THE BAPTIST’S QUESTION
In his third chapter, Matthew tells the story of John the Baptist. Or, more accurately, John the Washer. Or, perhaps, John the Dunker. Baptizō in Greek, the word from which we get “baptize,” means “to dip in water,” “to dunk,” before it comes in the New Testament to take on the meanings we give to it in the church. When the name was given to John, it hadn’t yet been filled up with Christian theology. John’s dunking of people into the water of the Jordan river symbolized repentance, but more than that, it was a ritual renewal of Israel. As the people of Israel at the beginning had crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land, now these 1st century Jews under John’s direction symbolically crossed anew to form a new and purified people.
The story that Matthew tells (along with Luke, quoting the same source, Q) is that as John was preaching down the Jordan, religious leaders—“many” of them, the text says—come to join with the others in John’s symbol-laden dunking in the Jordan. When John sees them coming, as befits a prophet, he immediately denounces them: “You spawn of snakes, who warned you to flee the coming wrath?” (3:7) Matthew doesn’t tell us what, if anything, the religious leaders said in response.
And what of us? Addressed with the Baptist’s question, what would we say? What do we say? The question centers two ideas that in the light of our time—and the light of scripture—bear our attention: “the coming wrath” and what we might do to “flee” it.
THE COMING WRATH
The biblical wrath is not something we like much. It feels, well, Old Testamenty, as if it belongs in Zephaniah or with John the Baptist, but not later we would like to think, not in the New Testament. But still, it’s there. And not just in the preaching of John the Baptist but at key points in Paul’s argument in Romans, beginning with 1:18: “For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the irreligious and unrighteous who in their unrighteousness oppose the truth.” And this wrath appears a few dozen more times in the rest of the New Testament, including in 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, which reads like a direct answer to the Baptist’s question: They [the saints in Thessalonica] “have turned from idols to serve a living and true God and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath” (NRSVue; my italics).
So what is this “coming wrath?” What does the Baptist—or, for that matter, Paul—have in mind by it? We might ask the question in terms of horizons: does the Baptist have in mind something near at hand, events playing out in the world as they knew it? Or does he have in mind something at the end of time? Something closer to 2 Peter 3:10: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be destroyed with fire . . .” Or Revelation 6:14, where the sky rolls up like a window shade? The answer surely is both. In apocalyptic, the near and far horizons collapse into each other.
So perhaps it’s better not to think of these apocalyptic statements in the Bible (and in other literature of the time) in terms of time but in terms of seeing. Apocalyptic is a way of paying attention to what’s going on in the world around us, to what is happening just below the surface. The word itself, “apocalyptic,” is from the Greek apokalupsis, which means “revelation,” “disclosure,” the unveiling of what has been hidden.
For the Baptist what had been hidden was the fragility of the social and political order. He saw that they lived in Jeremiah-like times, times that were likely to end in disaster—in “the coming wrath.” He was right, of course. Some forty or so years later, Jerusalem lay buried in rubble. The wrath was indeed coming.
THINKING APOCALYPTIC
In these apocalyptic prophecies, there is always both the immediate earth reality of the wrath and a larger end-of-the world, last judgment perspective. Take Luke’s version of the prophecy of Jesus about the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, of three gospel accounts, the only one to mention “wrath.” In the prophecy, Luke’s Jesus speaks of terrible times soon to come with wars (Luke 21:9), natural disasters (21:11), persecutions (21:12-19), and the eventual fall of Jerusalem (21:20-21). These will be, he says, a kind of rough justice (Greek ekdikēsis) against those who have put the people of God in peril. “It will be,” he adds, “a great calamity for the earth and wrath for those people” (21:23). The word for “calamity” also means “necessity.” It suggests a kind of karma: evil contains the seeds of its own destruction.
All of that is near horizon: the calamity that in fact came upon Jerusalem in the 1st century CE. But always in these prophecies a another, farther away horizon is also in view, when all things will finally be set right. It’s best to think of this farther perspective as a kind of prayer. These prayers are often full of rage, fulminating at the injustices suffered by the saints. The book of Revelation is filled with this sort of angry prayer. In chapter 16, for example, you have the bowls of God’s wrath poured out on the empire: “God remembered great Babylon [think both Babylon and Rome] and gave her the wine cup of the fury of his wrath” (Revelation 16:19). It’s as if to say, “Lord, are you listening? We are waiting for your justice. How long will our oppressors get away with it?”
THE WRATH COMES FOR US
All of this is first century, from a different time and different place than ours, but still the Baptist’s question lingers: “Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” If we take the question seriously, it forces us to consider two things: where and how the wrath comes to us in our time and how we should live in the face of it.
Apocalyptic is based on the idea that injustice and unrighteousness—I’ll come to what this means momentarily—is inherently unstable. Where a civilization, a culture, a politics is based on injustice and unrighteousness, it carries the seeds of its own dissolution. The wrath will certainly come.
At the heart of this are the Old Testament concepts of justice and righteousness, Hebrew mišpaṭ and ṣədāqâ, both of which have in them the idea of doing right by others. Our “righteousness” has unfortunately shaded into a kind of stilted piety, but this is not at all what they mean in the Old Testament. Doing right by is not a rule-based, legal concept, although rules can help clarify what it means to do right by someone. It’s based in honor: honoring God, honoring each other, honoring ourselves, honoring our fellow creatures, honoring the earth itself.
If we take account of the world in which we live in these terms, we have not honored what we should honor. We have not honored the earth, and the systems of the earth on which our life depends are changing with increasing rapidity. It’s as if the earth is angry. The wrath is coming.
We have not honored others. In our own country, we have lately given way to those who insist that the reality of the world is do to others before they do to you. And by thinking the world so, those currently in power make it so. By ripping up agreements made in good faith and treating longtime friends as enemies, others no longer have any incentive to honor our interests or to be our friends. The world becomes the sort of world that our president insists it is, and, as we are fast discovering, others may be better at playing that sort of game than we are or, at least, better at it than he is. This idea about the world bleeds over into almost every part of our lives, including religion. In the denomination in which I grew up, long relationships lately have been thrown over in favor of questionable convictions. None of this is stable. None of this will abide. The wrath is coming.
FACING THE COMING WRATH: PRACTICES
I could amplify this taking account of our time, but you know it all too well. We stand in the face of the coming wrath. And, if so, we need to address the second part of the Baptist’s question, the fleeing part. How in the face of the coming wrath do we live? How do we find shelter? What practices do we need to learn for the wrath that will surely come? Let me in the remainder of this post suggest a few such practices. You may have others.
Start with truthfulness. Facing the coming wrath requires us to practice truth. In a recent post, I discussed the Hebrew pair ʾemet and šeqer, the “truth” and the “lie.” These are relational terms. ʾemet, “truth”, contains within it the idea of faithfulness. Or, better, in biblical terms, just “faith.” Faith in the Bible is not primarily belief but more like what we have in mind with our English phrase “good faith.” Honesty with each other, with God, with the facts, with who we are and who others are. Proper dealings. Faithfulness. Start there, with the practice of truth, the first in the biblical triad of faith [truth], hope, and love.
Part of being truthful is surely the acknowledgement that we belong to each other. Call this the practice of inclusion. One of the deepest sins of modernity is the idea that we can go off on our own. We are inveterate line drawers. Race is such a line, drawn by those who would exploit others. So, too, for other lines we draw: lines between us and nature, as if we were not part of the natural world; lines between us and those of other cultures, as if we didn’t all belong to the same humanity; lines between genders and between the genders and those who do not fit easily into gender categories; lines drawn between the elect and the unelect. Ephesians suggests that the proper practice we learn with and in Jesus is the art of tearing down walls (Ephesians 2:11-22).
Add to this what we might call the practice of the ad-hoc and the provisional. When one begins to look, to take account of the coming wrath, it becomes apparent that we are in over our heads. Evil—all the ways that death and destruction work in our world—is larger than we are. We can only make provisional arrangements to mitigate the effects of evil. Anyone who has tried to live responsibly in our world knows the truth of this. But these provisional attempts, these gestures toward a cleaner, more just, more beautiful, and more compassionate world are like prayers. They offer to heaven our hopes.
And so to the practice of faithfulness—truth in the biblical sense—we should add the practice of hope. Hopelessness is a way of denying moral agency in ourselves. What can I do? we say, and so we do nothing. Cynicism, like individualism, is another deep sin. It fuels despair in the face of evil. Hope is a practice.
And with that, love. Love in the Old Testament is mostly carried by the word ḥesed, which suggests more loyalty than eros. Its New Testament companion is ʾagapē. Love is the practice of belonging. Belonging ties us to others, to a place, to the inescapably local. And to joy, the celebration of all that we have been given.
WHAT’S NEXT
And that is a good place for me to end. Not because I’ve named all the practices we need to survive in the face of the coming wrath but because part of my belonging to you is the knowledge that if you have made it this far, you will have thought of these and other practices for the moment in which we find ourselves. And, if we talked, I would discover that you are farther along in the practice of these things than am I.
I began this post pondering another biblical word, “salvation.” This is the beginning—only the beginning—of understanding what it means to be saved, how to “flee the coming wrath.” There’s more, much more, which I will get to in subsequent posts, but here is where we must begin thinking about salvation: with the coming wrath. Salvation in the Bible begins with taking account of the coming wrath. Not the far horizon of this in the beginning but with what’s immediate to us, with the coming wrath, looking for how to live well as the world collapses around us.
Clay