GOD’S JUDGMENT SHOWS up a lot in the lectionary passages this month, and in that I take great comfort. Let me clarify: God’s wrath is not usually my go-to for a cozy pick-me-up. But as I write these words, yet another innocent life was taken by violence at the hands of the state, and I am full of rage and mourning and an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of so much injustice. And so, I am comforted by these scriptures because they tell us that God has not forgotten the oppressed. They promise that justice will prevail, that those who climbed their way to the top with greed and exploitation will not stay on top. Their day is coming, but not, I think, because God is a God of revenge, but because God is a God of abundance, and everyone who has tried to limit that abundance for others will fail miserably in the end.
I am comforted by the promise that things will be made right and that, while I have my role to play, it is also not all up to me. I am not required to force justice along like a fish fighting upstream. Instead, I am being asked to collaborate with the flow of God’s generosity as it floods into this dry and barren land like a river shattering a dam. I am not the source of the water, but I can participate in the colossal splintering of a blockade all the same.
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