Homily for Tuesday, 2 July 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 19:15-29; Psalm 26:2-3, 9-10, 11-12; Matthew 8:23-27

Tuesday of the 13th week in Ordinary Time

Why is God, especially in the Old Testament, sometimes so cruel to people?

I ask this question in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, aware that the rejection of most of the Old Testament as part of our Bible because the God of the Old Testament was perceived as cruel, while the God of the New Testament (in Christ especially) was perceived as kind and merciful, was actually a heresy of the early Church. This heresy was called Marcionism, after its supposed proponent, Marcion of Rome.

We find many passages in the Old Testament that highlight God’s kindness and mercy, and passages in the New Testament in which God, or Jesus, become angry or even appear somewhat cruel (the overturning of the money changers’ tables in the Temple, or Jesus’ curse of an innocent fig tree in the Gospels come to mind).

But the reading we hear today from Genesis would have been excellent support for a Marcionite frame of mind back in the day. God is not (and was not, by Marcion) seen as cruel specifically because of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. After all, Sodom and Gomorrah had been warned repeatedly to turn from their sinful ways, but chose not to do so. In this sense, Sodom and Gomorrah could be understood to have brought their destruction on themselves rather than God having chosen to destroy them. As an aside, nobody really knows the specific sin of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah that led to their destruction. Despite the weight of legendary tradition, the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not necessarily or probably anything sexual.

But what about Abraham’s nephew Lot’s wife? Besides (we might think) her fairly innocent act of looking back at the burning Sodom and Gomorrah, what did she do that was so wrong so as to deserve God turning her “into a pillar of salt”? Surely here God seems unduly harsh toward Lot’s wife, right?

Well, if in turning Lot’s wife “into a pillar of salt” for looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, God was not unduly harsh or cruel, God, or especially the author of this story of Sodom and Gomorrah, is quite “punny,” here and elsewhere in our Scriptures.

If we look back a chapter in Genesis to Abraham pleading with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of any righteous people there, Abraham at this point looks toward Sodom and Gomorrah (šāqap in Hebrew). To describe Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, another verb is used in the Hebrew text of the reading we have heard today: tāḇeṭ. Yet another set of Hebrew play-on-words is used to describe the destruction itself of Sodom and Gomorrah, possibly a darkly humorous reference to the vulnerability of the Dead Sea region of the Holy Land to occasional fiery and sulfurous volcanic activity and earthquakes. To this day, a tall column of salt near the Dead Sea and Mount Sodom is called “Lot’s Wife.”

All this is to say that the God of the Old Testament is not unduly cruel compared to the God of the New Testament. Take that, Marcion! God, or the Biblical authors, simply have a way with play-on-words that becomes lost in contemporary-language translations. If anything, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, the choice is ours to turn from sin or not. But failure to turn from sin has consequences for us: We incur our own destruction. And, as any “punny” Italian would say, “Traductore traditore”: “The translator is a traitor”!