Bishop Richard’s Weekly video Message – Transcript 10.09.2026

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Bishop's Weekly Video Message #303 – 10.09.2026

Video for September 10th, 2026

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.

There is very little more stressful than disputes with the neighbours. Living next to someone who is obstructive, aggressive or socially unpleasant can feel like a violation from which there is nowhere to escape.  My sister had cause for a free and frank exchange of views with one of the neighbours at the bottom of my mother’s garden last year here in France. He knocked on my mother’s door unannounced to say he had raised a formal complaint with the local town hall about plants overhanging his garden.  All he needed to do was ask nicely and she would have been happy to sort it out. His approach left a nasty taste in the mouth.  He seemed to go straight to punitive justice rather than the gentler reparative kind where errors are pointed out and willingly remedied.

We can read the prophetic writings of the Old Testament as portraying a God acting in a similar way to the neighbour: out of relationship, in a very bad mood, and reaching for punitive justice at every turn. Even great theologians have found them difficult to understand.  Martin Luther said (and I paraphrase), “The prophets have an odd way of talking, like people who instead of proceeding in an orderly manner, ramble off from one thing to the next so that you cannot make head nor tail of them or see what they are getting at!”  In part, this is explicable because they often spoke poetically, but as other scholars have said, the prophets give us an insight into the divine pathos. The God of the Bible feels as well as acts.  Human beings are not biological computers making decisions on the basis of cold logic like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Many of the decisions we make are quite irrational.  Even rational decisions require an emotional driver if they are to be more than vague aspiration. As creatures made in the image of God, our own feelings are analogous to his, albeit much more selfishly driven and sometimes capricious.

Lest we slip into the heresy that sees the God portrayed in the Old and New Testaments as very different, we should see Jesus had an emotional life.  He wept bitterly at the grave of Lazarus his friend. He denounced religious leaders whose practices kept people God loved from access to grace. He was especially angry at injustice and the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the poor. He was visibly upset by the betrayal of those closest to him. Like the God of the prophets, he had a concern for the orphan, the widow, the poor, and the refugee. His emotional responses were in each case appropriate and proportionate to the issue being addressed. There was never a hint at being grumpy or hangry or lashing out when hurt at being slighted. There was no emotional response driven by a spirit of entitlement.

Jesus gives us a truer picture of the emotion that lies behind the words of God in the prophetic writings. They are addressed to Israel, His covenant partner. The most exasperated and severe come at the end of long periods of moral decline when previous prophets have given dire warnings of consequences to a continued course of action. The previous warnings elicited no response. The word wrath occurs frequently, but its not petulant anger.  It’s a concept describing God’s settled displeasure against evil and injustice.

If the prophetic words are emotionally appropriate then it should be no surprise that they shift dramatically when the circumstances of those addressed have changed.  The end of Isaiah written to the Israelites in exile is very different to the beginning when the mood is still one of dire warning.  Once the predicted consequences have come about, God turns to comfort and a look to the future.

These words are delivered to a particular time, context and people. But that doesn’t mean the themes and insights have no relevance to contemporary living. We can become so lost in our own little world that we become oblivious to the wider needs around us. There are systemic injustices in our culture around race, the environment and the economy that we easily ignore because they don’t impinge on our own comfortable little world. Sometimes God needs to shout to wake us up to our responsibilities. The search for comfort can be as powerful an idolatry as the gods that led the Israelites astray. When we come across these severe writings, we would be better not just to write them off as ramblings for another time, but to ask where is this challenging me? Hopefully and prayerfully, we will act accordingly.