"Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God"

A GOP official from Texas who regularly espoused anti-vaccine and anti-mask views online has died from COVID-19, five days after posting a meme on Facebook questioning the wisdom of getting inoculated against COVID. https://t.co/1HVlgIa7HC

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) August 5, 2021

So I'm watching re-runs of "The X-Files" (this is not an "X-Files" episode IRL, which means it's probably redundant to label what I watched as a "re-run," but anyway....), and at the end Mulder and Scully are talking about God again (the episode focussed on a Muslim terrorist blowing up an art gallery somewhere in "southwest Texas," which could only be Marfa, but it sure didn't look like Marfa; or like anyplace in southwest Texas for that matter.  Again:  anyway....)  Whatever happened to the "permanent threat" of Islamic terrorism, anyway?  The episode was from 2016, only 5 years ago.  Has it been that long?

Anyway....

Mulder ponders why human being worship the "angry God" of Christianity, or of the OT anyway, and I didn't even react mentally because that cliche is so old and tired it's just....pitiful.  Best I can tell that "angry God" is largely a lingering echo of the sermon of Jonathan Edwards (not that many a televangelist doesn't invoke it from time to time, mostly to set his/her followers off from those with whom God is angry.  Funny how seldom they notice God was "angry" with Israel, with whom there is, according to scripture, still a covenant.  Anyway....)  The idea looms large in the popular imagination, and it is, in Othello's wonderful metaphor, as false as water.

I'm not here to beat that dead horse again, but in a sidebar I'd note that history records Edwards was anything but a fiery and passionate orator,  moving people to excitement and fear by his oration; it was only his words that did it.  Reports are he read his sermons in an a a near drone, with little or no inflection.  And yet this famous sermon set people alight with its words alone, without any theatrics on his part.  I know a similar story, of productions of Marlowe's "Faustus", which ends with a purely verbal description of Faust being taken down to hell by Mephistopheles (what FX did the Elizabethan stage have, besides maybe a trap door or a cannon offstage?).  Reports are audiences "saw" Satan and demons coming out of the stage, and the pit of Hell open and swallow Faustus, and it was all...words.

Another "X-Files" episode, one of my favorites, turns and turns and turns on that issue.  It's all told in flashbacks and reports of interviews with all the characters involved in the story, and no two characters tell the same story about the same event, and in the final speech one character, talking to Scully, notes how much you can get people to recall, believe, even do, with hypnosis, which is only:  words.  Words have weight, as Mulder says in the episode I saw last night.  Indeed, they do.

Anyway....

So is God the cosmic thunderer who demands obedience and punishes disobedience?  Yeah, no.  But if I can call in a lifeline at this point and spare you the prophetic books exegesis (Jeremiah, deutero-Isaiah in particular (of the three Isaiahs), Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea; you don't want all that right now; it would take me hours just to assemble), I'll reach for a passage from The Thought Criminal:

The arguments for booster shots in the United States and other affluent countries where many people, such as myself, have had a full first-round vaccination provide an opportunity for those to arise in us - thanks in no small part to the Republican-fascist campaign to spread the virus among the unvaccinated and unmasked - make as much sense.  Nothing short of a world-wide campaign to develop and distribute the vaccine is going to work to slow or halt the spread of new variants and I don't foresee that happening - maybe this is God telling us it's time to practice universal justice or we'll die together due to our injustice.  The role that "justice" has played in this in the United States is the opposite of irony, it's an indictment of our concept of justice and its absence in practice. 

Timely and relevant to the topic at hand and exegetical!  The trifecta!  Three cherries!

Anyway... 

The point of God's "anger" in the Hebrew scriptures is not punishment, not even vengeance, but justice.  It may seem like this kind of justice.  You know that line from Amos, about justice rolling down like waters, the one on Dr. King's memorial, the line aside from "I have a dream" we like to associate with Dr. King because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy.  Yeah, this is the context for that verse:

Amos 5:18-24

5:18 Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD! Why do you want the day of the LORD? It is darkness, not light;

5:19 as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.

5:20 Is not the day of the LORD darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

5:21 I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

5:22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.

5:23 Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

5:24 But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

When that justice rolls down, it's going to wash away a great deal; when that righteousness flows like a life-giving stream (the context here is a desert culture, remember), it's going to give life to those denied it now by...well, by you and yours.  And who is likely to get washed away by the waters of justice?  Well, most likely:  you and yours.

I guess it does make God sound angry, after all.

But then explain Ron DeSantis to me; or Ted Cruz; or Sen. Kennedy.  Because I flat out don't get it.  Do they imagine they are protected, immune, safe from the Red Death?  Do they think the masque will save them, that they can party while all about them people die?  Do they not understand they represent the people who are dying, as well as the people they leave behind, the people trying to stop the dying, the people soon to be infected?

There's yet another X-Files episode; I've written about it before, too.  At the end, Scully the lapsed Catholic is talking to her family priest.  They are discussing whether God is still speaking, as the UCC slogan puts it.  Her final realization is that God is, perhaps, still speaking; but no one is listening.

...maybe this is God telling us it's time to practice universal justice or we'll die together due to our injustice. 

I would tweak that ever so slightly:  God is not telling us anything today God hasn't told us before:  that it's universal justice, or it's universal injustice.  These are the conditions that prevail.  Same as it ever was.

We aren't in the hands of an angry God; we're in our own hands.  No wonder we wish some cosmic power would bail us out.  Too bad it doesn't work that way.