“How do you like your God?” At first blush that sounds a bit sacrilegious, but seriously, it is becoming a reasonable question. In some ways, it is hard to believe that Christians could have such wide-ranging perspectives. Yet one only has to look at the newspapers and TV to see these varying points of view.
From One Extreme to the Other
There was Pat Robertson a couple of weeks ago on the 700 Club suggesting that Ariel Sharon, who suffered a massive stroke and cerebral hemorrhage, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995, were being treated harshly by God for dividing Israel. This statement followed another recent Robertson comment that a Pennsylvania town might face disaster as God’s retribution for voting out a school board who had favored the introduction of intelligent design in the classroom. Robertson’s God indeed is a God of wrath.
At the other end of the spectrum is today’s “modern God” of expediency and understanding — always seemingly there to hear our emergency requests, aware of the demands on our time that force us to miss Sunday Mass or services. His commandments, of course, are subject to convenient reinterpretation. Murder need not apply to embryos; living together as young lovers is not adultery; we satisfy our obligation to the poor with a token donation. God is good and the road to eternal life is easily traveled.
Then there is the God of the traditional and seemingly inflexible Catholic Church — a God of both love and justice. A Father who sent His Son to redeem us, but a Father who also gave Moses the Ten Commandments and through His Son talked of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. A Father’s love and mercy dominate the New Testament and the new Covenant in a way that Islam, for instance, cannot begin to comprehend. Nevertheless, we are the Church Militant. Our salvation remains a battle and the gates to heaven are narrow — not wide.
So pick your pleasure. Do you live in constant fear of God’s wrath? Do you move through life unimpeded, with earthly happiness as your goal and an altar call or occasional prayer as your ticket to salvation? Or do you accept the teaching of the Catholic Church? A God of love, of mercy and justice.
Of Katrina and St. Therese of Lisieux
David Gross writes in Restore America:
Katrina was an act of God upon a sin-loving and rebellious nation, a warning to all who foolishly and arrogantly believe there is no God, and that if He did exist, “would not have done such a thing!”
A Google search will show similar articles. There always seems to be an attempt to attribute “bad things happening” to God’s retribution. In a counterpoint article on Katrina, Bishop Thomas Wenski, coadjutor bishop of Orlando, Florida, states:
When faced with our misfortunes or those of others, we can be tempted to ask ourselves: what did we do or what did these people do to deserve this? Once in His ministry Jesus spoke of the Galileans whom Pilate had executed. And He spoke of those killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed (Lk 13: 1-9). Jesus warns us not to see these events as somehow the wrath of an angry God. Evil came into the world not by God’s willing it, but through the Devil and human sin. Jesus says in the Gospel: Don’t think that those Galileans were the biggest sinners around. Don’t think that those who died in the tower were guiltier than anyone else.
Whether we are talking about Ariel Sharon, the victims of Katrina or a tidal wave in Sri Lanka, the bottom line is we do not know the mind of God. It is presumptuous and wrong, therefore, to attribute such happenings to God’s wrath.
St. Therese of Lisieux experienced this conflict as a young Carmelite. In her own monastery, she was accused of relying too much on God’s mercy rather than focusing on His divine justice.
Her perspective is summed up in a Christmas play she wrote and performed for the community in 1894. In the play, Angel of Judgment, she approaches the infant Jesus in the manger and says:
Have You forgotten, Jesus, O Beauty Supreme, that the sinner must at last be punished?
I will chastise the crime in judgment; I want to exterminate all the ungrateful.
My sword is ready! Jesus, sweet victim! My sword is ready!
I am set to avenge you!
And the baby Jesus replies:
O beautiful angel! Put down your sword
It is not for you to judge the nature that I raise up and that I wish to redeem.
The one who will judge the world is myself, the one named Jesus!
The life-giving dew of my Blood will purify all my chosen ones.
Don’t you know that faithful souls always give me consolation in the face of blasphemies of the unfaithful by a simple look of love?
(First Steps on the Little Way of St. Therese of Lisieux by Father Peter Cameron, O.P.)
In his 1980 encyclical, Dives in Misericordia, Pope John Paul II says that mercy is superior to justice and validates the perspective of St. Therese. He uses the example of the Prodigal Son to show that justice demanded one outcome (that the son be a servant in the father’s household). Mercy, however, dictated forgiveness, love, and continuation of the father-son relationship.
A Balanced Approach to God
We do not know God’s methods of punishment, nor is it our role to determine the guilt of anyone. On the other hand, we should not go to the other extreme that is so popular today, of sunny non-judgementalism.
We cannot adopt a spirit of passivity toward a fast-spreading religious complacency that seems to emphasize a broad set of generalities: a vague belief in the divinity of Christ, a loose concept of heaven and hell, self-interpretation of the Bible and occasional Mass attendance. While we should not be judgmental of any particular individual, we also should not be tolerant of a dilution of religious teaching that reduces our concept of God to one of personal convenience and timely consolation.
To focus on a God of wrath is to ignore the principle message of the New Covenant. To form a concept of God that fits our lifestyle is to really have no god but self.
Christ said the road to heaven is narrow — not comfortable or convenient. We are to be watchful, because we know not the hour or time. We are warned not to be derailed by judging others. In 1 Thessalonians, we are told to “put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Above all this, Christ extended the promise of mercy and forgiveness. This is the God in Whom we Catholics believe and rejoice.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Dick Schenk is a freelance writer who writes occasionally in the St. Louis Review. He can be reached at [email protected].
