In the final days before Advent, when the liturgical year focuses on the apocalyptic visions of the Last Days, one of the daily readings from the Book of Revelation recently contained the following frightening scene where the earth is purged and harvested at the end of time:
“Then another angel came from the altar, who was in charge of the fire, and cried out in a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, ‘Use your sharp sickle and cut the clusters from the earth’s vines, for its grapes are ripe.’ So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth’s vintage. He then threw it into the great wine press of God’s fury.”
What we read here as “fury” is often elsewhere translated as “wrath.” In fact, it was from this passage, via the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” where they are trampled, that novelist John Steinbeck drew the title of his classic text “The Grapes of Wrath.”
This quality, the wrath of God, like all theological language is essentially analogy. God is not moody, he does not change his mind, he is not subject to his passions — in the sense of anger tainted by sin. Wrath, as we know it, which leads us to overreact with rage and impatience, cannot in any real way be predicated of a God who is defined by St. John simply as love.
And yet, God’s “love” is also only analogous to our experience of that word. God’s love is not mere kindness and tolerance of anything that happens to come to pass. That would be like a father who says, “Of course I encourage my child to take all the heroin he or she likes, for it makes them feel good. At least in the beginning….” No sane person would call this enabling attitude one of authentic love.
The language of God’s wrath is merely one way of calling attention to the fact that our sinfulness and God’s perfection are utterly irreconcilable. That is not to say that there is some person among us who cannot be reconciled to God, for the church teaches that every person can be redeemed and that no sin is unforgivable if one is repentant. While it has named saints, the Catholic Church has never publicly pronounced someone as eternally lost. Even Judas is left as an open question. But God and sin cannot be reconciled.
Charles Pope compares God’s holiness and our imperfection to fire and water. You cannot put them together and get a mixture of the two; no “wet flames” or “flickering water” result when they come into contact with one another. Depending on size and intensity, one will extinguish or conquer the other. Either the overturned ice cooler puts out the smoldering BBQ cinders, or the frying pan makes the beads of water sizzle and evaporate.
So too, divine goodness and human evil cannot coexist, one must conquer the other. And while we are given the very real possibility of sinfully exercising our will (even definitively — the sinners in hell, if there are any, are in a sense successful rebels against love and forgiveness to the end), there is little doubt as to who are the droplets and Who the divine heat here.
While God’s version of the term is a dimension of his overabundant love capable of destroying imperfection, our wrathful hearts, however, are an all-too-familiar and loveless reality. Quarrelsomeness, anger, hatred, frenzy, viciousness. These terms haunt our dealings with God, with others, and sometimes with ourselves. So often we forget that the Beatitudes (Blessed are the meek, Blessed are the peacemakers) most literally are recipes for how to live a life of reward, fulfillment, and satisfaction not only in heaven, but now. The root word “beatus” most literally means “happiness.”
Those that have peace, and not wrath, within their hearts will certainly be rewarded after death for these qualities. But, even more immediately, their daily lives here and now are often a much more joyous experience in the meantime.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”