Catastrophe as Catastrophe
Mar 24, 2026 | By Julian Assele YDS ‘26
I never understood the necessity of hatred within the spiritual life until this past year. Growing up, I read the prophetical literature of the Old Testament and came away alienated from it. In the voice of God, Jeremiah and Isaiah prayed for the desecration of the Kingdom of Israel and the wrath of God to spare not a single soul from its consuming fire. The God of the prophets appeared distant, cruel, and unrelatable. But we Christians should not eschew hatred, because hatred for evil is how we know our love for the good. The fact that we can recognize catastrophe and hate what is evil means that we implicitly measure against it a better, holier world. We must pray for justice, but a justice as conciliatory for the oppressed as it is condemnatory of the oppressor.
Wrestling with what I now view as evil in the world in the form of imperial domination and institutionalized violence against the vulnerable, this past year has transformed my perspective on the God of wrath. I came to recognize my earlier distaste as a sign of immaturity. Any person who attempts to live their faith and avert their gaze from the contemporary imperialism that sustains our form of life limits their understanding of the Lenten spirit. Christ, himself a victim of the colonial regime, suffered the death of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.
To hate murder is to love Christ. To love God is to hate all that does not reflect God. The prophets of scripture—Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezekiel—spared no rhetorical quarter for empire. Their love for God drove their hatred for Israel and its persecution of the poor. For them, there was no reforming the Kingdom of Israel; there was only the consuming fire of God’s love.
Hatred for wicked regimes is what continually renews my love for Christ. I think of how all that separates people in disparate parts of the world is the circumstance of birth. The line between myself and the hundreds of millions of persons subject to imperial violence is thin.
Christ’s love was one animated by hatred, but not the petty kind of hatred we practice daily. It was a hatred for all that is unholy. Christ’s hatred of the princes and principalities was so pure that he chose to die humiliated and broken rather than give any quarter to those who shut out the poor. While harsh on its face, it is only in the emphatic exclusion of the perpetrators of violence from the community that these same perpetrators face the reality of their actions and render the possibility of forgiveness, redemption, and restoration legible.
Paul teaches us that hope is one of the three cardinal virtues. But hope does not entail a bland optimism that somehow things will get better. True hope lies in our capacity to recognize catastrophe as catastrophe. We may hope because we are capable of recognizing the insignificance of barbarism next to the love God has for a single child.