I punched a window once. The nine or ten-year-old me ran up the stairs of the parsonage where we lived and smashed his fist through the second-story window. The glass shattered and cut my hand. The precipitating event has long since disappeared from my memory, but the underlying anger—the anger beneath the outburst—still pulses today, a tremor of distant struggle. I’d rather avoid it, but ignoring anger helped concoct the ingredients for a decade of teenage and young adult depression. Depression is, among other things, stuck anger, so I’d best tell the truth about it. It’s that feeling of utter frustration when the world turns out, in spite of my best efforts, not to be way I want it to be.
A bullied kid growing up, I nursed rage at my youthful tormentors, but my Christian faith and Sunday school teachers taught me to “be nice.” I was well aware that Jesus told disciples to “love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44), but I experienced that as the pressure of an individualist ethic rather than a communal commitment to nonviolence, so I had no resources to live such a seemingly impossible vision. I stuffed my anger inside, turned it on myself, prayed for my persecutors, felt self-loathing about it, and suffered. Come to think of it, I treated the Bible’s angry parts similarly to how I treated anger in my own life—I ignored it.
To lead with my conclusion, the thoroughgoing arc of nonviolent, restorative love in the Bible leads me to affirm with Julian of Norwich that “there is no wrath in God.” I believe the anger in the Bible ultimately comes from our side of things, the judgment that we bring on ourselves for our actions, and that to affirm a God of love means to affirm that God is not angry with us. Too many of us are still reeling from the psychological baggage of a worldview that sees God’s wrath smoldering towards what we were told were our depraved, sinful selves. Clearly, to live a life of freedom and love—a life transformed by the gospel of Jesus—means to leave such toxic beliefs behind.
I’m also convinced, however, that we’ve misunderstood the language of God’s anger in the Bible. I would even say that we’ve “repressed” it. Perhaps failing to come to terms with the Bible’s use of anger also leads to a parallel version of spiritual stuckness and depression? As Carl Jung notes, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” (Quoted in Edinger, Archetype of the Apocalypse). Making the darkness conscious means coming to terms with the repressed, disintegrated parts of myself. (For those who wish to move beyond the light and darkness duality, read here for my article on the positive generativity of darkness). I view this slow, exploratory journey through the Book of Revelation as doing just that—facing the most difficult text of the Bible so I can face myself and the world in which we live. The extent to which I wrestle with the unwieldy, brutal, terrifying, complex texts of Scripture and still encounter God there might be the extent to which I encounter God in my own life.
There’s plenty of anger in the Bible to go around. Most of it hovers either at the corners of our awareness, or in passages we never learned at all: a man named Uzzah places his hand on God’s ark of the covenant to steady it, God’s anger is kindled against him, and Uzzah dies on the spot (1 Chronicles 13:9–10). The Israelites worship other gods in the book of Judges, and God punishes them mercilessly for it: “he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them” (2:11–12). For the prophet Isaiah, “God’s anger has not turned away” because everyone was godless and an evildoer (9:17). And, of course, in the anger-filled book of Revelation, God seemingly explodes with fury on every page.
Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb. —Revelation 6:16
In Revelation 6:12–17, John of Patmos is still caught up in his vision of reality’s unveiling. He sees and describes the sixth of seven seals opened (see here for the first four, here for the fifth). What follows in this passage is a day of cosmic embattlement: a great earthquake, a sun black as sackcloth, a full moon like blood, stars of the sky falling to earth, mountains and islands removed from their place, and the powerful fleeing to hide. What are we to make of this, and what are we to make specifically of the paradoxical, head-scratching phrase “wrath of the Lamb”?
Such cataclysmic images are typical of the Bible’s apocalyptic literature. Right before his death in Jerusalem, Mark’s Jesus warns followers of “those days” that are coming, which includes the sun’s darkening, the moon’s failure, the stars’ fall from the sky, and the Son of Man arriving from the clouds with power and glory (Mark 13:24–27). To read Revelation is to read a vision of those predicted days that are now here. It’s highly evocative, too, that in John’s vision it’s the wealthy elite who are caught fleeing (Revelation 6:15)—after all, the arrival of God’s realm of justice is terrifying for those who have the most to gain from the present order. Here, again, is a verse that seems to describe our own reality all too well, as segments of the Silicon Valley ultra-rich were preparing for apocalypse long before the pandemic struck.
Such portends of collapse take place in Revelation accompanied by God’s anger.
I recently read a book by Brother John of Taizé entitled The Wrath of a Loving God. Having dedicated his years praying and chanting about God’s love at Taizé, I’m inclined to trust what Brother John has to say. Plus, he shares his biblical erudition in an accessible way with the hope that readers will deepen their own spiritual formation. Among other things, I learned from Brother John that there are many meanings of divine anger in the Bible, among them what he calls external and interior anger. External anger is God’s response to evil and injustice. In the biblical imagination, God reigns over heavens and earth, cosmos and planet, and there are consequences for living a destructive life. I’ll come back to that.
Interior anger is more psychologically interesting but less relevant to the book of Revelation. It develops from the image of God as the spouse of Israel—and to the mystics, Bridegroom and Lover of the Soul. When Israel rejects God by “choosing other lovers”—the metaphor the Hebrew prophets use for worshipping other gods—God is wounded and angry. Read Hosea 11 for a breathtaking reversal from anger to compassion from within the heart of God. At first, God pledges that a sword will flash in their cities, but then declares “My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger” (11:8–9).
I’m conflicted by this imagery.
On the one hand, any lover who turns to a sword or nearby weapon when angry should be fled from and reported to the police. If we hold God to at least as high a standard as most of us hold ourselves and others (not to mention the law!), then any abusive God-imagery needs to go. We embrace a malformed, undeveloped God if we work on our own anger in therapy but let God off the hook for the same. At the same time, I find the description of a vulnerable God who struggles with disappointment and anger and moves through it to deeper love relatable and compelling.
When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and there came a great earthquake. . . The sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. —Revelation 6:12, 14
It’s impossible for me to read passages like Revelation 6:12–17 in our time and not to think of climate change and ecological destruction. And as I’ve said before, we don’t need God to remove mountains or islands because we are the agents of our own destruction. The rising sea levels tell the truth about us. We even invented a devasting mining technique called “mountaintop removal”! And it’s largely the “kings of the earth, magnates and generals” responsible for the worst of it. The wrath of the Lamb is the consequences that we bring on ourselves collectively.
And it is still more. It’s an inherently paradoxical, descriptive pairing. The phrase doesn’t make sense except in the deep and broad realm of biblical symbolism. A lamb is an innocent and gentle animal used in the New Testament to represent Christ (see John 1:29). Add to that the sacrificial background of the Bible, and the Slaughtered Lamb becomes the death of Jesus (already in Revelation here). But why should the Crucified Christ—who repudiated the path of violent revolution amidst messianic expectations, and envisioned a loving, nonviolent realm of peace instead—take up destructive wrath?
We can hypothesize all sorts of reasons why this imagery worked for John of Patmos and his embattled hearers, but for me, the symbol of the wrathful lamb just doesn’t work today. I can’t see it being helpful as preaching in the pulpit for most congregants I’ve served, either. It’s too confusing to communicate to people, and biblical wrath has been too overtaken by violent images of God and patriarchal masculinity. De-emphasizing wrath is a more clear and helpful message that aligns with the Bible’s overall vision of nonviolent love.
For those, like me, who feel compelled still to mine for meaning in the Bible’s thorny texts, here’s a way through the interpretive thicket that does justice to the paradoxical symbols: The opening of the sixth seal is a visionary description of what happens during the death of Christ. Brother John of Taizé writes of this passage the following:
Starting from the cross of Christ, the victory continues throughout human history in the life of believers walking in the footsteps of their Master. ‘They have conquered by means of the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony; they did not live their lives to the point of fearing death’ (Revelation 12:11). Love, manifested by the given life of Jesus the Messiah and expressed concretely by the shedding of his blood, is henceforth revealed as the driving force of history, a cause for rejoicing for those who accept it and a torment for those whose lives have been based on other foundations.
To live a life of love and justice is to prepare ourselves to recognize the arrival of divine love and justice when it comes. To live a life of hatred and oppression is to fail to recognize God’s realm, and to encounter divine love and justice is therefore to have one’s world necessarily shattered.
It turns out that Brother John’s reading is present in ancient readings, too. Here’s the tenth century Oecumenius, likely a Bishop in Thessaly:
The loosing of the sixth seal effects the completion of our salvation. It dissolves death and brings back life. It dethrones humanity’s conqueror and is openly triumphant in accordance with that which is written: “The Only Begotten ascended on high and led captivity captive and received gifts among men.” And what is this loosing of the sixth seal? It is the cross and death of the Lord (Commentary on the Apocalypse 6:12-17).
In this perspective, Revelation 6—and the book as a whole—is a confrontation of divine and loving power with systemic evil. The slaughtered lamb reveals the true spiritual showdown happening behind the scenes of everyday perception. Christ on the Cross is the victory of Love over domination, and those very thrones of dominations tremble. That’s the wrath of the Lamb. It is what victorious love looks like from the perspective of evil.
Like I said, complex stuff, difficult to communicate, and almost impossible to preach responsibly. Reading Revelation through the witness of Jesus, and alongside other voices from Christian tradition, makes it possible to clear a nonviolent, loving path through dense apocalyptic woods.
I’d much rather keep it simple, though, and throw my lot in with 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich. She had her own visions of the Crucified Christ and memorably said there is no wrath in God. Like John of Patmos over a millenium before, she reported what she saw, except came to a different conclusion: “For I saw no wrath except on man’s side, and he [God] forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and love.” (Showings, Forty-Eight, 262)
God is not angry with humanity. Humanity resists divine love. God loves us anyway.
Apocalyptic quote of the month: “Is it the end of the world? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. . . But we need to be ready. We need to learn to number our days because we really do not know when our last breath will be.” —Ekemini Uwan, from this article.
Apocalyptic culture corner: Netflix’s new satire Don’t Look Up won’t convert any climate science deniers, but is still “an apocalyptic comedy for our moment” (The Atlantic)
Mark, your clear eyes communication of wrestling with Scripture brings it to life in the here and now, raises new questions for me, and Spurs conversation on the interior and exterior anger of God . Keep em coming!
Thank you, Mark, for your "long obedience in the same direction" on this project. You continue to bring new-to-me perspectives on a book I have tended to let others engage...I am grateful for the push to revisit some challenging topics and willingness to not have all the answers.