Numbers 21:4-9
One of the powerful parts of the Ash Wednesday liturgy is the litany of penitence (BCP, p. 267). It is a concise, clear, but also comprehensive confession of the many ways that we sin “by our own fault in thought, word and deed.” Towards the end it includes this petition:
Restore us, good Lord, and let your anger depart from us.
Lord, let your anger depart from us. God’s anger. How often do you picture God as angry? Do you ever think God is angry with you?
It’s today’s reading from Numbers that prompts these reflections. In many ways the reading is bizarre and difficult to interpret or find any relevance for us today. But basically, the Hebrew people are whining in the wilderness (again!!). For one thing, they don’t like the food. So they complain against God. They criticize God for freeing them from slavery. The rage against God for bringing them out of Egypt.
The next thing that happens is God sends poisonous snakes. One commentator that I read (Prof. Cameron B. R. Howard, HERE), an OT scholar, points out that, technically, in this reading neither God nor the narrator explicitly states that God sends the snakes because the people sinned. God sends the snakes, but it does not say that God sent them because the people complained. It does seem to be implied, but it’s not actually stated. And the Hebrew Scriptures are inconsistent on whether or not railing or complaining against God is a sin or not.
But the main point to stress is that the people thought that God sent the snakes in anger, as a consequence for their transgression. The people thought that God sent the poisonous snakes because they had sinned.
The God they knew, the God they experienced, was powerful, even dangerous, and certainly expressed righteous anger.
There are quite a few references in the Hebrew Scriptures that describe God as “slow to anger.” Not devoid of anger, but it is meant to be reassuring that God is “slow to anger and abounding in mercy.”
Just a few chapters earlier in Numbers (14:18) it is written:
The Lord is slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love,
forgiving iniquity and transgression,
but by no means clearing the guilty…
I want to be very clear that I’m not saying that every time something bad happens to someone it is always a sign of God’s anger or punishment. As we all know, bad things happen to good, righteous people for absolutely no apparent reason. And God is not the cause.
But it is worth noting that when the early Hebrew people did screw up, they expected consequences. When they knew and acknowledged their own sin, they expected consequences. In today’s reading they are sure that their suffering, the snakes, are a consequence for their admitted sin. So they name their sin and ask Moses to help restore them in God’s favor. And, in God’s own way, God does.
Restore us Good Lord, and let your anger depart from us.
This active, powerful, occasionally angry God is quite different, I think, from the God we expect in our lives. Our God is more tame, generally passive, never angry and eternally understanding. Eternally understanding! Our most common prayer seems to be: O Lord, keep calm and be eternally understanding. Be understanding, O God, of all my faults, negligences, and indifference towards you…. I know that this is often my hope and expectation of God, and I hear a similar sentiment over and over again in the lives of others.
The first he calls a prayer of “pious intention”… pious intention about attending worship.
O Lord, so long as the weather is reasonably fine,
so long as I have no visitors,
so long as nobody asks me to do any work,
so long as I can sit in the back pew but one on the left,
so long as it isn’t a local preacher planned,
so long as they don’t choose hymns I don’t know,
so long as my Joe is asked to recite at the Anniversary,
so long as I can get home in time for the play,
I will honour Thee with my presence at Church whenever I feel like it.
It would be really funny if it didn’t hit quite so close to home. I hear these sorts of comments often—offered quite reasonably. I’ll admit to feeling frustrated. I imagine that God feels mostly sad. And maybe just a touch angry?
But, of course, it isn’t really about coming to church. It’s about God. And our expectations of who God is and what it is like to experience God. This prayer about worship speaks of an understanding of God who is passive and content to accept our excuses.
Another prayer from the book speaks even more directly about how we understand the nature of God, and what we expect the experience of God to be like. It’s a General Confession, modeled after the one in the Book of Common Prayer.
Benevolent and easy-going Father; we have occasionally been guilty of errors of judgement. We have lived under the deprivations of heredity and the disadvantages of environment. We have sometimes failed to act in accordance with common sense. We have done the best we could in the circumstances; And have been careful not to ignore the common standards of decency; And we are glad to think that we are fairly normal. Do thou, O Lord, deal lightly with our infrequent lapses. Be thy own sweet Self with those who admit they are not perfect; According to the unlimited tolerance which we have a right to expect from thee. And grant as an indulgent Parent that we may hereafter continue to live a harmless and happy life and keep our self-respect.
I do want to add, as an important aside, that a perception of God as always angry and judgmental towards people, never simply cherishing us as his own (a perception probably not too common in the Episcopal Church) is equally misguided.
Professor Howard, whom I quoted before, writes: “As twenty-first-century Christians it may take us out of our comfort zones to imagine God as a dangerous, [powerful] presence in our lives. Yet, if we claim that we’ve got God all figured out, then we have ignored the mystery and divine freedom with which God is characterized throughout much of Scripture. A domesticated, unmoving God does not pull a people out of slavery, through the wilderness, and into the Promised Land.”
The Hebrew Scriptures as a whole (written out of the wisdom and experience of the collective hindsight of God’s people) are a record of God’s relentless faithfulness to his people. God’s relentless faithfulness. But God’s presence and faithfulness was often expressed and experienced as powerful, dangerous and bearing righteous anger.
This is generally not the God of our theology, or our expectations…
Professor Howard concludes: "Perhaps it is the task of preaching to turn our attention to the God of the wilderness."
