The Wrath to Come.

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4–13; Matthew 3:1–12

The Second Sunday of Advent.

I.

            John the Baptizer rails at the Pharisees and Sadducees with the rhetorical question, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”  What does he mean?  Because the description he gives of the Messiah as someone wielding a winnowing fork, who “will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire,” is not really the Jesus we meet in the rest of Matthew’s gospel. 

            In his earthly life, Jesus is certainly not an embodiment of God’s wrath in any conventional sense.  He doesn’t come into the world delivering violence and condemnation, but with love, forgiveness, peace, and healing.  He gets angry a few times, but, unless you count overturning some tables and waving a whip around in the Temple, he never does any violence to anyone.

            At the same time, later in his ministry Jesus does talk in no uncertain terms about God’s wrath.  That’s where he does sound like John.  He talks about a separation between the sheep and the goats, the wheat from the chaff; he talks about the rich man languishing in torment in Hades; he talks about the end, the Day of Judgment, when the blessed inherit the Kingdom and the cursed depart into eternal fire. 

            I suspect that the wrath of God is not simply “to come” in the sense that it is just relegated off into the future, often the far-off future.  In Scripture, the wrath of God is a constant threat.  The Apostle Paul talks about it as something being revealed now in the way people are given up to their own destruction because of the practices they choose.  In other words, the wrath of God is already here even as it is still to come.   

            In the Bible, God’s wrath breaks out repeatedly against people’s injustice and idolatry.  There are times when God’s patience runs out and the reset button gets pressed.  The big one of course was with Noah’s flood.  But whenever the people fall into idolatry, which invariably leads to injustice – that is to say, whenever God’s vision and will for human beings to live together in equality, sharing, and community is rejected and the people fall into violence, greed, corruption, and gross inequality – then there is always a reckoning.  God’s wrath explodes, and some form of catastrophe, be it political, economic, military, or natural, afflicts the people.  It is always clear that the people bring this disaster upon themselves by their idolatry and injustice.

            In other words, they have decided to reject God’s law and will, choosing to exist governed by their own fear and anger.  And the consequence of this is not pleasant.  Because God made the universe to function according to God’s purpose and order, and if we set ourselves against that purpose and order we are choosing to make the universe and the One who created it our enemy.  And that doesn’t work very well because the universe is a lot bigger than we are, and if we go against it, it will frankly crush us. 

            And that movement of the creation against those who seek to destroy it, is what the Bible refers to as God’s wrath.  We have been so profoundly and comprehensively separate from, and antagonistic towards, God’s good creation and other people, that God’s wrath is indeed all around us.

II.

            All kinds of things are happening today that could be interpreted as examples of God’s wrath.  People are putting themselves against God and God’s creation, and this generates negative consequences.  Global warming and other environmental problems, the breakdown of families and communities, economic crises and unemployment, wars and terrorism, epidemics of diseases like cancer, asthma, depression, and obesity, not to mention natural disasters of increasing frequency and ferocity, these are all what people in biblical times would identify as instances of God’s wrath.   

            So it is difficult to distinguish God’s wrath from the nastiness and violence we commit against each other.  It is hard to say that one is God’s “punishment” for the other, since it’s all about the state of being separate from God.  That separation itself generates all this anger, hatred, shame, and violence.

            So when John questions the motives of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and when he warns everyone about the Messiah’s coming judgment, it has to do with something already happening that people are dealing with.  They are already living in “the wrath to come.”  That’s why people go out to the wilderness to hear John and be baptized by him.  Not because everything is wonderful and they all have it all together.  But because they sense something is wrong, they feel God’s wrath now in the disorder, corruption, oppression, inequality, and violence of their situation.  In the disaster of their present existence, they are anticipating an even great disaster in the future.

            And John places before them this choice.  He says, “It doesn’t have to be this way!  You don’t have to be the chaff burned up in the unquenchable fire.  That’s what you’re already feeling in the anger, depression, frustration, pain, grief, sadness, and hopelessness of your situation.  We’re conquered by the Romans, we’re crushed under their brutality, our economy is controlled by a tiny minority for their benefit, everyone else is afflicted with low wages, long hours, high taxes, high interest rates, and high prices.  I get that.  That’s the wrath we do want to flee from.  And we flee from it not by the empty claim that Abraham is our ancestor, but by bearing fruit worthy of repentance.  That is, by living in a different way because we are seeing things, and thinking about things, in a different way.”

III.

            The separation the Messiah is bringing is not a threat about how bad things will get if we don’t shape up.  The people already know how bad things can get.  What John says the Messiah is about is opening up the other way, the way of repentance, the way of bearing good fruit, the way of living together in peace, justice, and love.

            The fact that the Messiah will baptize people with the Holy Spirit and with fire is a good thing, because those who remain, the “wheat,” will be gathered together into the granary.  It’s not a threat; it’s a promise.  It is hope.

            And we have to live into that hope.  Rather than being scared of being burned up with the chaff, we have to start being the wheat, we have to bear the good fruit, we have to live lives of repentance, with new minds, new hearts, and a different quality of actions.

            One important characteristic of the wheat is that it is “gathered.”  It is all brought together.  That togetherness is itself a witness to the reconciling power of the gospel.  If the wrath has to do with the state of being separate and alienated from God and each other, we express the reconciliation that Christ has brought about between God and people, and people with each other, when we gather in community.

            This is what Paul is exhorting the Christ-followers in Rome about.  He is writing to a church divided and perhaps even in danger of splitting along the lines of ethnic and religious background.  If that happened, it would only demonstrate their continuing participation in God’s wrath, the separation from God and from each other that is wrecking the planet and destroying lives. 

            So he pleads with them when he says: “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  He is calling on them to practice  unity by lifting the exclusion and breaking down the barriers separating them, which had made them enemies of each other.

            Followers of Jesus have to exemplify reconciliation.  They have to witness to the way God, in Jesus Christ, reconciles humans to God and to each other.  They have to form a new, alternative community, where these differences don’t divide but rather are understood to be an expression of the wondrous diversity of God’s world.  They have to demonstrate in their life together that different people can feed and energize each other.  They have to show that their unity in Christ is what makes their differences bear fruit in reconciliation.

IV.

            John the Baptizer would know the prophecy we read from Isaiah, and it would certainly be in his mind when he utters those words about the Messiah.

            Isaiah also talks about redeeming the poor and the meek, and destroying the wicked by God’s Word.  But mostly his vision is one of reconciliation and reversal.  I get the impression that “wicked” refers to people who do not accept God’s love, who prefer to remain divided and who enjoy being on the top of a violent and unjust system.

            Isaiah’s vision of reconciliation extends even to the animal world.            I suspect that Isaiah mainly understands this to illustrate a new kind of community growing and spreading among people, a community where the strong and the cunning do not oppress, exploit, or kill the weak; a community without predatory carnivores, devouring others simply because they can; a community where the philosophy of the survival of the fittest is not in effect.

              Remember that the story of Israel really begins with the release of the people from slavery in Egypt.  God gives them the Law to make sure they will never adopt a system like Egypt, where the strong did oppress, exploit, and kill the weak, and where the few wealthy owned everything.  God gives them an alternative community where everyone is equal before God, and where killing, stealing, lying, and coveting are not allowed for anybody; a community with no king, no ruling class, where nobody is permitted to pile up wealth.

            That community based on the Law, the Torah, didn’t fully work.  People figured out how to use the letter of the Law to undermine and negate its Spirit.  In fact, it only served to calcify people’s alienation.  And in the end nothing changed.  People were still mired in sinfulness and subject to God’s wrath. 

            Prophets like Isaiah foretell God’s new community, which is finally inaugurated by the Messiah.  This new community is one that will bear good fruit in righteousness, equity, faithfulness, and peace.  It will not be based on a written code that people can reinterpret and twist to mean whatever they want.  Rather this new community will be established by the Spirit of God working in people’s hearts, making them abound in hope.

V.

            Jesus Christ is the welcome of God.  Jesus Christ is God come to us with not just the message of reconciliation, but its active, embodied truth.  By his incarnation, which we anticipate in this season of Advent, he breaks down the wall of separation between us and God.  In him God takes on our mortal existence, even to the point of sharing in our death.  Giving his life for us on the cross, absorbing and neutralizing human hatred and violence, he also gives his life, God’s life, to us in the resurrection.  He shows us that we do not have to be controlled or dominated by fear or anger or violence or greed or even death.  We do not have to prop up systems and hierarchies of injustice and exploitation.  We do not have to oppress others to elevate ourselves.

            In a world that has chosen and is so completely addicted to opposing God that all we know of God is God’s wrath, Jesus Christ opens up an alternative.  In him, God welcomes us into communion, even to the point where we become participants in the divine nature, as Peter tells us.  As God takes on our life in Christ, so in him we receive God’s life.

            Having been welcomed into God’s family and household and community, so now by his Spirit alive and active within us, we welcome each other.  And we extend the good news of God’s welcome to others as well in lives that bear fruit in repentance.  That is, we now glow and shine with actions and behaviors that show how our hearts and minds have been changed; we have been set free to experience and to share the love of God.

+++++++