No Bowls of Wrath

I remember an old Nichols and May routine from the 60s.

Mike Nichols played a man desperate to make a call on his one and only dime. Elaine May was the telephone operator.

He said to her, “Please don’t jiggle something with your elbow and make me lose my dime.”

She replied, “Sir, we don’t work with our elbows.”

I heard a preacher reading from Revelation the other day—the lines about God pouring bowls of wrath on humankind.

God doesn’t work with bowls of wrath.

I used to play the preacher game: Try to find something good to say about Revelation.

It’s in the Bible! It’s part of the canon!

Yes—and a theologically useless book. Tell it like it is. It’s a mess.

And it was not written by the author of the gospel and letters of John.

Unlike them, it is written in very poor Greek.

The worst thing about Revelation is that it contradicts the teaching of Jesus that we are to love our enemies for God loves his enemies.

In Revelation, God hates his enemies and treats them with unspeakable cruelty.

Like pouring bowls of wrath on them.

It has Jesus riding in on a white horse cutting off the heads of sinners.

We all know what Jesus does. He dies for sinners. All of us.

It is impossible to affirm the content of Revelation and also affirm what Jesus taught us about God.

The God we know in Christ is the only God there is. And God doesn’t work with bowls of wrath.

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