Dionysus on a Bike

Nahum 1:1-13 – 7/20/2026

In reflecting on yesterday’s reading, I wrote about the idea of “hell” or rather the fire reserved for evildoers in Jesus’s parable. I remarked that whatever this fire might be, it is not the hell of common conception and popular culture. In reflecting on today’s reading from the minor prophet Nahum, it would be tempting to take the track that God’s jealousy and vengeance is something other than it is popularly conceived.

It’s true that whatever it is for God to be “jealous and avenging” is something other than it is popularly conceived. This follows from God’s transcendence and incarnation. As God apart or beyond our reality, human qualities cannot be straightforwardly applied to the deity. As God in the flesh—God the Son, qualities or traits like jealous and avenging are turned on their head. Jesus as God become human redefines all of the qualities we associate with both God and the human, so that categories like jealousy and vengeance become completely new.

What strikes me first about this prophecy of Nahum is that it points back in time to when the God of the Hebrews was a storm God, a God of winds, rains, thunder, and lightening. With this background, God’s vengeance is seen through the lens of natural phenomena, like the weather and earthquakes, famine and disease. When one considers how our understanding of natural processes has changed since the ancient world from which this prophecy comes, that too forces us to reconsider what it is for God to enact vengeance. Jesus presents a more modern view of the activity of the storm God when he says God makes the rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike (Matthew 5:45). The activity of the storm God does not take into account good and evil, only the unfolding of natural causation, the chain of becoming that is our natural world.

So what is it for God to be jealous and avenging? What truth do we find here in this prophet speaking of doom? Nahum’s first words in the book that bears his name point toward the otherness of God. Lutherans focus primarily on the God who has come near, the Christ, God the Son, but to fully appreciate the nearness of God in Christ, it’s important to contemplate the otherness of God. God in all three persons of the Trinity is both the furthest and the nearest thing, beyond and within, the same as us and at the same time utterly different. Even natural phenomena are in some sense subject to and other than God conceived of in this way.

All of this is to say that we cannot say much about what vengeance is for God, but that is perfectly OK. We are reminded that vengeance is God’s task, not ours, and that we are to do good to those who harm us. It’s not important that we understand it because our tasks are mercy, love, and kindness to all. Thankfully, we can and should remain ignorant of vengeance and let go of the desire for it.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 7/19/2026:
Nahum 1:1-13
Revelation 14:12-20
Psalm 75

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis