If God is so anguished over our suffering, why does God allow it? Shouldn’t God be protecting us?
by Nanette Sawyer
Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
For Sunday, September 12, 2010: Year C – Ordinary 24
“Ah, Lord God, how utterly you have deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, ‘It shall be well with you,’ even while the sword is at the throat!” The prophet Jeremiah lobs this accusation at God in the verse right before this week’s lection begins.
Is God a Deceiver?
Sometimes it feels like God betrays us. God claims to love us, yet why do we end up feeling abandoned? How could a loving God let us suffer as we do? Or allow evil to continue in the world?
This story in Jeremiah recounts the destruction of the earth so complete that it resembles the un-creation of the world. While God created the heavens and the earth out of a formless void and brought forth light with a word in the beginning of Genesis, here in Jeremiah God turns the earth into a “waste and void” and removes light from the heavens. God’s “fierce anger” has mythic proportions, as God undoes the creation, removing people from the land and birds from the sky. Plants are gone and cities are destroyed, leaving only desert, a wasteland.
I don’t know about you, but I get uncomfortable when mere humans are angry with me. Divine anger is overwhelming. There is some relief in Jeremiah 4:27, but it seems plopped into the middle of the story out of nowhere. Scholars believe it was inserted in later copies of the story, and I find that likely. Apparently there were others who were a bit uncomfortable by the degree of destruction in this story.
Is God Angry or Anguished?
I recommend reading the portions of this story that the lectionary leaves out. Check out Jeremiah 4:19, which falls in the middle of a monologue by God:
“My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent; for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.”
Apparently, all this destruction has come about because of the bad behavior of the people, whose doom is “bitter” and has reached their “very hearts." Some of this is confusing though. Who is saying what? When is the prophet speaking? Which are the words of God, which the words of the people, and which the words of Jeremiah? It makes sense to me that God would feel anguish upon seeing that the people are “skilled in doing evil,” are foolish, and don’t know God. The relationship with The Holy is ruptured and people are destroying themselves and others.
Is There a Consequence for Evil?
Keep reading into the next chapter of Jeremiah and even more is revealed. Prophets have been telling the people that there is no consequence for evil. They said that God “will do nothing. No evil will come upon us, and we shall not see sword or famine” (5:12). The people believe that they can do evil without suffering evil. This is reiterated in Psalm 14 (also from this week’s lectionary), which begins, “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.”
There seems to be an underlying concept here, and in many biblical texts about God’s “wrath,” that the fear of God is the very thing that keeps people doing the right thing. Wrath and justice, wrath and righteousness, seem to go hand in hand. Bringing this right down to the merely human level, I have to ask myself, would I be quite so diligent in not parking in fire lanes if doing so did not risk receiving a $100 ticket?
Receiving a $100 ticket and the un-creation of the world are laughably uncomparable, of course. This just brings up the question of scale. You can run the analogy with parking tickets or war crimes, but we are still faced with the question, possibly…
The Hardest Question
Do we need the threat of punishment to keep us from doing evil?
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Nanette Sawyer is the founding pastor of Wicker Park Grace (www.wickerparkgrace.net), an emerging faith community that gathers in an art gallery on the west side of Chicago. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has blogged at The Christian Century’s lectionary blog and has been a featured speaker at various events, including Christianity 21 (http://www.jopaproductions.com/christianity-21-faith-21st-century) and The Big Event of RevGalBlogPals (http://revgalblogpals.blogspot.com/2009/10/nanette-sawyer-and-cruise-big-event.html). She has also taught as adjunct faculty at McCormick Theological Seminary, a Reformed, ecumenical, urban, and cross-cultural seminary on the south side of Chicago. She blogs at http://nanettesawyer.wordpress.com/, is a contributor to An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, and the author of Hospitality: The Sacred Art (http://tinyurl.com/hospitality-sacred-art).
