Have we done a “search for the historical Jesus” treatment on the wrath of God? In reading the Screwtape Letters with a men’s study group I came across Letter 23 where Lewis has some prescient things to say about the “search for the historical Jesus”.

One probably unfair way of characterizing the search for the historical Jesus was to first determine what your imagined Jesus could NOT have said or done and then examine the canonical texts eliminating those things (usually supernatural events or claims to divinity), only to discover exactly what you set out to find after eliminating the texts your decided to excise. Schweitzer made his famous comment “The quest was like looking into a well and seeing your own reflection at the bottom.”

I wonder if this hasn’t happened with our talk about “where is God in the tsunami (or fill in any large, natural disaster)?” If you first eliminate a wrathful, angry God, he of course won’t be in the disaster if you’ve first excluded the possibility that this disaster is a manifestation of that wrath. If you didn’t divest God of power you then have the question “Why didn’t he use his power to stop it? Was he not present?” reminding us of Elijah taunting the prophets of Baal.

Despite nearly every Western news reporter’s inability to refrain from describing the tsunami as a disaster of “biblical proportions” we avoid seeing this disaster in community with Biblical disasters. Catastrophes are a large part of the Bible and the Bible isn’t shy about making God the author of them. Likewise the victims of these disasters are not shy about either crying out for mercy, challenging or cursing the God who made them. As recipients of catastrophe we measure considerable less than proportions of Biblical characters.

During the major earthquake in Haiti that killed many there was one famous Youtube video from a cell phone camera capturing the devastation where the woman cries out at the end in English “the world is coming to an end!” I think she voiced the instinctive reaction that many victims of these major catastrophes instinctively feel and express. These instinctive response are often very much in line with the language of many Biblical catastrophes.

One interesting catastrophe passage in the Bible is in 2 Peter 2.

2 Peter 2:4-10 (NRSV)
For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment; and if he did not spare the ancient world, even though he saved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood on a world of the ungodly; and if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction and made them an example of what is coming to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man greatly distressed by the licentiousness of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by their lawless deeds that he saw and heard), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment —especially those who indulge their flesh in depraved lust, and who despise authority.

The word I want to draw your attention to is “peirasmos” translated “trial”. This is the same word exemplifies the “trial” of Jesus by Satan in the gospels. It is the word that Jesus uses in the Lord’s prayer “keep us from the time of trial” and that Luke features prominently in the Mount of Olives scene in Luke 22:39-46. This kind of “trial” is both eschatalogical in flavor and Satan is deeply involved. (For a detailed treatment of this check out Raymond Brown’s “Death of the Messiah, Vol 1” pgs 157-162.) Satan is very involved in the Passion Narrative in Luke as seen in his entering Judas and his demanding God to sift the disciples like wheat.

Given the fact that in our secular context God is barely visible and Satan nearly extinct is seems clear why we struggle to frame these large natural disasters apart from a purely scientific approach which simply says “they happen” but fails to be able to attach any meaning to them. This is perhaps an illuminating moment in the cost/benefit evaluation of a purely secular worldview.

The “time of trial” it seems is a sorting out type of period where there is a seeming simultaneous loosing and judgment of evil. The releasing of the restraints on evil causing disaster simultaneously brings judgment upon evil and shows evil for what it is.

This “time of trial” is also deeply tied to the tradition of “The Day of the LORD” where Yhwh returns in judgment to sort things out. The catastrophic elements are all there as part of the package, earthquake, hail, fire and brimstone from the sky, floods, wars, famine, etc. These are defining moments where the everyday lying and denial of humanity is blown away by divine power somehow mingled with disastrous chaos to expose the flimsy pretense of human self-sufficiency. Jesus’ story of the house built on the rock and the sand and the flood is one small example of it.

What Luke 22:39-46 illustrates is Jesus praying in the time of trial and admonishing his disciples to pray. The disciples are unable to pray and the implicit message is that they are unable to withstand and triumph through the time of trial. Jesus, however, will receive the cup and fully pass through the time of trial.

Jesus’ prayer itself I think shows three things about praying in the time of trial:
1. It’s absolutely legitimate to ask God for a pass
2. Faithfulness is finally submitting to the will of the Father
3. God will provide the strength for his saints to endure the time of trial and to have it result in dramatic redemptive benefits.

1. It’s absolutely legitimate to ask God for a pass on the time of trial.

What if this weren’t the case? Could we be real with God about our suffering, about our feelings, about our fears? It seems that this is the only way to maintain and authentic relationship with God. We take him everything and pour it at his feet. Jesus, for whom his incarnation and mission centered on this had the right to ask God for another way. If that is the case for Jesus, how much more for us.

2. Faithfulness is finally submitting to the will of the Father.

I’m working through Samuel in my adult Sunday School class and this week we’re at the famous 2 Samuel 11, the David and Bathsheba story. This as everyone knows is a watershed moment for the book of Samuel and the life of David. It shows David finally succumbing to the corrupting power of the kingship and putting in jeopardy all of the progress that God had been making with his people through his servant David. The climax of David saying to his accomplice Joab in the murder of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband “let this thing not seem evil in your eyes.” David in his cover-up casts himself in the role of moral arbiter.

Garret Keizer in his excellent book “The Enigma of Anger” makes this comment: “I have never ceased to be amazed that the Bible, the Bible, should present the prototype of all sin as the willful acquisition of an independent moral consciousness. Not power or pleasure, a quiver of invincible arrows or a cache of giant chocolate bars, but the knowledge of good and evil. Not the stuff of brothels but of Sunday schools.” (Kindle location 911-14)

In Gethsemane we see Jesus at exactly this point as he pleads for his disciples to pray in their time of trial. Will Jesus acquire an independent moral consciousness? Adam, David and Jesus stand at this point. It is Jesus’ time of trial more poignant and powerful than even the trio of trials put against him by Satan in the wilderness.

3. God will provide his saints the strength to endure the time of trial.

The Calvinist vs. Arminian debate can sometimes boil down to trying to predict the outcome of our times of trials like gamblers try to pick their ponies or winners of games. At the heart of the doctrine of election is the locked door that says “you can’t predict it” but also the results oriented perspective that says “saints persevere”. Who perseveres, why they persevere, why others fair is not ours to say.

We naturally protest at such a reality and scream it isn’t fair, but there never seems to be any fairness in any time of trial that we can discern. Are we capable of saying why Japan got whacked and any China did not? Are we able to weight the morality of a nation? Are we able to judge?

What instead we see is a world of unfairness where some are born to struggle and die young while others catch all the breaks. Can we run the fairness math on any of this? Isaac receives the blessing, Ishmael does not. Jacob receives the blessing, Esau, not so much. Peter will persevere, Judas will fall. One made the correct turn on the fork of the road in Japan and lived, many others perished in the flood.

The text of the angelic visitation to strengthen Jesus is full of problems in terms of the scholarly question of whether it was original to Luke. What we can say is that the message of the visitation seems analogous to the fourth visitor in the Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace in the book of Daniel. Jesus will enter the time of trial, the sun will go dark, the earth will tremble and the Son of God will be broken on a cross to be raised to life on the third day.

With all the talk about Rob Bell’s book I think the greatest fault I find with his approach is his failure to embody the urgency of the call of Jesus. What we see here on the Mount of Olives is Jesus as he often does making an urgent appeal. He is earnest and frustrated at the sleepiness of the disciples. They are not paying attention. He is concerned they will be caught by the time of trial unprepared, and he is right. They will, however, recover.

Catastrophes of Biblical proportions help to rouse sleepy disciples. In those catastrophes we hear the urgent appeal from Jesus for our own welfare to pray fervently that we not fall in our time of trial and that if we find ourselves in the midst of the chaotic process of judgment we appeal to our father to bring us through and to do his work through it.