Saved From Wrath
But Whose Wrath?
My friend Bob asked me to watch a Christmas Eve message from his pastor; one of my favorite preachers, Rev. Tara Thomas Smith. Tara is Co-Lead Pastor of Crossroads Nazarene Church in Chandler, AZ. Tara is also one of the best preachers I have ever heard live and I believe one of the best preachers in the Church of the Nazarene (COTN). The core of Tara’s message is a visual comparison between two visions of God and the meaning of Jesus’ ministry. Here’s the video of the message and I ask you to please go watch it before continuing so you have the full context.
“This is good news!” Amen to that second picture. But how often do we hear the first distorted view presented as good news? The first picture is not the Gospel, even though it may be the most popular view in Western Christianity. It is especially popular among American evangelicals. The view of a God whose honor resembles human ego such that it must be upheld by violence is a very pagan idea. This is the Gospel according to empire, expressed by Augustine who has influenced so much of Western Christianity, and honed by modern Reformed Calvinists in the idea of penal substitutionary atonement. I suspect the first picture is what another prominent Nazarene pastor meant when he claimed Reformed preachers give a better picture of the Gospel than most Wesleyans. The idea that God despises us outside of saying a special prayer or thinking the right things is a distortion. This is s distortion that allows us to hate those who do not think as we do, worship as we do, or live as we do. This distortion allows us to see God as a destroyer of those not like us. But that is not God.
When the great schism of the Eastern and Western church finally happened in the eleventh century, it was a culmination of centuries of struggle between the two images of Christianity. While the Western Church was influenced by consolidated power and Roman ideas, the East resisted changes that led to particular understandings of sin, salvation, humanity, God, and the very nature of God. That’s not to say that the two were entirely different, but there are stark differences. The West leaned into legal understandings of sin while the East continued in a framework of illness and harm. In the West, God’s honor and our shame began to take shape through Augustine and later Reformers who took Augustine’s ideas to inevitable conclusions. In the East, the harm done by sin and the need for therapeutic means to cleanse us from sin continued. The very different ideas of hell between East and West are reflections of this difference in focus.
Once the West and East fully went into schism, the Western ideas took root and Europeans used the ideas of our shame and God’s honor to control. Hell became a centerpiece of salvation and God’s wrath became the vehicle to condemn us all to hell without the right formula of response. In this understanding, the God who cannot look up sin became our God. This is where that first distorted picture of God comes from and it is very far from the picture of God revealed in Jesus. The idea that God cannot look upon sin or that God even turned God’s face away from Jesus on the cross comes from missing the point of Jesus quoting Psalm 22 from the cross. The Psalm may begin “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But it also has this: “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me but heard when I cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him., For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations” (Psalm 22, NRSVue)
Psalm 22 is good news. While it may feel like God has turned away, God never turns away. This brings us to the beautiful picture within the second illustration. God is the God who comes to us. God is not across a chasm we need a bridge to cross. No, God is here! “There is nowhere God is not.” Even if we “make our bed in hell, [God] will be there.” This is good news! Wesleyans inherit an Eastern influenced theology. Our theologies of sin, humanity, grace, salvation, sanctification, and others are closer to the Eastern Church than our Baptist or Presbyterian sisters and brothers. Our understanding of grace, especially prevenient grace, is why it is so hard to swallow that first picture of God when people try to shove it don our throats because an online influencer calls our understanding of race “another religion.” The grace that goes before is the evidence of God working in the world. There is nowhere that God is not. I get a chuckle out of the critics of ideas like Amipotence* when they reject the idea of omnipresence. I think a misunderstanding of grace leads to distorted ideas of hell and of God’s nature.
Pastor Tara reminds us the order of grace and that order does not match the typical evangelical ideology of grace or forgiveness requiring our action rather than our response. Jesus continually led with “I do not condemn you” or “your sins are forgiven.” Then he would speak of what comes next in our response to grace and our response to forgiveness. Ours is a responsible grace as Randy Maddox says. Salvation comes when we finally recognize that God loves us so much that we have been forgiven and we are given grace. We are the woman at the well, Zacchaeus, the woman caught in adultery, the Pharisees, the Romans, the thieves on the cross, the man at the pool, the woman who annoints Jesus. Jesus comes to each and every one of us. There is nowhere God is not.
God is the God of prodigals and always has been. The Gospel confronts the systems of shame and fear by saying that God is with us, God loves us, and there is nothing we can do to make God not love us. God is not a God of wrath. No the deep and abiding truth is that the wrath we are saved from is the wrath of sin, not of God. As Pastor Tara puts it; through “our wrath we crucify him while God looks on.” It is our wrath, our violence, our hatred that hang Jesus on a dead tree while God looks on. It is our wrath that we need to be saved from. It is the love of God that saves us into a restored relationship in which we respond to the love poured out in blood to become heirs of that loving character of God.
Isn’t this good news? True, it takes a lot of courage to believe that God loves us no matter what. It takes a lot of faith to believe that, but we are a people invited into faith. A people who should be shaped by faithfully proclaiming the good news rather than reciting the bad news. Let’s be a people of good news.
---
*Amipotence combines Latin roots “ami” (love) and “potens” (power), prioritizing divine love over traditional omnipotence. It posits that God cannot unilaterally control creatures or events, acting instead as a persuasive, necessary influence in synergy with creation.