Turning Away

Deut. 31: 7-13,24-30 & 32: 1-4 (Deut. 31 & 32)
16 Adonai said to Moshe, …… But this people will get up and offer themselves as prostitutes to the foreign gods of the land where they are going. When they are with those gods, they will abandon me and break my covenant which I have made with them. 17 Then my anger will flare up, and I will abandon them and hide my face from them. (from the redacted portion of the text)
Romans 10: 1-13
3 for, since they are unaware of God’s way of making people righteous and instead seek to set up their own, they have not submitted themselves to God’s way of making people righteous. 4 For the goal at which the Torah aims is the Messiah, who offers righteousness to everyone who trusts.
Matthew 24: 15-31
15 “So when you see the abomination that causes devastation spoken about through the prophet Dani’el standing in the Holy Place” (let the reader understand the allusion [to Daniel 9:27, 11:31, 12:11] …)
26 So if people say to you, ‘Listen! He’s out in the desert!’ don’t go; or, ‘Look! He’s hidden away in a secret room!’ don’t believe it. 27 For when the Son of Man does come, it will be like lightning that flashes out of the east and fills the sky to the western horizon. 28 Wherever there’s a dead body, that’s where you find the vultures.

I’m struggling. I have an idea about what God’s anger is like and why it isn’t what people think. Not at all. The reason I’m struggling has everything to do with the idea of “compassion.” In my Zen class the other day we were talking about the pain that comes with compassion, and the anger and frustration that also comes with compassion. As a group we concluded that compassion in its true form is not an emotion. Instead, it’s a principle; a value by which we live. When we see people suffering, of course we feel things. We are distressed; we feel pain along with them. That, by itself, is most definitely NOT compassion. When we see people suffering because other people are taking advantage of them for their own profit, or being unfair to them out of hatred or animosity, then we get angry. We want things to be fair. We want suffering to stop. Compassion is the principle that chooses to stay, even though we know we can’t fix anything. Compassion sticks around. Compassion shares the load.

When someone betrays and abandons us we are torn between wanting to follow them to beg them to change their minds, or standing in place and letting them walk away. When we are sure that it’s useless, that they really have rejected us, then we also turn our backs. Maybe we turn away with resignation; maybe with anger; maybe with desolation and regret; maybe with tears and mourning. Maybe all of them at once. But we do turn away. The thing is, we turn away because we’ve decided to turn away. We don’t turn away first. We write self-help books and memes about how appropriate and right it is to turn away from someone who has betrayed us; abandoned us; rejected us;  broken their promises to us. And yet, we censor the passages that talk about God doing the very thing that we believe it is right and appropriate for us to do under the same circumstances.

Back to compassion. Compassion is the principle that gives us the freedom to stay, even after we have turned our faces away. We don’t walk away. The ones who have invested in violence; who have chosen to harm; they are the ones who walk away. Harm is always mutual; violence is always shared.

Compassion is knowing that we walk with them as they walk away. It’s knowing that we are bound together even as we turn our backs on one another. How is that different from what God does? How dare we think it’s a good thing for us to ignore God’s anger; to censor God’s love? Do we imagine that no anger can be justified, not even for God?

Here is what I think has happened: We’ve forgotten that it’s really all about trust. We can’t stand to hear about God’s anger, or about the consequences that fall upon both Human Beings and God alike when we do something harmful or hateful. We won’t admit that God lives within us just as we live and move and have our Being in God.

We can’t be separated from God.
Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

When the Bible talks about God being angry and turning his face away from us, that is a vivid metaphor for our own denial of ourselves.


When we censor the Bible,
 

in that moment 

we become 

the Turning Away.

As we leave,
 

God takes one step to follow 

and then 

stops—

what if 

we keep

walking away?

No matter how far we go—

vultures still circle;

and 

the lightning

still

fills the sky.