“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” Romans 12:9
The Bible talks a lot about God taking vengeance. This kind of speech bothers a lot of people. They imagine that their preferred god would simply and immediately look past all offenses and immediately wipe the slate clean. Likewise they imagine that if everyone in the world simply did this the world would be a better place. I don’t think so and I don’t think many of those who hold this position really do either.
Let’s imagine the guilt of every incident of theft, assault, abuse, neglect, were simply, permanently wiped clean away. Would anyone seriously advocate for such a situation? Instead we tend to postulate hypothetical offense that we imagine should be immediately forgotten but real offenses, the consequences of which we are in touch with emotionally or experientially, these we instinctively and immediately respond to with a call for redress.
If you do a concordance search of the Bible for the word “vengeance” you’ll find it comes up a lot (I searched the NRSV). The first occurrence comes up with the story of Cain. Cain is terrified, afraid that someone will take vengeance upon him for being an outcast and the murderer of his brother. God promises that He himself will take a seven-fold vengeance on anyone who kills Cain. The story that follows is that of Lamech who boasts to his wives that if God’s vengeance for Cain is sevenfold then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold. He killed a man for wounding him. Very early on the pattern is set. We are flush with ourselves, we step into God’s shoes and attempt to multiply his place by eleven.
I love the way the movie “The Godfather” begins. The undertaker pleads with Don Corleone for “justice” for the assault on his daughter. Even the Godfather recognizes that the undertaker’s request that the perpetrators be killed is not “justice”, because his daughter is not dead. Don Corleone, however, understands Lamech’s economy all too well. “If you would become my friend then your enemies would become my enemies and then they would fear you!” Is Yhwh Cain’s Don Corleone? Is this why talk of God’s vengeance disturbs us?
So what can we make of wrongdoing and retribution? On one hand we can’t just blithely imagine that nothing bad ever happened. On the other hand we see that Lamech’s approach instinctively leads to all the cycles of retribution we witness today. We also see that those charged with bringing justice to our world do so poorly. Only a fraction of wrongdoers are actually brought to justice and only held accountable for a fraction of all the wrongs they do. (Notice how easily it is to exclude myself from the class of “wrongdoers”!) Hollywood regularly releases violent movies about strong men and women “settling the score” outside of the law. It’s a fantasy we all indulge in and Hollywood knows there is money to be made by inviting us to indulge in these fantasies. We also know, however, that the real life stories of people who pursue this indulgence are far more ugly than the Hollywood versions.
The Apostle Paul quotes the Old Testament when he says “Vengeance is mine, says the LORD, I will repay.” One place in the 5 books of the Law where this sentiment is approximated is Leviticus 19:18. Leviticus is an Old Testament book with a severe image problem in today’s society, but this verse says something that even the most “enlightened” folks can celebrate: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” If you look at this and Deuteronomy 32 it seems that God’s vengeance is tied to our capacity to love our neighbors.
On the basis of God’s promise that he will repay, we can legitimately withhold judgment and retribution from wrongdoers (now I want to include myself) because we now have no need to take “justices into our own hands”, also knowing full well that justice is never done by our own hands. In Romans 12 Paul drops this Torah quote in the midst of all sorts of very Jesus-like commands: “bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse”, “live in harmony with one another”, “do not repay evil for evil but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all”. It is God’s promise to take up the need for retribution that allows us to love and forgive those who don’t deserve love because of what they’ve done.
I hope that you see in this piece that I am not challenging the state’s role in bringing justice. They should and must pursue justice. I am speaking about our impulse to take vengeance ourselves against the wrong done to us. I am also not limiting my observation to those things that are egregious or illegal, but in fact including the much more common variety of relational offenses we live in the midst of every day. In those cases our acts or words of vengeance are seldom violent but generally verbal or relational. Our impulse for vengeance leads us to gossip, verbally malign, passive aggressively retaliate, withdraw, withhold, etc.
What happens, however, if you take God out of the equation? Who then is left to bring retribution?
If God is mentally taken out of the process by us we are left only with ourselves. For the big things this means violence, chaos, and cycles of bloody retribution and retaliation. For the small things, this means nursing resentments, mentally rehearsing past wrongs, and setting ourselves on a path to bitterness and hatred. We will feel that we simply MUST establish justice by our own hand, or our own tongues. We MUST vindicate ourselves, protect our own reputations, usually at the expense of the reputations of others. Human conflict then just continues on, relationships are broken, tempers flair, churches are torn apart, bonds are broken.
Without God and a vivid knowledge of his justice, we are locked into perpetual warfare with each other. With a God of vengeance, we have a hope to be freed from cycles of retribution and a need to defend self and reputation thus pursuing love of neighbors and enemies alike.
Perhaps the liturgical repetition of God’s faithfulness in vengeance in the Old Testament is designed to free us from hostilities ourselves. The irony of course is that these are the bits we often leave out when privately or publically reading the Bible. We emphasize the mercy bits but subtlety sidestep the bits about God’s judgment in hopes to not offend people with this part that God plays and that the Bible regularly emphasizes. If we want to lead people in the kind of uncommon love, generosity and forgiveness that we say we are about perhaps we should include these passages about God’s passion for retributive justice thus de-emphasizing our felt need to take matters into our own hands.
What do you think? Conventional wisdom seems to assert that portrayal of the Old Testament God of wrath and vengeance elicits violence and retribution in those who confess to follow Him. Could the opposite in fact be true?
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I think loving our neighbors needs to start with seeing all people (all sinners) on the same level as us as the first notion of love. You can’t make a quick and early decision to look down on them upfront. If you don’t have this as a starting point the remainder is doomed for failure no matter how hard you try.
To see each other at the same level we need to understand that it is only by grace and Jesus you have anythinn at all. This means you really cant look down on muslims, fat, short, or anybody different from. It is only through the cross we have anything,
Also, seeing sin at a deeper level than just moralism also goes a long ways toward establishing a longer relationship of love.
Great insight, Paul. I’ve never thought about vengeance in this way before. I think it is especially applicable to those who have been seriously wronged by their enemies – like Rwandans or Holocaust survivors. To be honest, when I think about the ways in which I have been wronged, I am reminded of Jesus’ parable about the dude who was forgiven an enormous debt and then proceeded to harass his debtors over much, much smaller amounts. While the vengeance of God might not factor into how I love my neighbors and my “enemies,” it can certainly factor into how I think about those who have been grievously wronged and how I think about those who have wronged them …which has always been a source of concern (sometimes doubt) for me. Again, great insight.
I also think you are definitely right about how retribution is celebrated in movies and TV…and how we are called to think and live differently. (It always bugs me when an audience cheers after the “bad guy” gets killed.)
I am reminded of the words: “The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.”
I think this is helpful not just in extreme examples such as genocide, but also in the much more common relational conflicts we ALL experience at church, at home and at work.
If you want people in conflict you note that there is usually an initiating incident where someone is hurt or embarrassed or shamed. This incident may have been intentional or accidental but in any case someone is hurt. Our instinctive response is to become defensive and to seek some form or retaliation. This retaliation is commonly verbal or passive-aggressive. We feel that we have been treated unjustly (and maybe we have!) and we take it upon ourselves to make it right. The difficulty is that in the vast majority of cases we don’t bring justice, we just initiate a cycle of retribution and the conflict continues to escalate and deepen until community is broken. Sometimes intervention happens successfully by an outside party and the conflict is defused, sometimes one party just decides the fight isn’t worthy it and it ends, but often real damage is done permanently.
If you are grieved party (and often both sides would identify themselves as such) how can you find the resources to stop pursuing “justice” and reconcile? It involves absorbing the blow (Tim Keller often relates this with substitutionary atonement) and releasing the opposite party from your debt (forgiveness). Is justice violated in this? Not if you can offload your internal demand for justice and give it to God.
In order to satisfactorily process this in your heart without becoming a victim you need two things: a resource pool from which to draw the generosity needed to extend grace to the undeserving (even if their status of undeserving is only imagined in your heart) AND a faith that ultimately justice will be served. The gospel give us both of these things. The resource pool is we draw on is the generosity of God in Christ to forgive the far greater offenses we have committed, and the justice consolation is the knowledge that vengeance belongs to God. He will ultimately judge with pure justice, not the revenge driven stuff we generate ourselves that repeated sets up cycles of retribution.
In this way knowledge that the creator is a God of vengeance combined with knowledge that he is also a God of grace can not only help us defuse large uncommon offenses but also the small every day ones we all experience.