In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you want to sow disagreement, ask Christians what they think of the hymn “In Christ Alone.” Episcopalians typically aren’t involved in this debate, as the hymn in question was written in 2001 and our Hymnal was published in 1982, so we don’t sing it very often, if at all. What makes it a controversial hymn is the line, “This gift of love and righteousness, scorned by the ones he came to save: Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” This Holy Week, each sermon is focusing on a different emotion as a way of participating in the drama of this week. Today, on Good Friday, we consider wrath.
It’s one of the stronger emotions, and one whose strength can make us uncomfortable. Wrath is sometimes defined as an excessive or extreme version of anger. Wrath is portrayed as an all-consuming sort of rage. But that’s not the definition of wrath that we need to have in mind on Good Friday. Instead, wrath is an emotional response to wrong or injustice. Yes, wrath is stronger than anger. We are angry at things that frustrate us – a tool that won’t work, for example. But wrath is the feeling that we have when children are made refugees because of warfare. There’s a clear and appropriate distinction between the two situations, and our response. Theologically speaking, we can define wrath as the passionate opposition to sin and its consequences.
On Good Friday, there are two versions of wrath – one human and one divine. The human side of wrath can start in a place of righteous anger and holy indignation, but it rarely stays there. Wrath is an incredibly powerful emotion, and we are not capable of bearing it very long before we are overcome by it. That’s what we see happening in the Passion narrative.
To be sure, Jesus is doing and saying things that are touching some nerves. He has insinuated that he is the Messiah, he’s used the divine name of “I AM,” which is an unspeakable name in Judaism, and he’s stirring up enough turmoil that people worry that Rome is going to come down hard on everyone in order to make sure there is no Jewish rebellion afoot.
And this is a reasonable fear – about a hundred years prior, a group of Judeans led a rebellion against Rome known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Rome’s response was near total genocide. Around the time of Jesus’ birth, there was another attack by Jewish freedom fighters on the Roman administrative center in the Galilee region – a city named Sepphoris. The city was burned to the ground and its inhabitants, if they survived, were sold into slavery. If the Romans thought that Jesus was stirring up similar, the people had a vested interest in avoiding another Roman response.
They had tried dealing with Jesus on their own and they had tried scaring him. Jesus’ response earlier was “Go and tell that fox, Herod, for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’” And so, after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, the religious leaders realize that they’re not going to be able to keep this quiet – Rome is going to get involved. So, they called a meeting and said, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” And then Caiaphas posits, “Do you not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed?” Given what seemed like heresy and putting the entire nation in jeopardy, godly wrath seemed like the appropriate response to Jesus.
While we can never know the answer to the question, “What would I have done in that situation?,” I’m not so sure I would have come to a different conclusion. The danger for us is we see how quickly fear and anxiety turn to wrath, how quickly we can accept murder as a viable solution to our problems. And then, we see, once the crowd gets involved, how the mob mentality takes over and a bloodthirsty and wrathful mood comes over them all. They start shouting, “Crucify!”, falsely believing that their lives depend on it.
Social scientists have studied the phenomena in which we willing comply with things that we know are wrong. The problem with wrath is that we are all incredibly biased. If wrath is an emotional response to wrong, when we’re not clear about what wrong really is, then we can get swept into doing some pretty evil things in the false name of justice. That sad reality is how Jesus ends up crucified by his own people. And this is an important and difficult thing for us to face today. The crowds who shouted “Crucify!”, the leaders who stirred up the accusations, the Roman soldiers who were “just following orders” and then adding their own gratuitous cruelty, are really no different than we are. These are not evil people – they are ordinary people, just as we are. But their fear and frustration turned to wrath and it consumed them.
Wrath can do the same thing to us. And, as we see on Good Friday, wrath is infectious. So, Good Friday is a cautionary tale to be careful when we become single-mindedly focused on what we think justice must look like or when we look to violence to deal with our problems. Wrath is something like the blast of a rocket – it can launch us in the right direction, but that’s no way to go through life. Not only will we crash and burn, but we’ll bring down those around us. As Psalm 37 puts it, “Refrain from anger, leave wrath alone; do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.” Look, I know there’s a lot to be frustrated and angry about right now. There is a lot of injustice and cruelty happening in our society, and it does need to be addressed. But let us not make the mistake of using wrath to pursue revenge or violence as a solution.
The other side of wrath is divine wrath. And this, I know, might seem even more problematic than human wrath. A lot of people have been scared and scarred by the notion of a vengeful and wrathful God. For many, the wrath of God is closer to terrorism than salvation. But this need not be the case because the wrath of God is the Good News of Good Friday.
All of those evils and injustices that I referred to earlier – how do we reconcile a supposedly loving God with the persistence of such wrongs? If we believe in a god that a Deist could believe in or could be at home on Mount Olympus, we are left with the disturbing proposition that injustice will remain forever.
But this is not the God of the Bible. God is indignant about poverty, frustrated by our selfishness, vexed by our violence, angry at our dishonesty. This is what we mean by the wrath of God. God’s wrath is never directed at us – but rather the Sin that we are complicit in. We don’t want a God who is apathetic about injustice. No, we want a God who is full of wrath when it comes to things like the rich stealing from the poor, or those who exploit their power and abuse others, or bullies who are intentionally cruel and dehumanizing to others.
The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf knows a lot about injustice and the horrors of human sin. His father was forced into a labor camp and tortured. Volf was then raised in war zones and saw, firsthand, the atrocities of war. In reflecting on the wrath of God, Volf writes, “A non-indignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence.” This is why seeing the wrath of God on Good Friday is so important. The Cross shows us, quite literally, that God gives a damn.
God’s wrath though is always in service of God’s love. Just as we would have very strong emotions if we watched someone wrong a loved one, so, too, is God passionate when injustice is done to any of God’s children. Just as the Cross is made up to two beams, there are two aspects to God’s love – both justice and mercy; wrath and grace; no and yes.
The Cross is when we see that God will not let Sin go unaccounted for. This is what has given hope to so many peoples who have been oppressed across space and time. It’s not about us longing for retribution or punishment, but it is an insistence that God, if God is going to be worthy of that title, will set right what has gone wrong. To take away God’s wrath at Sin is to take away the hope that so many have for their suffering being redeemed. On the Cross, God says “No” to Sin getting the last word.
And, at the same time, the Cross is when God shows mercy by not visiting the wrath upon us sinners. Thanks be to God that we do not receive the full consequences of our Sin. Instead, we see Grace in Jesus’ willingness to absorb it. The thing is – wrath had to go somewhere. If not Jesus, the crowd would have found another scapegoat, just as we still look for them. On the Cross, God says, “Fine, you need someone to blame – I’ll take it.” And in doing so, Jesus demonstrates the absurdity scapegoating. The consequences of Sin are real and have to be dealt with, and that is precisely what Jesus means when he says, “It is finished” - violence as a solution is finished.
I know sometimes people will say, “If God wanted to forgive us, God could just do it – a sacrifice wasn’t needed.” As nice as that might sound, it just doesn’t work. What the Cross demonstrates and makes possible is a future of forgiveness without violence. In the Cross, God absorbs all of our wrath so that we no longer turn to wrath to solve our anxieties and problems. By absorbing this wrath, God is both saying “No” to Sin and “Yes” to us. We are sinners, yes; but we are also God’s beloved, so, “No,” we will not be destroyed. God will not be God without us, because God is always God with us and God for us.
The wrath of God is about just this: God is not against us, but rather the Sin in and among us. And that is a very good thing, because left to our own devices, we have nothing but more and more violence to deal with our problems. God though shows us the most excellent way of love, a love that defies explanation and absorbs the burden of Sin that we cannot bear. We might not be able to wield the power of wrath in the name of justice, but God is able. And this is what Good Friday is all about – God doing for us what we are unable to do for ourselves: going head to head with Sin and coming out victorious through his perfect and obedient love in Jesus.
One theologian has used the metaphor of a compass to understand how both mercy and wrath work together. The magnetic needle of a compass works because the end that is labeled “N” has a strong affinity for north. That is like God’s desire for love and justice. Now, when that needle points towards north, the opposite end is equally repulsed away towards the opposite direction. That is God’s wrath. But it would be a mistake to think there are two forces at play – there’s only one magnetism. The same is true for God’s love. God is always with us and for us, but a part of that “for us-ness” is a fierce and passionate opposition to that which stands against us, and that repulsion is properly called “the wrath of God.” On Good Friday, we see that God is like a mama bear, snarling in the face of Sin, to protect us, her cubs.
So that God can be for us, God is against Sin. God will stop at nothing to eliminate everything and anything that stands in the way of the flourishing of divine love, up to and including absorbing the consequences of this Sin into the very body of Jesus. What the Cross shows us is that God very much is aware of injustice and evil and that God intends to set things right by taking the worst in us and using it for the means of grace and the hope of glory. On Good Friday, indeed, the wrath of God is satisfied. Thanks be to God.