The Wednesday Reflection: "Angry Love"

Ezekiel 36.22-30 -- ²²Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. ²³I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes. ²⁴I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land.

²⁵I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. ²⁶A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. ²⁸Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. ²⁹I will save you from all your uncleannesses, and I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. ³⁰I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations.

I don’t like this reading from the prophet Ezekiel at all. Not one bit. Passages like this one draw out the rebellious, grumpy adolescent in me, the one who sulked and complained and was never, ever satisfied. Like Jeremy Duncan in the comic strip “Zits:” all big feet and mood swings and utterly convinced that he’s got the lamest, un-coolest parents in the world. Yeah, that’s how I feel about God when I read these verses from Ezekiel. If my best friends from back then were hearing the words with me, they’d be rolling their eyes right along with me. “You’ ve GOT to be kidding me.” “Are you for real?” “You don’t love me – you just care about yourself!” “I hate you!” *SLAM!* (bedroom door).

Here’s the thing: if you’ve been reading Zits lately, you know that a few weeks ago, Jeremy really messed up. He snuck out in the middle of the night in his dad’s car and drove through his new girlfriend’s cul-de-sac. Several times. The police pulled him over after they’d seen him do it seventeen times. He later confessed to his father that it was actually sixty-three times (and then told Dad, “you’re almost out of gas.”). At which point both his parents basically went ballistic.

I know a little bit about what it feels like to be in Jeremy’s position. When I was fourteen, my cousin Mark left the keys in his car one day when he drove out to our farm to work for my dad. When I had a half hour home alone that afternoon while my mom was coming to get me for baseball practice, I got into Mark’s car and started driving it around our farmplace. Lots of fun – until my Mom’s car popped over the hill a mile away and I panicked. I threw Mark’s car into reverse, tried frantically to get it back to where it had been, and wound up backing over the cap to our well and nearly puncturing the gas tank.

It should go without saying that my parents were horrified at what I had done – so much so that I’m sure they apologized personally in addition to making me apologize to Mark for what amounted to stealing his car. I remember the look on my parents’ faces when they realized what I’d done. They were about as angry with me as they had ever been, because my actions reflected on their parenting. In a small town like mine, news traveled fast, and this was definitely news. The good name my parents had built over years of hard work was being damaged because of their reckless, insubordinate, willful child’s misbehavior – and so, they were furious with me for what I was doing to their reputation.

In the same way, God gets furious with us when we misrepresent God’s name to the world around us. When we are baptized, we are baptized into the family of God; we become bearers of the name of Christ, just as I bear the name of Johnson and carry the reputation of my family with me. Living in a family can be messy sometimes: people say and do things that cause friction, and sometimes a mistake one of us makes reflects poorly on all of us. In the case of the people in Ezekiel’s time, a history of mistakes and rebellion against ‘family values’ made God angry – so angry, in fact, that Ezekiel records a vision of the glory of God leaving the temple, like a parent who storms away from a disobedient child rather than lose his temper (not that I’d know what that looks like, of course. ). In the end, we have God’s word in our reading for tonight. God was righteously angry, yet still loved the family God had called God’s own – so God promised good to the rebellious children, even when they didn’t deserve it. In the next chapter of Ezekiel, in fact, Ezekiel sees a valley of dry bones coming to life, and God says, “This is how you’ll know that I am God – when I bring your dead bones back to life again.”

One of the last Zits strips to deal with Jeremy’s big night behind the wheel shows his mother describing his punishment. “Grounded for a month. Cell phone confiscated, and driving privileges severely curtailed until after the court appearance,” says Mom. “Okay,” says Jeremy. “Okay?” says Mom? “I messed up, I’m scared, and I need you, Mom,” says Jeremy. Then he hugs her, and in the last frame we find her melting into a puddle of sighing, parental love. Sentimental, yes, but also not too far from our relationship with God, I think. God’s wrath is strongest when we won’t admit our need for grace and love – and God’s love is strongest when we drop our resistance and admit that we are in bondage to our sin and cannot free ourselves. The God who grows angry is also the God who loves – who promises to forgive our sins, open the future to us and, like a good parent, care for our needs and protect us from harm. Thanks be to God, from whom all good parenting flows. Amen.

Anyone who wants to see the series of comics I'm describing can find them here.