orge with contempt, teaching that it must be completely eradicated from human personality.
Many followers of Jesus have been taught this kind of
contempt for passionate anger, and have been made to feel guilty for harboring feelings of hostility and anger. VOrgh,,
orge is one of those "works of the flesh" which can never be justified, and which must be "put to death" or be "gotten rid of" (compare
Ephesians 4:31 and
Colossians 3:8).
For those accustomed to this kind of teaching, it comes as somewhat of a surprise to find Jesus Himself being described in Mark as looking at people with ovrgh,, orge, “anger” (Mark 3:5). Was Jesus wrong in this attitude? Is anger always wrong? Or, are there times when the people of God should get angry--for example, at religious hypocrisy, or injustice? Can we in truth believe that the God of eternal love can also be the God of anger and wrath?
The view of God as a "God of Wrath" is a commonplace in the history of religions. "Wrathful deities are so vividly present to the consciousness of all peoples that attempts have even been made to explain every religion as an effort to anticipate or soften the anger of the gods...The pre-Greek
gods of earth and of cursing, like the Furies, show by their very name (‘the wrathful ones’) that wrath is their nature...
“Unswerving, pitiless and terrible as nature itself, they appear always where the unbreakable ties of nature--especially of blood and family, later of law too--are violated and call for retribution. From the time of Homer divine wrath is in Greek mythology and poetry 'a powerful force in the interplay of the powers which determine destiny.'" (Hermann
Kleinknecht, quoting W. Schadewaldt, in the article on ovrgh,, orge in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, V, p. 385; this article includes a number of other authors, including Grether, Procksch, Fichtner, Sjoeberg and Staehlin).
The Greek philosophers criticized this view of God, holding that God must be free of such human passions as anger. But among the common people it was strongly believed that such things as natural disasters were evidences of the punishing anger or wrath of the gods, and this led to many superstitious religious practices designed to appease the wrath of the gods.
In the
Jewish Bible, it is constantly asserted that "wrath" and "divine anger" belong to YHWH, the divine Judge of Israel and of all the earth. The source of "wrath," of suffer-ing and destruction in human history simply could not be attributed
to some unknown divine power, or to "fate," as could be done by those who believed in many gods. For Israel devoutly believed in only one God, and "Therefore, the source of wrath was not an unknown deity or a merely sensed power of fate, but one 'unequivocally distinct divine person'...Nowhere do they encounter an obscure or indeterminate power, but the personal
will of Yahweh with which it is necessary to come to terms." (Johannes Fichtner, Theolog-ical Dictionary of the New Testament, V, p. 397)
Fichtner,
in this article, points out how YHWH's wrath or anger is directed first of all against His Own people, Israel; and it is one of the central purposes of the great prophets of Israel to emphatically deny "The false assurance of the people which is grounded in the sense of election and which feels secure against wrath and judgment...Among them Jere-miah and Ezekiel can be numbered as prophets of God's wrath against His people. The prophets during and after the exile see in the exile an outworking of the wrath of Yahweh..." (P. 398)
Even though there is always something inexplicable and mysterious in the wrath and anger of YHWH, its central theme is to be found in the rejected love and mercy of the div-ine Lover of His people. This view "...Is found in all its breadth and depth in the prophets.
These never weary of emphasizing what Yahweh has done for Israel with His election and guidance, and this is the background against which they bring their message of the wrath of Yahweh...
“At the back of every individual prophetic charge, whether it refers to the cultus or to social injustice, to a policy which trusts in armaments and alliances, or even
to the worship of other gods, there stands finally the one great complaint, namely, that the people has forgotten its God, turned from Him, and despised His love. This is the deepest root of the concept of wrath, and in this light one can understand the overwhelming force of the message. It is Yahweh's wounded love which awakens His wrath." (P. 403)
In the light of this, it is not surprising that
Mark, in its picture of Jesus as the embodi-ment of God's
love and mercy, should picture Jesus also as the embodiment of God's wrath and anger! Fichtner observes that "Objections are continually raised against the thesis that the [wrath of God] is an integral part of biblical proclamation. They are chiefly based on belief in God's love. If God is truly love, He cannot be angry...
“But even prior to the
New Testament it was realized that wrath and love are mutu-ally inclusive, not exclusive, in God. In the
New Testament as in the
Old Testament, in Jesus as in the prophets, in the apostles as in the rabbis, the preaching of God's mercy is accompanied by the proclamation of His wrath. Only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy." (P. 425) What do you think? Do you agree with Fichtner?