parents for new ones. There’s only one God — the great I Am, the One who is — and we get no other gods to choose from.
Yet, all is not lost. The Old Testament God of wrath is also a God of infinite mercy. God’s own son, Jesus Christ, has come into this fallen, chaotic, wrath-battered world to redeem it. Yes, responding to the reality of sin, God may have permitted the green and ordered paradise of Eden to descend into chaos, but even now God is engaged in a slow and deliberate process of repair and rebuilding. It’s happening through the amazing grace we come to know most completely in the person of Jesus Christ.
Isaiah talks of God’s wrath, but in the very same chapter, he speaks of God’s mercy:
But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint (40:31).
How is this possible? How can God embody both wrath and mercy?
First, we should note that we can’t understand mercy, in its deepest dimension, without first acknowledging wrath. Were there no such thing as wrath, the opposite of mercy would be indifference. Would we really want to live under a God who feels no anger, who can muster only indifference towards the bad things in this world? Would we want to worship a God who looks at an abused child or a power-mad dictator and responds with a shrug of the shoulders? Mercy would have precious little meaning were there not such a thing as wrath to act as a counterweight.
Jesus was born into a disordered world, a world where suffering was all too common. There’s a place in the gospel of Luke where He comments on a disaster that happened in His own time, the sudden collapse of a building known as the Tower of Siloam. Eighteen lives were snuffed out, just like that. But Jesus refuses to blame any of those 18 victims: “Do you think,” He asks, “that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4).
God didn’t target those people crushed under the collapsing tower any more than God targets those whose homes are flooded by hurricanes. There’s a certain amount of wrath floating around in this broken world of ours. From time to time, certain people, regardless of guilt or innocence, may be ambushed by that wrath. They may be Godsmacked. We’ve got to believe God is the first to weep at their misfortune, even as God surely wept to see Jesus dying on the cross.
But God has a plan. The plan is that those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, mounting up with wings like eagles. Let us focus not on the wrath that pulls us down, but on the mercy that lifts us up again. And let us be quick to use our talents and treasure to build up whatever is broken down in this beloved, God-touched world of ours!
