Alison writes about Paul turning upside down the old notion of wrath - that's where we begin today.
So we have a gradual ironic subversion of the language of wrath, whereby that which is initially seen as something active (God being angry) is recast to show God being righteous in the midst of human anger, but without losing the word "wrath." Something of the same process can be seen (but more obviously) in the Johannine reworking of the theme of God's judgment whereby God's judgment of humanity consists not in any judgment actively exercised by God, but in the judgment undergone by Jesus at the hands of human beings. We are judged by our relationship to that judgment. We see then how God "handed over" Jesus to us can be described as God's wrath, when the content of that wrath is the human violence exercised against Jesus, or the simultaneous handing over of ourselves to idolatry typified in the killing of Jesus.
It is important to remember (as Alison does point out later) that Paul was at a much earlier stage of writing on wrath than John was - years and years earlier. Therefore when he notes that it is easier to see this in John - well, there were many more years of thought and development going on. God remains the righteous God in the midst of all the human dynamics around the death of Jesus. Well, those same human dynamics are the ones that produce what looks like wrath among us. Yet, this 'wrath of God' is really the actions and life of you and I and how we - in our idolatry - attempt to have the world go our way or the highway. God continues to be the just and benevolent one even as we find many ways to live and act contrary to the righteousness of God.
Connection: I don't think I have this connection in place, but as I read this about the wrath of God and see the horrible violence over that dumb movie about Islam, I wonder if we really do need to look at the lives and actions of people of faith in order to see the character of God. A benevolent and gracious God - creative in all our days - does not need to be defended. We tend to want to defend our own inadequacies. Therefore, God is God - always. We, on the other hand, often turn everything around and lose the vision of God's peaceable Reign.
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