My friend Clint the Therapist told me that anger is a surface emotion.  He said that anger is like an iceberg; you can see 10% of it, but the real causes of what you see are below the surface.  I began my Lenten journey through the prophets yesterday.  Their God is very angry.

I’m accustomed to this kind of God.  He is drawn as a figure so holy it’s as if he has no choice but to demonstrate his wrath.  Fear is his method for inspiring worship and faithfulness, because he knows what you did, and you better make things right between you and him before the sun sets, lest you die in your sleep and receive the punishment you deserve. Jonathan Edwards still plays well.  “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in many ways, is the sermon upon which American Christianity was founded.

God is holy.

I am not.

I get that.  It makes sense.  Perhaps he is wrathful with a purpose.  Okay, that fits into most theological frameworks.  But what if anger is a surface emotion for God too? I don’t mean to suggest that God is somehow less holy, and that we should stop taking his wrath so seriously.  God shows up in the writings of the prophets, and it seems that he is looking for the tiniest reasons to forgive Israel.  He is angry, but at the end of his rants through his prophets there are all these statements:

Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.

Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

Will he be angry forever?  Will he be indignant till the end?

I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.  (Oh my God!  How I love this image!)

Seek me and live.

God, in the writings of the prophets, appears as a pained, jilted lover teeming with conflicting emotions.  The human tendency is to apply our experience with wrath onto God, or our experience with nonchalance onto God.  God is then either very pissed, or he doesn’t much care.

The prophets begin painting a fuller picture of God’s grace than the earlier writings, say, Joshua and Judges, where God merely lays his enemies to waste in wrath and vengeful anger.  From the prophets onward, God becomes more complex.  There is a complex motivator behind God’s anger; it is not just his holiness that his people have offended.  They have spurned his affections.  This is an entirely different matter.

Sure Israel has broken God’s laws, but that is secondary.  Primarily, they have betrayed the reason for the law, God’s great love for his people.  It is a different emotion than anger.  Jealousy, rejection, betrayal, unrequited love; these things are beyond “You broke my over-arching, perfect, impersonal law and now you must pay.”

Words like whore and harlot began to appear.  God is taking Israel’s unfaithfulness very seriously, beyond the breaking of laws.  If you stand in an impartial courtroom, judges don’t look for reasons why you broke the law.  They simply determine if you broke the law.

Impartial judges don’t love you.  Your mother does. Your Father does.  The web of justice and mercy is a navigational nightmare.  Without love you serve only justice.  Without a morals you serve only mercy.  You can see the levels of heartbreak associated with a God who claims to be perfect in both justice and mercy.

The prophets present a God who is caught in a complex web of emotions toward his people beyond “just the facts.”  When he says, “You’ve played the harlot,” he is not merely pointing out an action, but a deeply personal emotion, a pain, that corresponds to the action.  And then, like a lover, he begs for redemption.

My grandmother described my mother’s post-teen rebellion to me once.  Thirty-some years after the fact, after the reconciliation, she still shed tears over a long-healed rift.  Of course my grandmother had been very angry in the midst of my mother’s choices, but one doesn’t weep thirty years later because of anger.  Thirty years of latent tears emerge only because of the great love that conflicts with the anger, the overwhelming need to set things right.

And that is God.  Most of us see the tip of the iceberg.  Most of us can find it in ourselves to mete out God’s angry judgment onto others or onto ourselves.  But that is only the tip of the iceberg.  His emotions run deeper than what you can see from a Titanic deck chair.