Approaching An Angry God

Joan Chittister, the radical, contemplative spiritual teacher, says that in reading Scripture you should look for one notion that might present itself to you, asking yourself why that phrase seems relevant or bothersome to your life. I read Psalm 90 this morning, a psalm that quickly moves through a wide range of emotions and images. I came away with one word sticking in my craw: anger, the anger of God. As I pondered this psalm during the day, I remembered how quickly the notion of God's anger was followed by a request for mercy and joy, and by the psalmist's happy meditation on the fulness and strength of God's favor. This sudden switch from fear to pleasant forecasts reminded me of childlike moods, appropriate to the childlike trust expressed in the last stanza of the psalm. This notion helped me sort out the presence of God's anger in this psalm: I thought of a child crying in her awareness of something she's done wrong. Because of the awesome power her patents seem to hold, she can't imagine anything stronger than the vision of them angry--not even to temper it with the idea that they love her and can be expected to forgive her.

A distraught kid might run for a hug to the parent who just reprimanded her, because only a love equal to the felt displeasure can put her sadness right. In the same way, the psalmist, after confronting God's anger, quickly offers an equal-measure vision of God's compassion: "Make us glad as many days as you have humbled us, for an many years as we have seen trouble."

Looking back at the psalm now, I find much in it to resonate with my image of the guilty child. We begin with an account of the extent of God's power, making clear our relative weakness and need. Then the psalmist says, "We are consumed by your anger," and why? Only because God knows how we have deviated from the divine plan: "You have set our faults before you." The God we see here is so powerful and so good that we are sure the mere knowledge of our wrongdoing will result in terrible anger.

Next, the condition at which the psalmist marveled earlier--the incontrovertibly fleeting nature of human lives--is presented again in a fearful light, as if mortality was God's angry punishment for us. The qualities which seem normal or admirable to us in someone favorable quickly become twisted into oppressions by fear or anger--this might be a bit too subtle for the toddler of my earlier metaphor, but it happens in teenagers struggling for control. However, the psalmist recollects that the source of our guilt in wrongdoing is also the source of healing and rectification: "Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart." God, when we see your world order as something bad, it's because we know we've fallen short of your desires for us, and your power can make us fearful. Teach us to see the world with your eyes, to find peace, not punishment, in your plan.