I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the others I’ve covered on this blog, but I decided to write about it because I still found it quite profound. It’s a novel that has provoked controversy since its publication in 1939. Vilified by some as socialist propaganda and praised by others as prophetic truth, it is a compelling novel of Law and Gospel written not in doctrinal prose, but in dust, hunger, sweat, and blood. The Joad family’s pilgrimage from the cracked soil of Oklahoma to the vague promises of California mirrors Israel’s wilderness wandering, Christ’s suffering, and the Church’s calling to be a people of compassion, community, and cross-bearers.
Christians should not read Steinbeck for orthodoxy; they should read him for truth—the kind of truth that reveals the brokenness of the world and stirs the heart to look for redemption. In the words of Reverend Casy in the novel, “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.” That may sound like relativism and a blatant rejection of the doctrine of original sin, but it is better understood as the honest confession of a man unafraid to stare into the effects of sin without religious platitudes. For the Lutheran, it is a novel saturated in the theology of the cross.
This is your spoiler warning.
The Law Written in Dust and Poverty
Steinbeck does not begin with a plot; he begins with judgement. The Earth is dying. The rain does not come. The crops rot. The people are evicted. This is not simply natural disaster (the Dust Bowl of 1930-1936), but also human sin manifested in systemic greed. Banks take the land, tractors replace workers, and tenant families are treated like refuse. As Steinbeck narrates, “The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.” And as he writes quite viscerally in chapter 5, “Behind the harrows, long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion.”
Here, Steinbeck personifies the god of Mammon that consumes without mercy. As Luther comments, “Such a person has a god by the name of ‘Mammon’ (i.e., money and possessions; [Matthew 6:24]), on which he sets all his heart. This is the most common idol on Earth” (LC I, 6-7). This is the Law at work in society: the condemnation that falls not only on individual acts of sin, but also on the structural injustice of human systems. Luther recognized this in his treatise, On Trade and Usury (1524), where he wrote, “Let everyone see to it that he is not unjustly enriched at the expense of another” (LW 45:257). In other words, Scripture warns people not to pursue wealth through the suffering of others. Steinbeck shows us exactly what happens when we ignore that warning.
The Joads are not punished for personal sins; they are caught in a world already condemned. In this, they are figures of Adam and Eve, cast out of Eden and forced to wander a corrupt land. They are also Christ-figures, in a sense, bearing the curse of others, hungry and despised.
The Persistence of Dignity and The Imago Dei
Despite their poverty, the Joads retain a remarkable dignity. They share what little they have with others, they help complete strangers, and they bury their dead with honor. In a world that dehumanizes, they remain human. This is the imago Dei (image of God) shining through dust and despair. Ma Joad, the heart of the family, articulates this most succinctly, “Why, we’re people—we go on.”
“We are the ones who endure,” she’s saying. We carry something essential in our humanity that cannot be crushed. This is not triumphalism, but faith. Not faith in the self, but in community, love, and ultimately the God who creates and sustains even in ruin. Luther taught that faith is not grasping God by power, but trusting Him in weakness: “Faith clings to the Word, and through the Word it sees God in the most humble and hidden form” (LW 31:40). This is the theology of the cross.
Ma Joad’s endurance is this kind of faith. She does not see God, but she keeps loving, feeding, and carrying others anyway. She becomes a kind of sacramental presence: the body of Christ given for others—in, with, and under the form of an exhausted mother.
The Church in Exile: Jim Casy and the Cruciform Vocation
Jim Casy, the former preacher turned activist, is one of Steinbeck’s most overt Christ-figures. He has lost his faith in organized religion but retains a profound sense of holiness embedded in humanity. He says, “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.” Now, this is much more pantheistic than it is Christian, but it does present some human solidarity that echoes Lutheran convictions about vocation. Casy realizes true ministry doesn’t stay in the pulpit; it exits the sanctuary and stands with the poor.
In the novel’s pivotal moment, Casy is murdered while organizing workers. His final words, “You don’ know what you’re a-doin,” are strikingly similar to Christ’s, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). Just as Christ dies for a world that does not understand Him, Casy dies to witness to a truth the powerful reject. His death is cruciform, and his influence is resurrected in Tom Joad, the protagonist.
Tom Joad and the Theology of the Hidden Christ
Tom Joad begins as a young man trying to stay out of trouble. But after Casy’s death, he begins to see his life as a calling—a vocation (from the Latin vocatio for “calling). Not to comfort, but to solidarity. In his final dialogue with Ma, he articulates a kind of incarnational presence: “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there… Wherever they’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand, I’ll be there.”
This is not political sloganeering; it is Christological. Tom becomes a presence for the suffering. He is not Jesus, but he does reflect the Body of Christ: hidden, dispersed, at work in the neighbor. As Lutherans, we confess, “The Church is the congregations of saints [Psalm 149:1] in which the Gospel is purely taught and the Sacraments are correctly administered” (AC VII, 1). Yet the Church is not only where the saints physically gather, but also where the Holy Spirit dwells in the hearts of believers: “But the Church is not only the fellowship of outward objects and rites, as other governments, but at its core, it is a fellowship of faith and of the Holy Spirit in hearts” (Ap VII & VIII, 5).
Thus, wherever God’s people go as they love their neighbor, Christ becomes present through them:
[Faith] does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them… Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace… This knowledge of and confidence in God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all creatures. And this is the work that the Holy Spirit performs in faith. Because of it, without compulsion, a person is ready and glad to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, out love of and praise to God, who has shown him this grace.
(FC SD IV, 11-12).
The Grapes of Wrath, then, shows the Church in exile—gathered around soup pots, roadside fires, and acts of mercy, where the hungry are fed and the weak are defended.
“The Grapes of Wrath”: Judgement, Harvest, and Hope
The title of the book is drawn from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose opening lines famously declare: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” That hymn itself draws from Revelation 14:19-20 where an angel reaps the Earth’s vintage and throws it into “the great winepress of the wrath of God.” Thus, from the outset, Steinbeck situates his novel within the imagery of biblical apocalypse. But for Steinbeck, the wrath stored in these grapes is not divine retribution against sinners, per se; it is the inevitable judgement that falls upon systems of injustice—upon those who exploit the poor and ignore the cries of the oppressed. Indeed, the Prophets are filled with such judgements against Israel (e.g., Isaiah 1:17; Micah 6:8).
This is made explicit in chapter 25, one of the novel’s most powerful and prophetic intercalary chapters. Steinbeck writes, “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” In other words, the fruit of injustice is ripening. The poor are not only suffering—they are also awakening. Wrath, here, is not revenge. It is judgement—not merely divine but historical. What is sown in greed will be reaped in rebellion.
This is the Law in action, not just the eternal law of God’s righteousness alone, but also the law that governs creation itself: “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7). Steinbeck’s title captures the moral pressure that builds when creation is exploited, when the neighbor is despised, and when mercy is withheld. It speaks to the truth that even if judgement is delayed, it is never forgotten.
And yet, even in this image of wrath, there is the Gospel, because wrath implies someone cares, that the world is not random, that the cries of the poor do not fall into a void, and that God sees (see Psalm 10:1-2, 14). To quote Tom again, “They’s a time for ever’thing, and this is the time for fightin’. I been there before—people all friendly an’ helpin’ one another. That’s the kind of place I’d like to see again.” This isn’t a call for vengeance; it’s a call for justice rooted in love. For Christians, it reflects the longing of the Prophets, who cried out not only for the punishment of the wicked, but also for the restoration of the broken.
In Lutheran theology, wrath is never the final word. It is God’s strange work (opus alienum)—the alien work of judging sin—so that His proper work (opus proprium) of mercy may be revealed. As Luther writes in his commentary on the Psalms, “God must first crush us by the Law so that He might comfort us with the Gospel” (LW 14:165). God uses judgement to bring about repentance so that He might give us His grace.
So, too, in The Grapes of Wrath, the wrath of the title is not the end.
The Ending: A Eucharist of Flesh and Grace
The novel ends with an image as shocking as it is sacred. After flooding and sickness, the Joads seek shelter in a barn, where they find a starving man near death. Rose of Sharon (Joad’s sister), who has just lost her stillborn child, offers the man her breast to be nourished (like I said, shocking). Steinbeck writes, “She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.” The man drinks, and the scene is maternal, sacrificial, and somewhat eucharistic.
In a Lutheran framework, this is a picture of hidden grace. A woman whose womb has produced death gives life with her body. There is no liturgy or church, but there is a communion—flesh given, life shared, mercy embodied. This is the Incarnation in extremis—God hidden not in power, but in weakness and shocking imagery. Luther calls this the essence of God’s self-revelation: “The visible and manifest things of God are seen through suffering and the cross” (LW 31:40). We come to know God not in glory, but in hidden suffering—indeed, longsuffering. This is what Steinbeck offers: not a new theology, but a visceral witness to one already given.
The Gospel in the Fields
The Grapes of Wrath is not a religious novel in the narrow sense, but it is a deeply Christian novel in its portrayal of sin, suffering, and the defiant mercy of those who love anyway. It does not offer easy answers. Instead, it offers Christ in disguise.
Every Christian should read this book not to find themselves in it, but to see their neighbor—to remember that poverty does not annul the image of God in a person. That justice is not the enemy of faith, but its fruit. And that the Gospel is not bound to churches and choirs—it walks in dust, it feeds the hungry, it weeps with the dying, and sometimes it waits, mysteriously, in a barn. “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Matthew 25:40).
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