by Jack Miles
God’s classic early characterization of himself comes at Exodus 34:5–7:
The Lord passed before [Moses] in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh! A god merciful and gracious, slow to wrath, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, but letting nothing pass and visiting the sins of the parents upon the children and children’s children unto the third and the fourth generation.”
In this statement, inasmuch as God’s love abides “unto the thousandth generation,” an unimaginably long time, while his punishment reaches only unto the third and fourth, he may seem to be more loving than wrathful. Even here, however, it is clear that, for him, forgiveness by no means precludes punishment. Sinners may be forgiven, yet their children and their children’s children must pay the price. Punishment is never commuted. God lets nothing pass.
It is not principally, however, what God says but what he does that makes him seem a being other than the one whose benignity and neutrality Jesus invokes. The Lord’s actions speak much louder than his words. Between the Israelites’ Exodus from Pharaoh’s Egypt and their entry into the promised land of Canaan, to consider only Israelite sinners and only that forty-year period, the Lord executes at least thirty thousand of them. He sees to it that three thousand are put to the sword after the episode of the golden calf in Exodus 32. Later, in Numbers 16, he buries alive some 250 rebellious Levites and Reubenites, along with their wives, their children, and the other members of their households. At a conservative twelve per household, counting concubines and slaves, the total put to death comes to another three thousand. Later still, the Lord fatally poisons an unstated but evidently large number of Israelites when, angry over their complaints of hunger and thirst, he sends “fiery serpents” against them (Num. 21). Finally, after Israelite men consort sexually with the priestesses of a Canaanite god, he slaughters twenty-four thousand (Num. 25). At no point during Israel’s desert wanderings does the Lord seem slow to wrath. At one point, much to the contrary, he contemplates exterminating ungrateful Israel altogether and beginning a new nation from the loins of Moses (Num. 14:12). Moses shames him out of this by warning him that he will ruin his reputation back in Egypt and by quoting to his face the “slow to wrath” language of Exodus 34:6.
So much for the Lord’s conduct toward his friends. What of his conduct toward his enemies? How does Jesus’ characterization of him square with, for example, his characterization of himself to the prophet Habakkuk? In the timber-rattling battle poem found at Habakkuk 3, the Lord portrays himself as a colossus of war who has turned his powers of creation into weapons of destruction, shaking the mountains, gouging riverbeds into the earth, trampling the sea, and terrorizing the very sky. The prophet who receives this vision of cosmic rampage trembles with fear as he alternately describes and prays to the divine warrior who is allegedly coming to his rescue:
Pestilence goes before him,
and plague follows close behind.
He stands, and the earth quakes,
he glances, and the nations quiver.
The ancient mountains buckle,
the ageless hills collapse.…
You carve torrents across the land;
the mountains see you and tremble,
The great floods rush past,
the abyss roars aloud,
flinging high its waves.
Sun and moon hide in their houses,
take flight at the flash of your arrows,
at the glint of your lightning lance.
In rage you stride across the land,
you trample the nations in anger
As you advance to save your people,
to rescue your anointed one.
You stave in the sinner’s roof beams,
you raze his house to the ground.
You split his skull with your bludgeon,
His warriors you blast away,
They whose joy it was to take us,
like some poor wretch, to devour in their lair.
With your horses you trample the sea,
you stir the mighty waters.
When I heard, I was shaken to the core,
my lips quivered at the sound;
My bones were wrenched loose,
my legs gave way beneath me.
Numb, I await the day of anguish
Which will dawn on the people now attacking us.
(Hab. 3:5–6, 9–16)
Though Habakkuk’s is a uniquely vivid evocation of the divine warrior in action, the Lord offers essentially identical self-characterizations in dozens of speeches to other prophets. And Israel did not fail to take the point but learned to pray to the Lord as just the fearsome warrior he claimed to be. Thus, to choose a typical passage from the Book of Psalms:
God is for us a god of deliverance;
Lord Yahweh opens an escape from death.
God smashes the heads of his enemies,
the hairy head of him who walks in guilt.
My Lord said, “I will bring you back from [the mountains of] Bashan,
will retrieve you from the bottom of the sea,
That your feet may wade through blood;
that the tongue of your dogs may have its portion of your enemies.”
(Ps. 68:20–23)
If what Jesus is saying is correct, then such prayers can no longer be offered. The Lord can no longer be praised for smashing the heads of his enemies, for he is no longer a head-smashing kind of god. But there is no denying that the Lord has been a head smasher—both by performance and in endlessly repeated aspiration. If he is such no longer, then he must have changed, but what accounts for the change?
One possible answer is that there will be no answer because the Lord intends that there should be none. Though he insisted, when speaking to Moses, on the clarity and transparency of his words and intentions (Deut. 30:11–12), God has grown more remote and more mysterious as the centuries have passed. During Israel’s Babylonian Captivity, he began saying for the first time things like “As the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9). Often enough, Jesus talks the same way. And whether or not God Incarnate will choose to make himself humanly comprehensible, God has certainly never acknowledged at any earlier point any slightest obligation along those lines. If we grant that Jesus is God Incarnate, then we must grant as well that he has the right to announce a deep change in God—which is to say, in himself—without quite calling the change by that name and without otherwise troubling to explain it. The Lord of All the Earth does as he pleases.
Yet there is no mistaking—particularly in Matthew’s version of the sermon quoted above—that Jesus does indeed intend to claim the authority of God for what he is saying, and in his own way he does indeed wish to explain himself. If Jesus were merely a prophet speaking by divine authorization, we would expect to read: “And then the Word of the Lord came to Jesus of Nazareth, saying, ‘Say unto the people of Israel, “Thus says the Lord.…” ’ ” But both Matthew and Luke read otherwise. On no authority but his own, Jesus boldly characterizes God and proceeds to derive an arresting new morality from his characterization. The crowds are understandably “astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one in authority, and not as their scribes” (Matt. 7:28).
Jesus emphasizes that his authority is his own by his repeated contrastive use of the phrase “But I say this to you” to underscore the fact that what he is announcing is an unabashed revision. He says, for example:
You have heard how it was said, “You will love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say this to you: Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on the wicked as well as on the good, and he sends down rain on the just and the unjust alike (Matt. 5:43–45, ital
ics added)
In Leviticus 19:18, part of which Jesus cites in the passage just quoted, God does not in fact say “you will hate your enemy,” but neither does he say “you will not hate your enemy.” What he says, to quote the verse in full, is “You shall not take vengeance on or bear any grudge against your countrymen. Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” The context is clarifying. Directly contradicting what Jesus implies about him, the Lord most certainly did take vengeance on and bear grudges against his enemies, his enemies being in every case Israel’s; and he both expected and, on various occasions, directly commanded Israel to do the same, imposing obligations upon them that were consistent with his vengeful and grudge-bearing character.
The point may be illustrated by the story of the Lord’s long-running grudge and ruthless vengeance against Amalek. When Moses led the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, Amalek was the first of several nations to attack Israel en route. After the attack was repulsed, the Lord swore to Moses: “Record this in writing, and recite it in Joshua’s hearing, that I will utterly wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Exod. 17:14). Moses built an altar to witness the oath, saying: “The Lord will be at war with Amalek from generation to generation” (17:16). What the Lord swore and Moses solemnly witnessed was, in more modern language, an oath of genocide. The Lord swore that he would exterminate the Amalekites, however long it took. Over the ensuing two centuries, far longer than the four generations of Exodus 34, the Amalekites and the Israelites were, as predicted, repeatedly at war with each other, but Israel gradually grew stronger. Finally, the Lord decided to fulfill his ancient vow to the letter. He summoned King Saul: “I intend to avenge what Amalek did to Israel—laying a trap for him on the way as he came up from Egypt. Now, go and crush Amalek. Put him under a curse of total destruction, him and all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but slay man and woman, child and babe, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam. 15:2–3). Saul carried out the order without hesitation, sparing only—for later demonstrative execution and ritual sacrifice in the Israelite shrine city of Gilgal—Agag, king of Amalek, and the prize livestock of the slaughtered tribe. The Lord, however, was indignant that anything Amalekite had been left breathing. He wanted his vengeance enacted exactly as ordered. In his wrath, the Lord stripped Saul of his kingship, leaving the prophet Samuel to complete the genocide:
Samuel then said, “Bring me Agag, king of Amalek!” Agag came forward on unsteady feet, saying, “And now, the bitter taste of death!” Samuel replied: “As your sword has left mothers bereaved, so shall your mother be left bereaved among women.” Samuel then butchered [that is, dismembered] Agag before the Lord at Gilgal. (15:32–33)
The Lord did to the last Amalekite (the mother who would have been left bereaved is already dead) only what Amalek would presumably have done to the last Israelite, given the chance. The point to be made is that when the Lord said, through Moses, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he was not saying anything that Moses or he thought incompatible with the Lord’s earlier vow “I will utterly wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” The story of Amalek from first attack to last defeat can quite coherently be read as a gloss on Leviticus 19:18, demonstrating, among other things, that the reference group for the word neighbor in that verse is Israel alone. Leviticus 19:34 graciously extends the circle to include aliens peacefully resident in the Land of Israel, but enemies are another matter.
The story of Amalek need not necessarily mean, of course, that Israel is allowed, much less that it is commanded, to hate its enemies to quite the violent extreme that God hates his. The Lord concludes his “love your neighbor” commandment, as typically in the Book of Leviticus, by saying, “[You will] love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” He does not say: “You will love your neighbor as yourself because I, the Lord, love my neighbors as myself, and you must be like me.” Conceivably, Israel could be held to a stricter standard of forbearance than the Lord intends to impose on himself. The more natural assumption, however, given the fact that Israel’s friends and enemies are essentially indistinguishable from the Lord’s, has to be that the Amalekite principle is no less valid for Israel than it is for the Lord.
This would seem to be the point of a revealing episode in 1 Kings 20. The Lord has promised Ahab, the king of Israel, victory over Ben-Hadad, the king of Aram. The battle goes just as promised, but aides to Ben-Hadad advise him: “We have heard that Israelite kings are merciful. Let us dress in sackcloth with cords around our heads [the traditional garb of penitence] and go out to meet the king of Israel; maybe he will spare your life” (1 Kings 20:31). Ahab shows himself merciful indeed, making a generous peace settlement and sparing Ben-Hadad’s life. The Lord, however, is furious at this conduct. “You will pay with your life,” he tells Ahab, “for having set free a man who was under my curse of destruction. It will be your life for his life, and your people for his” (1 Kings 20:42).
From this, it would seem to follow that God wants his people to be no more merciful (or no less vindictive) than he is. In the Books of Samuel and Kings, no less than in the Gospels, God is the model. And it would seem further to follow that Jesus captures the spirit of the ancient commandment accurately enough when he says: “You have heard how it was said: ‘You will love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ”
What Jesus would substitute for this conduct, which at its root is no more than the spontaneous and natural discrimination that everyone past early childhood learns to make between friend and foe, is an unspontaneous and unnatural refusal to discriminate. His followers are called on to treat everyone alike, taking the sun as their model, which God makes to shine without discrimination “on the wicked as well as on the good.” If this noble refusal to discriminate would be problematic anywhere in the world, it is doubly so in Israel, for Israel was brought into existence as a nation by an act of undisguised and, in fact, proudly proclaimed discrimination on the part of God. What Moses held up as the pinnacle of divine greatness could not be more remote than it is from the indifferent shining of the sun:
Did ever a people hear the voice of a god speaking from the heart of fire, as you have heard it, and yet live? Has it ever been known before that a god intervened to bring one nation out of another by such trials, signs, and wonders—war waged with mighty hand and outstretched arm, horrendous terrorism—as the Lord your God has done for you in Egypt before your very eyes? … But he loved your forebears and, after them, chose their descendants, and for their sake he personally conducted you out of Egypt, showing forth his mighty power, dispossessing for you nations who were larger and stronger than you, to make room for you and to give you their country as your inheritance. (Deut. 4:33–34, 37–38)
God’s covenant with Israel is this act of discrimination, and he never equates Israel with other nations except when afire with rage.
Yes, rarely, as through Amos, he may snarl in his fury something like:
“Are not you and the Ethiopians all the same to me, children
of Israel? …
“I brought Israel up from Egypt, oh yes,
and the Philistines from Caphtor,
and the Aramaeans from Kir.
“Beware! Lord Yahweh’s eyes are on the sinful kingdom.
I shall wipe it off the face of the earth!
(although I will not destroy the House of Jacob completely), ” declares the Lord.
(Amos 9:7–8)
When he talks this way, the Lord aggressively and insultingly secularizes what Moses has declared sacred. He normalizes what Moses has declared exceptional. Did God bring Israel out of Egypt? Yes, but so what? God is always bringing somebody out of somewhere, is he not? Are the Israelites so vain as to think that they are his special favorites because of a mere population transfer?
But when the Lord talks this way, he taunts Israel only to make a point. The idea that the Exodus was just another population transfer is not one that he entertains for long. As the half-retraction of the closing parenthesis shows
, the idea that Israel might be for him just one among the peoples of the world is finally not one he is prepared to act upon. Even on this occasion, even pushed—as he imagines himself—to this extreme, he cannot bring himself to present perfect neutrality as his own behavior in its ideal form. And on innumerable other occasions, he boasts of himself as by no means neutral but, on the contrary, openly and passionately discriminatory.
So, then, what has come over him, now incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, that he presents himself so differently? As God Incarnate, Jesus surely remembers quite well what he once did to the Amalekites. Surely he remembers as well that he promised no less to Israel’s later oppressors. What has driven him to forswear those oaths and assume so utterly different an attitude? The root of the change, as we have seen, is something more radical than an intensified commitment to the mercy, patience, and steadfast love of Exodus 34:6–7, something more than a mere muting of transgenerational revenge. No, Jesus exhorts his hearers to a profoundly counterintuitive, cost-what-it-may disregard for the most basic of human differences, the difference between amity and hostility. What makes this ideal inherently and massively disruptive for God no less than for Israel is the fact that at the time when Jesus preaches it, he has behind him a two-thousand-year career based on acknowledging and exalting one difference above all others—namely, the difference between Israel, the people with whom he has established his covenant, and all other peoples. Israel has been everything to the Lord. Since the time when he first narrowed his focus from mankind in general (“Be fruitful, and multiply”) to Abraham (“I will make your offspring like the stars of the sky”), his every word, his every action, has revolved around his chosen people. What could possibly induce him to level to nothing a distinction upon which he has based so defining a personal commitment?