John said to them,
“You brood of vipers!
Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”
—Matthew 3.7
The “coming wrath” is not God’s vengeful anger,
but the doom of the world’s self-sentenced ways,
the inevitable collapse of all greed and violence
into pointlessness and the abolition of being.
Those who came to John to judge were trapped
in their own grace-starved world. Fighting
for their place, they would destroy each other,
drowning in their own anger, fear and selfishness.
The Coming One invites us into a different world,
where God’s wrath is not vengeful anger
but refining fire, the blacksmith’s hot anvil,
God’s insistence on transformation,
where our swords are hammered into plowshares,
fear bent into courage, greed worked into trust.
It may feel like wrath, to be so wrought
for the sake of love—even by grace,
but there is no anger, only mercy
and the hard, painful labor of birthing us
into a new realm.
The blacksmith, pleased with the work,
plunges it into the deep baptismal water,
and it comes out tempered, strong, and ready.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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