In those days, God delivered all these commandments:
“I, the LORD, am your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery.
You shall not have other gods besides me.
You shall not carve idols for yourselves
in the shape of anything in the sky above
or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;
you shall not bow down before them or worship them.
For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God,
inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness
on the children of those who hate me,
down to the third and fourth generation;
–excerpted from this Sunday’s first reading, Exodus 20:1-17
Ah, here we are, with that angry, tit(+)-for-tat, brutal God of the Old Testament! Why should we listen to this? Don’t we know better?
We should know better. Before continuing the “angry God” rant, let us consider a few things. First, we are modern enough to realize that a text written in a foreign language 2500-3000 years ago takes some parsing to be sure we understand what is going on. Languages, and the cultures they are spoken in, approach things quite differently from our language and our culture so many centuries later. We will not expect to find carefully phrased and pruned academic theology from a time when formal schools and Greek logic did not yet exist among the Israelites. What we will find are vividly recounted memories of human men and women struggling to make sense of difficult lives and complex events in all their wonder and horror. Their dramatic stories, carefully preserved and passed down to us, are unforgettable. (I cannot say the same for a lot of academic theology… .)
So, for instance, God is “jealous”—this Mighty One we struggle with—his passion is for us as my passion is for my wife and her passion is for me. He’s not some remote schoolmaster eager to be marking us down, he’s a lover who keeps an eye out for possible rivals. He’s involved at an emotional level. Abandoning our lover or our lover abandoning us will have consequences, and our own deep sense of justice cries out that abandonment should have consequences! Sadly, all of us have family members and friends whose human-level infidelities we have seen play out at great cost over two or more generations. How much more destructive, then, to fall for false gods and their false goods.
At this point we may think, “Okay, but how much better when Jesus comes along ten centuries later and teaches a different, forgiving God of love!”
Yet doesn’t that Jesus we like so much better claim to be that old God’s Son? What happened to “like father, like son?”
The response is, “Nothing.” Nothing at all happened to it. The Son is just like the Father. The next lines in Exodus read:
“but [I am] bestowing mercy down to the thousandth generation
on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments.
The Father who punishes serious evil for three or four generations bestows mercy for a thousand generations. With a mix of people involved, suffering for evil and the experiences of mercy will overlap. But there we have it: the Old Testament so-called angry God’s ratio of punishment to mercy is not less than 250-to-1. That is 250 doses of mercy for each dose of justice.
That is a deal to sign up for.
For further reflection:
Keep in mind that one of the most common ways God punishes sin is simply to let people experience the normal consequences of their sins. Also, that morality is not physics or math–consequences of sin do not always show up immediately. People and situations are complex and multi-level, so that God is working on more things than one at any one moment in time. These are some of the reasons Christ warns us repeatedly not to “judge” (he is speaking of definitive approval or condemnation, not of discernment).