Judgment

God is love, but that does not mean that God is never angry. In the Old and New Testaments, the things that anger God most are faithlessness and abuses of power—oppression of the widow and the orphaned, violence toward the traveler, stealing from the poor. In the gospels Jesus is often angry and in one famous confrontation he throws the moneychangers and merchants out of the Temple.

In spite of God’s righteous anger, however, injustice is alive and well. It often seems that there is no direct connection between sinful actions and punishment. As the psalmist complains, people who do evil thrive and flourish while the righteous suffer. Or as Jesus says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

I have some thoughts on this appearance of injustice. First, God is slow to anger. God gives us time to realize what we’ve done and repent. Second, God knows our shortcomings, our difficulties, our struggles, our doubts, our needs, and our desires. God knows all our mitigating circumstances and can judge us better than we humans can judge one another. What may seem unjust from my point of view might seem perfectly fair to someone else. In general, though, thinking that God will punish our sins in tangible, obvious ways is not very useful, perhaps because the power that God wields is very different from the power that humans wield. The resurrection did not include violent retribution meted out on those who conspired to kill Jesus. Rather, the transformation God brings through Jesus is one of conquering death, and the incarnation of Jesus was an act of reconciliation – that Jesus came to us even when we were behaving like God’s enemies. I don’t believe that God strikes people down with lightning, or causes spiritual wanderers to catch fire when they walk into a church. I trust that God’s plan will be worked out, and I accept that if I am going to be given God’s mercy, then I can only hope for that same mercy for everyone else.