The small group gathering my wife and I host was circled together in our living room. It was the night before Lent was to begin. Monica led us in a meditation on Psalm 103, the poetry that we’d pray with the wider church community the following evening on Ash Wednesday. As we immersed ourselves in those ancient cadences, several of us heard the lines that open the second stanza strike a deep chord:

The LORD works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.
He made known his ways to Moses, 
His acts to the people of Israel. 
The LORD is merciful and gracious, 
Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. . .

When the congregation I serve, gathered in the morning and evening of Ash Wednesday to worship, those words kept rattling around inside me.

Israel’s John 3:16

We’re not the first ones to be stirred by that cluster of adjectives. Psalm 103 is actually a quotation of the divine self-disclosure to Moses in Exodus 34; it evokes the Sinai story. The biblical scholar Tim Mackie calls it “ancient Israel’s John 3:16.” In the same way that, for Christians, John 3:16 is perhaps the most-quoted verse of the New Testament, Exodus 34.6-7 is the most-frequently-referenced text in the Hebrew Bible. This set of divine descriptions is quoted over 20 times in the Old Testament. 

Interestingly, Exodus 34 is the first occasion in the biblical drama in which God’s character is explicitly described. To this point in Scripture’s story, God speaks — “Let there be light!” “Let my people go!” — and God does things — creates a cosmos, calls a family into an unknown future, frees the enslaved. But, here for the first time, God actually says what God is like.

This decisive moment of revelation is set within the Exodus story: YHWH, the living God, has heard the pained cries of the Hebrew slaves, emancipated them through the waters of the Red Sea, and brought them to Mount Sinai. The Israelites waste no time forsaking their God. As Moses intercedes on their behalf, he implores, “show me Your glory!” God obliges, sort of. God hides Moses in a fissure of rock, envelops him in a cloud, and then, Moses hears the divine voice.

I’m partial to the Berkeley professor Robert Alter’s earthy way of rendering God’s proclamation:

The LORD, the LORD!
A compassionate and gracious God, 
slow to anger, 
and abounding in kindness and good faith, 
keeping kindness for the thousandth generation,
bearing crime, trespass, and offense, 
yet he does not wholly acquit, 
reckoning the crime of fathers with sons
and sons of sons,
to the third generation and the fourth.

I Knew You Were Like This

That pronouncement is woven right through the tapestry of Scripture’s text — it turns up again and again. One of my favorite instances of this, apropos for the penitential season of Lent, is in the book of Jonah. As many will know, Jonah’s titular character is a Jewish prophet whom God calls to cry out against the wicked city of Nineveh. Jonah refuses the assignment, winds up in the belly of a great fish for three days, and is spewed out into a second chance.

This time, Jonah does go to Nineveh, preaches a half-hearted, five-word sermon, and repentance breaks out. Jonah is furious. He waits outside of town, hoping that maybe God might still nuke his hated enemies. But when God doesn’t, Jonah complains to God, revealing that he fled his assignment in the first place because he was afraid this kind of thing might happen: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing…” 

The text intends us to see the irony and comedy of Jonah, shaking his fist at the heavens while Nineveh turns to YHWH. Jonah’s only alive at all because God is slow to anger, keeps kindness, bears offense. And Jonah’s people only have a claim upon God because God is compassionate and gracious, abounding in kindness and good faith — that’s their whole story. But God’s kindness and compassion, when extended to people Jonah hates, make him seethe: “I knew you were like this! You’ve always been like this!”

I pondered Psalm 103’s poetry through the day, watching congregants and visitors line up to receive their ashen smudge of last year’s Palm Sunday fronds. This is the paradox pressed into Christian foreheads around the world, year after year on Ash Wednesday: though we’re dust, and return to dust, the One who made us from dust abounds in kindness. In the crucified Christ, God has borne our crimes, trespasses, and offenses. But, as it turns out, God is also compassionate and slow to anger with all the other sinners in line with us for mercy, too — even the ones I wish weren’t there.