Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I may have written about this in another letter to you, but in light of our Office Reading from Romans today, I feel like I should mention it: I’ve some difficulties with the idea of the wrath of God as it’s generally/popularly understood. Friend, I don’t believe for an instant that God is death god, and I will reject any notion that God either desires or chooses to inflict violence on people as I believe very strongly that the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ shows (definitively, to my understanding) that God would rather endure our violence than inflict violence on us.

And yet…I think we’d be missing something important if we confused the wrath of God with the abhorrent notion that God wants to hurt us or some of us. I think one way of understanding God’s wrath is by affirming that God does not abide evil, that wickedness and death-dealing have no part in God’s life. Consequently, the degree to which we abide evil and wickedness and death-dealing is the degree to which our rejection of the life of God has removed us from participation in God’s good life…and that alienation from the life of God will not bear pleasant fruit—in fact, the fruit it will bear in our lives and in the social structures we build and the communities to which we contribute is violence, and oppression, and injustice, greed, hatred, pride, envy and death and death and death. A habitual alienation may in fact lead us to experience any proximity to the life of God as painful. Why? Because it makes us aware that God is always calling us out of the un-life of sin and death we find so comfortable, God is always desiring that we turn from our wickedness and live. That call and that desire may reveal the real depths of our spiritual woundedness…but our sin-sick souls may turn away, rejecting the uncomfortable healing attention of the Wounded Surgeon of Souls for the dull familiar ache of our vices, which only serves to worsen and worry our wounds until we can manage, to paraphrase Eliot, to consent to be redeemed from fire (death) by fire (Love). I think that’s one way of understanding the wrath of God.

And I think that understanding is what’s at work in our reading from Romans. I think we misunderstand Paul if we believe him to be teaching that some people are made for wrath or destruction when he speaks of objects of destruction created separately from objects of mercy. The whole movement of Romans is towards an understanding that God’s love is a reconciling love, that people we might have thought excluded from that love are actually invited, that there are no outsiders. And I think Paul’s use of the wrath of God in this passage is a rhetorically brilliant one: he establishes that God is completely sovereign and can do whatever God wants to do, including, should God choose, ordaining whomever God likes to mercy or destruction. But Paul goes on to turn the tables and upend our expectations by suggesting that God manifested God’s sovereignty so beautifully and wonderfully and amazingly by extending mercy even to outsiders—for no good reason other than it was God’s good will to do so—naming as chosen what seemed to be rejected, revealing the marvelous loving-kindness of God to be even more marvelous than we could have possibly imagined! If all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (as Paul affirms earlier in Romans), then the question of who is meant for mercy and who for destruction is a bit of a moot one: we’re all in the same boat, we’ve all chosen sin and death. But God, in God’s sovereign mercy has chosen life for us…and not just any life, but God’s own life. The question now is: whose choice will we let inform and determine our lives—ours for wrath and death or God’s for mercy and life?

Beloved Friend, it’s still a live question. And I pray that, every moment of our lives, we may let God’s choice for us live in us and be our choice for God!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+