We don't like to think of God being angry, do we?
After all, the New Testament declares that 'God is love' – and that instinctively sounds rather appealing. The idea of the Lord being angry in some way is something from which we might well instinctively recoil. It also doesn't feel very appealing in terms of marketing God to your average spiritual sceptic in this day and age!
But when we read the teaching of Jesus we have to conclude that, yes, God indeed does experience anger – or 'wrath' to use the word that the Bible seems to prefer. And as we continue our fortnightly pilgrimage through Mark's gospel, Jesus helps us understand what that means – and what it doesn't mean too.
As he approaches his crucifixion, Jesus falls to the ground in the Garden of Gethsemane and prays, 'Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want,' (Mark 14v36).
We might think that 'the cup' is simply a figure of speech relating to the suffering Jesus knows he will endure on the cross; after all, in contemporary English we use another piece of crockery as simple metaphor, saying we have a lot 'on our plate' – albeit in the rather less serious context of saying how busy we are.
But Jesus' disciples would have known 'the cup' was not just a colloquialism. For as Jeremy McQuoid writes, 'The cup was an Old Testament motif pointing to the wrath of God, used in the context of exiles when God poured His wrath out on decadent, sinful Jerusalem by allowing Babylonian invaders to tear the holy city apart.' And Donald English, former chair of the World Methodist Council, comments: 'The cup, in a number of Old Testament passages, is about suffering and punishment, usually at God's hand.'
For example, in Jeremiah 25 we find God saying, 'Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath.' And Isaiah 51 speaks of those who have 'who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath'.
Still not convinced? Think of it this way: there are three basic options when we consider the way the universe is. Perhaps there is no God – and so the cosmos is a place in which, ultimately, evil doesn't matter, and those who get away with wickedness in this life will never, ever be held accountable. Or maybe, secondly, there is a God – but he doesn't really care about right and wrong at all.
The third option is that there is a God and he does care about justice and injustice. And that's the Christian view of things. In fact, God cares so much about these things that when he sees oppression, injustice and violence his reaction is one of anger. The Church of England's funeral liturgy describes God as 'justly angered by our sins'.
The problem is that our anger is often rather hot-headed, cruel and unfair. Sometimes we are simply taking out our own failings on others. But God's wrath is not like that at all. The Anglican theologian J.I. Packer writes in his classic Knowing God: 'God's wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil.' And another Anglican theologian, Ian Paul, cites Stephen Travis in Christ and the Judgement of God speaking of the wrath of God as 'an attitude rather than a feeling' and Michael Green describing it 'as God's settled opposition to all that is evil'.
Perhaps all this sounds rather abstract. But we need to be clear that God is justly angry about evil, oppression, injustice and sin – including mine and yours – and that 'the cup of God's wrath' is a motif the Bible uses to speak of his reaction.
And then perhaps we will just begin to understand the magnitude of what Jesus is struggling with in the Garden of Gethsemane. For he knows – with a wide-eyed clarity we can scarcely comprehend – that on the cross he is going to drink that cup himself, even though he has done nothing to deserve it, so that we don't have to.
Steven Lee, a pastor at College Church, Wheaton, Illinois, puts it so well: 'Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath for us so that he could extend the cup of God's fellowship to us... We don't get wrath anymore – now we get God. We get the sweet, satisfying reality of his eternal fellowship in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit. This is the cup we drink now and forever. This is the cup that we offer to those who don't know him yet, imploring them in God's mercy: Come, drink this cup with us – because Jesus drank that cup for us.'
David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex, England. Find him on Twitter @Baker_David_A The Rough Guide to Discipleship is a fortnightly series.
