I had a friend while in graduate school (he was preparing to become a priest, I a historian) who was a member of a group of folks who regularly studied scripture in a group.
One day he came to the office where we worked and proclaimed that his group was studying Jeremiah. “He has the angriest God in the book,” Rob proclaimed.
I thought of this recently while traveling down the street and noticing a minivan ahead of me that had “Jeremiah 29:11” painted in big letters on his back window. I was intrigued and when I got home, decided to look up the passage and here is what i found: “For I know the plans I have for you,”‘declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (NIV)
Well, that didn’t sound as angry as I expected it to be. There are quite a number of conservative evangelical Christians in our town, and I expected to find a passage condemning me to Hell for being unfaithful to God.
And there are plenty of those; my friend Rob from grad school was right about that. Consider this, for example:
“Tell this to the nations, proclaim it to Jerusalem: A besieging army is coming from a distant land, raising a war cry against the cities of Judah. They surround her like men guarding a field, because she has rebelled against me, declares the Lord. ‘Your own actions have brought this upon you. This is your punishment. How bitter it is! How it pierces to the heart.'” (Jer. 4: 16-18)
Yet, despite words like these, Jeremiah is often reassuring as well as angry, telling God’s people that he still loves them and will “restore” them to his favor.
So my minivan passage wasn’t really all that out of character for Jeremiah’s God. I was reminded of this when, on the same day on which I saw the painted back window, I read in a book this quotation: “Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hands of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.” (Jer. 22:3)
So there we have it. Even in the Old Testament and in the “angry” book of Jeremiah, the God of the Hebrews could be both angry and loving, righteous and forgiving–given certain conditions. Don’t oppress people, especially if they are poor and have already been oppressed by their state in life. Don’t kill innocent people. These seem reasonable enough, especially when the Old Testament gets such a bad reputation from so many Christians.
Yet we still do oppress people, don’t we? And we still kill the innocent–and I am not referring here just to abortions but the entire range of killing that we routinely engage in but to the whole range of innocents we kill, in war, by police, through domestic violence, by warehousing immigrants and denying some poor people medical care.
God contains both anger and love–without an either-or dualism. We can’t seem to manage that, can we? Maybe someday?