⁶Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient.

¹⁰Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord

Ephesians 5: 6, 10 – The New Revised Standard Version

⁸He who does not love does not know God, because God is love

1 John 4:8 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

⁴Love suffers long; is kind; love is not envious; love does not vaunt itself; is not puffed up; does not behave in an unseemly manner; does not strive after its own things; is not roused to anger; does not keep an account of evil; does not rejoice at unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; is forbearing in all things; believes all things; hopes all thing; endures all things.

1 Corinthians 13:4 – The New Revised Standard Version

Not that long ago, I was asked what I thought was the biggest social change of my lifetime. My reply was that whereas, once upon a time, if someone made a mistake which caused grief to another person, they’d apologise, now it was just as likely that they would shout abuse at the person they’d wronged. On further reflection, and it’s part of the same social change, I feel that it’s become far more common to witness people displaying a complete loss of temper in a public place. One such recent example is the disgraced Labour MP Mike Amesbury (shown above) who made a ferocious physical attack on one of his constituents, who had said something that he took exception to. It’s becoming worryingly common to see people spitting with rage and threats at each other in public places.

If my experience is shared by others, why would this be, I wonder? It’s too easy for an old man like me to point to a lack of common courtesy and wonder whether parents are any longer teaching their children to say please, thank you, or sorry. Might the fact that Amesbury has escaped serving a prison sentence, be sending a message to the public that it’s perfectly reasonable to attack a stranger in the street in the middle of the night, whilst ‘under the influence’?

It’s hard not to reach the conclusion that the events during the period of Lockdowns contributed to this social change. During COVID, I was angrily shouted at in a Supermarket, by someone who felt that I might have strayed by ten centimetres into his two metres of ‘Social Distancing’ space (it couldn’t possibly have been more than that). If you analyse what might have fed that change of behaviour, again the conclusion might be that if you scare people into thinking of strangers not as fellow humans, but solely as subhuman vectors of disease, then maybe you shouldn’t be surprised if the effect lasts for more than the lockdown period itself and is still being witnessed 5 years later?

I’ve also had a couple of recent experiences that underline that one of the long-term effects of the COVID and Lockdown periods may be that things generally don’t work anymore, or at least don’t work as smoothly as they used to? In fact, the general area of ‘Customer Service’ has become so poor, that I’m relieved that I no longer have to run companies – I would find it painful to tolerate how badly most companies now treat their customers. This, of course, is no excuse for people to shout abuse at those who are ‘serving’ them, but surely it must contribute to the fact that the threshold for anger is now very much lower than it used to be? Is it just me who looks at people in the street and sees folks who are permanently on the edge of losing control?

Finally, we’ve recently had the videos of an ‘Antifa’ mob in Cornwall, their faces distorted by hatred, shouting: ‘Nazi Scum off our streets!’ at a Reform Party Rally. This seems to underline another social change – that we’re quite comfortable now using the most extreme language for fairly ordinary situations. This leaves us with a quandary. If the Reform Party is considered ‘Nazi,’ how do we adequately describe people who are genuinely extreme?

I’ve always been uncomfortable about suggestions that God can be wrathful. After all, if God can be ‘wrathful,’ it conjures up a picture of our Loving Father with his face contorted by hatred and that has always seemed to me to be a terrible, even heretical, distortion. But I do have to accept, albeit reluctantly, that there are some verses in the Bible that seem to suggest, in isolation, that God can be wrathful. The verse above from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is an example – “the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient.”  (Note: It’s only fair to say that there are very different translations in other Bible Versions) And there’s a hymn called ‘In Christ Alone’ that’s much loved by the evangelical tradition, that includes the line: ‘Till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.’  What do you think about that line? The excuse that’s given is that if God is a God of Justice, He must react to injustice in a very forceful way. I wonder if you’re persuaded by this?

This question is a challenge to us, isn’t it? Because we all feel that God can’t ignore sin without His nature changing into something other than a just God, and yet the alternative seems to be a deeply disturbing picture of God like the Antifa characters in Cornwall, spitting venom at those who are not obedient.

If I struggle to see God as wrathful, am I not guilty of flying in the face of teaching that’s been promulgated by the Christian Church over many centuries of history? Is God not unchanging? And doesn’t the Old Testament give us a clear picture of not only a wrathful God, but perhaps even a jealous and vengeful one, too?

If we’re going to try to answer these points, we need to look ourselves in the mirror. Which one of us could ever hold our hand up to being always, without exception, perfectly obedient to God?

All of us who believe are challenged, when grappling with the nature of God, by having to learn that we can’t put God into a box made with our own puny human hands. If we see Him as rather like a Victorian schoolmaster, keen to dole out the punishment that we know that we’ve most certainly deserved, or conversely if we see Him as a kindly, avuncular figure, always ready to hold out His grace, mercy and forgiveness, even when we commit the same sin for the umpteenth time in the same week, then sorry, we must be missing something. We’re trying to create a man-shaped God, a pathetically small reproduction of ourselves, with all our human faults. God surely deserves better than this!

Wrath, or anger, is part of our make-up as human beings. In fact, not only is it part of our human nature, but what is more, some psychiatrists might suggest that bottling up our anger and never showing it, risks creating a short-cut to depression and anxiety. We get angry when we don’t get our own way; we get angry when we’re let down. Perversely, we even get angry when we’ve made a mistake and wronged someone else. But if we think God is the same as we are, might we be guilty of seeing God as made in our image, rather than us made in His?

It would seem to me that we need to bring love into this picture. The First Letter of John has one of the most transformative, but also challenging short phrases in the Bible: ‘God is Love.’ If God is Love, is it obedience that he wants from us, or does He actually not only want, but crave, our love in return? And can true love ever exist as an act of obedience?

In St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that’s often read at weddings, he defines love, among other things, as never quick to take offence, as keeping no score of right and wrong and taking no pleasure in the sins of others. If we try to measure God by our own feeble standards, we can never reconcile such unlimited love with our own human desire for justice and retribution. A quick look at any English Dictionary immediately reveals how our notion of justice is interwoven with the concepts of retribution and punishment. But we should challenge ourselves over whether these views are human or divine.

In Noel Moules’ book ‘Fingerprints of Fire, Footprints of Peace’ he describes Christ’s Second Coming as a spiritual and practical process to make relationships right, not a legal mechanism to punish wrongdoers. He tells us that the process of judgment is disturbing because, when relationships are bitter, broken and hostile, reconciliation will be traumatic, deeply painful and full of anguish. Biblical depictions of ‘weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth’ and images of lakes of fire, are not descriptions of punishment, but of the distress and agony of accepting our responsibility for failure and harm, and the struggle towards authentic healing, where nothing will be left unresolved in bringing in the Kingdom of God, that new world where only God’s values reign.

This suggestion fundamentally challenges any supposition that our God is a wrathful, vengeful, God. Perhaps more importantly, it presents us with a picture of God’s enduring and unfathomable love for us, that’s the only one that’s compatible with his taking on human flesh and dying on a cross because of our sinfulness. A few verses after the passage describing God as wrathful, Paul says to his readers in Ephesus: ‘Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.’

Is that so hard? Do we really have to look far?

Graceful and loving Father, teach us to control our anger and suppress any feelings of hatred for those who have behaved in ways of which we don’t approve, for without that, we know that not one single one of us can ever stand in your presence. Amen